The Flaming Forest | Page 5

was physically more at ease, he began reassembling his
scattered mental faculties. Who was this stranger who was pot- shotting
at him with such deadly animosity from the ambush below? Who--
Another crash of lead in tinware and steel put an unpleasant emphasis
to the question. It was so close to his head that it made him wince, and
now--with a wide area within reach about him--he began scraping up
the sand for an added protection. There came a long silence after that
third clatter of distress from his cooking utensils. To David Carrigan,
even in his hour of deadly peril, there was something about it that for
an instant brought back the glow of humor in his eyes. It was hot,
swelteringly hot, in that packet of sand with the unclouded sun almost
straight overhead. He could have tossed a pebble to where a
bright-eyed sandpiper was cocking itself backward and forward, its
jerky movements accompanied by friendly little tittering noises.
Everything about him seemed friendly. The river rippled and murmured
in cooling song just beyond the sandpiper. On the other side the still
cooler forest was a paradise of shade and contentment, astir with
subdued and hidden life. It was nesting season. He heard the twitter of
birds. A tiny, brown wood warbler fluttered out to the end of a silvery
birch limb, and it seemed to David that its throat must surely burst with
the burden of its song. The little fellow's brown body, scarcely larger
than a butternut, was swelling up like a round ball in his effort to
vanquish all other song.
"Go to it, old man," chuckled Carrigan. "Go to it!"
The little warbler, that he might have crushed between thumb and

forefinger, gave him a lot of courage.
Then the tiny chorister stopped for breath. In that interval Carrigan
listened to the wrangling of two vivid-colored Canada jays deeper in
the timber. Chronic scolds they were, never without a grouch. They
were like some people Carrigan had known, born pessimists, always
finding something to complain about, even in their love days.
And these were love days. That was the odd thought that came to
Carrigan as he lay half on his face, his fingers slowly and cautiously
working a loophole between his shoulder-pack and the rock. They were
love days all up and down the big rivers, where men and women sang
for joy, and children played, forgetful of the long, hard days of winter.
And in forest, plain, and swamp was this spirit of love also triumphant
over the land. It was the mating season of all feathered things. In
countless nests were the peeps and twitters of new life; mothers of
first-born were teaching their children to swim and fly; from end to end
of the forest world the little children of the silent places, furred and
feathered, clawed and hoofed, were learning the ways of life. Nature's
yearly birthday was half-way gone, and the doors of nature's school
wide open. And the tiny brown songster at the end of his birch twig
proclaimed the joy of it again, and challenged all the world to beat him
in his adulation.
Carrigan found that he could peer between his pack and the rock to
where the other warbler was singing--and where his enemy lay
watching for the opportunity to kill. It was taking a chance. If a
movement betrayed his loophole, his minutes were numbered. But he
had worked cautiously, an inch at a time, and was confident that the
beginning of his effort to fight back was, up to the present moment,
undiscovered. He believed that he knew about where the ambushed
man was concealed. In the edge of a low-hanging mass of balsam was a
fallen cedar. From behind the butt of that cedar he was sure the shots
had come.
And now, even more cautiously than he had made the tiny opening, he
began to work the muzzle of his rifle through the loophole. As he did
this he was thinking of Black Roger Audemard. And yet, almost as

quickly as suspicion leaped into his mind, he told himself that the thing
was impossible. It could not be Black Roger, or one of Black Roger's
friends, behind the cedar log. The idea was inconceivable, when he
considered how carefully the secret of his mission had been kept at the
Landing. He had not even said goodby to his best friends. And because
Black Roger had won through all the preceding years, Carrigan was
stalking his prey out of uniform. There had been nothing to betray him.
Besides, Black Roger Audemard must be at least a thousand miles
north, unless something had tempted him to come up the rivers with the
spring brigades. If he used logic at all, there was but