Chapter XLI: In Which Providence Takes a Hand

He crushed her to him with a passion that bade fair to stop her breath. He poured out his kisses upon her lips, and face, and eyes. He kissed the little scar that crossed the part in her hair. And there he held her for long, lingering minutes, loath to untwine his arms. Her hot breath was on his neck, and he surfeited his senses upon the incense of her curls.

"We'll all go down to Blue-Grass together now, won't we, Lem?" she said.

"Sho'--I'm done a warrin' now--I'm done fo' always--an', Belle-Ann, my darlin'--I want t' git a edication like yo'-all--eh?--I want t' make myself fittin' fo' yo'. I sho' will do hit, with Gawd's help--an' yore'n. I aimed to ax yo' again to marry me pint-blank--but I don't want yo' to jest now--'til I'm fittin'--I air a goin' to study th' books by day an' by night--I know I kin learn--I'll do hit er bust--then when yore sure I'm fittin'--an' kin talk nice like yo'--an' look decent-like--then--then----"

He drew her to him and buried his face in her curls.

"Little Belle-Ann," he muttered, his joy crowding his words, "little gal, whut I knowed would come back----"

"Did I not cross my heart, Lem?" she said, and as her lips parted to tell to him all that lay in her heart for the future, a swift, blighting look of horror dashed into the girl's face, leaving it whiter than moon-pallor. A half-screamed, incoherent outcry burst from her lips as with outstretched arm she pointed behind him. Responding instantly to her alarm, Lem flung himself around.

Together, transfixed and agape, they stared. A startling sight stood in front of their eyes--a spectacle that filled the sensitive girl with a panting, sickening horror. She stood all a-quiver, her two little hands clutching her breast and her violet eyes swimming in terror. For a tense long minute they could neither speak nor move.

Then Belle-Ann's one hand shot out and grasped Lem's sleeve imploringly.

"Oh, Lem--Lem!" she cried, "can't we get it out--oh! can't we hurry and take it out, Lem?" but even as she talked she knew the hopelessness of the intent in her mind.

"I 'low hits too late now, Belle-Ann," returned he, in tones a trifle unsteady. "Hit air God's buryin' now," he added, with no trace of venom in his tones.

"Oh!--Lem, it's too awful--too terrible to watch and think about," pursued Belle-Ann in half whispers broken with emotion. She dropped her lids and placed her hands over her eyes.

The night wind carried an ominous groan. A dully grinding, crepitating sound came up to the lofty heights of Eagle Crown.

Even now there was a tremendous gutting upheaval below them; then with a dynamitic cough of concussion the entire roof of the church belched upward and fell in and a wide black flight of smoke hurried up to the high heavens and blotted the scintillant stars. Then a measureless, flanged blanket of blood-hued flame followed, propelling still higher the ebon clouds above it.

Here the flame turned to orange and split, and dropped back into a seething pit, where it gathered another and greater force. Then a lance-like turret of pure fire spurted straight upward, struggling and twisting and stabbing its lurid path through the pitchy volumes of smoke that rolled and plunged and tumbled infernally; filching with edacious swirls, great amber flakes of tinder, delivering them up in spiral gusts to the whining wilderness wind, which in turn hurtled its meteoric salvage, red and alive, out over the rampant waters of Hellsfork.

The clearing was transformed into an oscillating arena of lurid light that eclipsed the stars and drove the moon pallid. The front wall supporting the belfry was last to go. Its superstructure half devoured, the belfry itself clung on fearfully askew, like a man skidded from a high cliff, hanging by a single root awaiting his strength to ebb. The pitiless flames duelled, raged and fought ferociously over their prey of fire-bitten logs that strove vainly to rise, only to be stricken, again to fall back, casting groans to the spectral night. They turned and stirred and crawled in agony, like the maimed half dead.

Suddenly the sheet of flame scathing the front wall fell back again for another assault and, taking it thrice with blasting, mighty tongues, took the key-log to the belfry for its own. And as it went the belfry trembled and quaked on the threshold of its doom. For a minute it hung there like a mortal thing, having eyes to see down into the white-hot pit--fearing something there that this grim-hell clasped to its red breast, vauntingly and gloatingly. Something more scathing, more horrifying, more contaminating than the mere scourge of molten annihilation.

The fire gnawed its trembling support away, and the belfry staggered, tottered and succumbed.

As it hurtled headlong downward, the bell shrieked out across the night,--a throttled, frenzied medley of fear-stricken mad utterances, and tumbled over and over, and went screaming into the ghost-man's casket of destruction. And roundabout them fluted leaves of flame grew. And the fire made flowers that covered them over.

Incessantly the lurid lustre of the embers died down, only to leap pulsing up anew, like the rhyming flush of heat lightning playing behind pearly clouds. As the dull red flung its cycle outward from the vermilion pyre of the doomed church, it caught in bold, startling relief, the mask of a human visage. The russet of the dancing, dying flames touched this pale, marcid face with a florid, sanguine flush. Only his peaked, lupine features were visible against the purple green of the laurel. He was there in the beginning, and he meant to stay there to the end. He meant to keep his adder-like eyes charm-fixed and unmoved upon this death pile, until its face was gray and cold. He meant to see that no treacherous, human skeleton pushed up out of the yielding ashes and stalked abroad. There was reverence and infinite tenderness in his fondling of the rifle Buddy now hugged in his lap.

His dead father's gun. His heritage that naught would part, until the epoch, that came to still his little hardened heart, stepped between them. As the fire smouldered, thus did the boy's eyes smoulder, while he watched audaciously and fixedly; for deep down in his warped, puerile soul the curtained joy of revenge was a-sputter. Now his weazened countenance broke with a satanic grin, ill to behold, the while he mumbled things to himself.

"I 'low th' ol' Scratch ez a pickin' em, an' a spearin' em, an' a humpin' em 'roun' down below 'bout now--leastways I'll see his bones burn up, I will," he muttered in sibilant, soul-deep glee.

Like a luscious, esculent morsel he rolled the words over and over. The sound of these disjointed phrases spelled happiness to his soul.

"I'll see his bones burn--he cyan't cum back ef I burn his bones all up--th' ol' Scratch'll have t' keep em, ef I burn his bones up--he'll have t' keep em." The jungled hills, a-hush, were ominously empty of night voices.

And all the soft-footed creatures of the wild crouched fear-crazed in their lairs, and peered tremblingly out at this fire-swept, fearful night. A furtive, fleeing wind, ocean-bound, whipped the slatternly dawn clouds away from the wan face of a vigilant moon. Its haggard visage looked pityingly down upon a boy-heart clasping a rifle to his breast like a brother, his dream-dizzied head, pillowed upon the soughing bosom of a wilderness world--fast asleep.

* * * * *

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

GOLIATH'S BRIDE
THE APOSTLE ON HELLSFORK
A GHOST'S VENGEANCE
THE REDEMPTION OF ZACK McCOY
MR. HARTEM'S SPECULATION

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