The Fire Flower. Jackson Gregory
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a tall peak looking out across the broken miles, with no hint of Lake Nopong. He made his way down a long slope in the thickening dusk, seeking a grassy spot to tether his packhorse. That night the animal crunched sunflower leaves and the tenderer shoots of the mountain bushes. With the dawn Sheldon again pushed on, seeking better pasture.
Late that afternoon he came into a delightfully green meadow, where a raging creek grew suddenly gentle and wandered through crisp herbage and little white flowers. There was a confusion of deer-tracks where a narrow trail slipped through the alders of the creek banks. Upon the rim of the meadow was a great log freshly torn into bits, as though by the great paws of a bear.
Under a tall, isolated cedar about whose base there was dry ground, Sheldon removed the canvas-rolled pack and the pack-saddle, turning his horse into an alder-surrounded arm of the meadow where the grass was thickest and tallest. While the sun was still high he cut the branches which he would throw his blankets upon, fried his bacon and potatoes, boiled his coffee, and ate heartily.
Then he sat upon the log at which the bear had torn, saw the tracks and nodded over them, noting that they were only a few days old—smoked his pipe, and out of the fulness of content watched his hungry horse ripping away at the lush grass.
“Take your time, Buck, old boy,” he said gently. “We’ll stay right here until you get a bellyful. We don’t have to move on until snow flies, if we don’t want to. I think that this is one of the spots of the world we’ve been looking for a long time. I’d lay a man a bet, two to one and he names the stakes, that there’s not another human being in three days’ walk.”
And a very little after sunset, with the same thought soothing him, he went to sleep.
CHAPTER II.
BONES.
THE seventh day out Sheldon began in practical manner by shaving. His beard was beginning to turn in and itch. And, even upon trips like this, he had yet to understand why a fellow shouldn’t include in his pack the razor, brush, and soap, which, altogether, occupied no more space than a pocket tin of tobacco.
He was up and about in the full glory of the morning, before the last star had gone. A grub from a fallen log went onto a hook, into the creek, and down a trout’s eager throat, and the trout itself was brown in the pan almost as the coffee began to bubble over. Thirty minutes after he had waked, he was leading the full-stomached Buck northward along the stream’s grassy banks.
The world seemed a good place to live in this morning, clean and sweet, blown through with the scents of green growing things. The ravine widened before him; the timber was big boled with grassy, open spaces; though there was no sign of a trail other than the tracks left by wild things coming to feed and water, he swung on briskly.
“If I really am in the Sasnokee-keewan,” he told himself early in the day, “Then men have maligned it, or else I have stumbled into a corner of it they have missed somehow. It strikes me as the nearest thing imaginable to the earthly paradise.”
He had turned out to the right, following the open, coming close under a line of cliffs which stood up, sheer and formidable, along the edge of the meadow. And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, he came upon the first sign he had had for three days that a man had ever been before him in these endless woods. Upon the rocky ground at the foot of the cliffs was a man’s skeleton.
Sheldon stopped and stared. The thing shocked him. It seemed inconceivable that a man could have died here, miserably as this poor fellow had done, alone, crying out aloud to the solitudes which answered him softly with gently stirring branches and murmuring water. Sheldon’s mood, one of serene, ineffable peace, had had so strong a grasp upon him that this sign of tragedy and death was hard to grasp.
He stood long, staring down at the heap of bones. They were tumbled this way and that. He shuddered. And yet he stood there, fascinated, wondering, letting his suddenly awakened, overstimulated imagination have its way.
There came the query: “What killed him?”
Sheldon looked up at the cliffs. The man might have fallen. But the skull was intact; there had been no fracture there. Nor—Sheldon forgot his previous revulsion of feeling in his strong curiosity—nor was there a broken bone of arm or leg to indicate a fall. The bones were large; it had been a big man, six feet or over, and heavy. No; in spite of the position of the disordered skeleton, death had not come that way.
For half an hour Sheldon lingered here, restrained a little by the thoughts rising naturally to the occasion, seeking to read the riddle set before him. There were no rattlesnakes here, no poisonous insects at these altitudes. The man had not fallen. To come here at all he must have been one who knew the mountains; then he had not starved, for the streams were filled with trout, and he would know the way to trap small game enough to keep life in him. And what man ever came so deep into the wild without a rifle?
It seemed to Sheldon that there was only one answer. The man must have got caught here in an early snowstorm; he must have lost his head; instead of going calmly about preparing shelter and laying up provisions for the winter, he must have raced on madly, getting more hopelessly lost at every bewildered step—and then the end had come, hideously.
At last Sheldon moved on, pondering the thoughts which centered about the white pile of bones which once, perhaps four or five or six years ago, had been a man. How the poor devil must have cursed the nights that blotted the world out, the winds which shrieked of snow, the mountains which rose like walls about a convict.
“What became of his gun?” cried Sheldon suddenly, speaking aloud. “The buckle from his belt, the metal things in his pockets, knife, coins, cartridges? The things which prowling animals can’t eat! They don’t carry such things off!”
He came back, walking swiftly. There was little grass so close to the cliffs; nothing but bare, rocky ground and a few bits of dry wood, two or three old cones dropped from a pine; nothing to hide the articles which Sheldon sought. But, although he made assurance doubly sure by searching carefully for more than an hour, back and forth along the cliffs, out among the trees, he found nothing. Not so much as the sole of a boot.
“And that,” muttered Sheldon, taking up Buck’s lead rope, “if a man asked me, is infernally strange.”
As he went on he strove frowningly for an explanation and found none. The man had not been alone? He had had a companion? This companion had taken his rifle, his knife and watch, or whatever might have been in his pockets, and had gone on. Possibly. But, then, why had he not taken the time to bury the body? And how was it that there was not a single shred of clothing?
“Coyotes may be so everlastingly hungry up here that they eat a man’s boots, soles, nails and all!” grunted Sheldon. “Only—I am not the kind of a tenderfoot to believe that particular brand of fairy tale. There’s not even a button!”
It is the way of the human intellect to contend with locks upon doors which shut on secrets. The mind, given half of the story, demands the remainder. John Sheldon, as he trudged on, grew half angry with himself because he could not answer the questions which insisted upon having answers. But before noon he had almost forgotten the scattered bones under the cliffs, the matter thrust to one rim of his thoughts which must now be given over almost entirely to finding trail.
For no longer was there meadow-land under foot. The strip of fairly level, grassy land was gone abruptly; beyond lay boulder-strewn slopes, fringed with dense brush, all but impassable to the packhorse.
Often the man must leave the animal while he went ahead seeking a way; often must the two of them turn back for some unexpected fall of cliff, all unseen until they were close to the edge, compelling them to retrace their steps perhaps a hundred yards, or five hundred, and many a time did Sheldon begin to think that the way was shut to the plucky brute that labored on under his pack.
But always he found a way on, a way down. And always, being a man used to the woods, did he keep in mind that the time