The Flaming Forest | Page 8

persisted in hopping about, like a lot of
sand-fleas in a dance, and just as he got hold of one and reached for
another, the first would slip away from him. He began to get the best of
them after a time, and he had an uncontrollable desire to say something.
But his eyes and his lips were sealed tight, and to open them, a little
army of gnomes came out of the darkness in the back of his head, each
of them armed with a lever, and began prying with all their might.
After that came the beginning of light and a flash of consciousness.
The girl was working over him. He could feel her and hear her
movement. Water was trickling over his face. Then he heard a voice,
close over him, saying something in a sobbing monotone which he
could not understand.
With a mighty effort he opened his eyes.
"Thank LE BON DIEU, you live, m'sieu," he heard the voice say, as if
coming from a long distance away. "You live, you live--"
"Tryin' to," he mumbled thickly, feeling suddenly a sense of great
elation. "Tryin'--"
He wanted to curse the gnomes for deserting him, for as soon as they
were gone with their levers, his eyes and his lips shut tight again, or at
least he thought they did. But he began to sense things in a curious sort
of way. Some one was dragging him. He could feel the grind of sand
under his body. There were intervals when the dragging operation
paused. And then, after a long time, he seemed to hear more than one
voice. There were two--sometimes a murmur of them. And odd visions
came to him. He seemed to see the girl with shining black hair and dark

eyes, and then swiftly she would change into a girl with hair like
blazing gold. This was a different girl. She was not like Pretty Eyes, as
his twisted mind called the other. This second vision that he saw was
like a radiant bit of the sun, her hair all aflame with the fire of it and her
face a different sort of face. He was always glad when she went away
and Pretty Eyes came back.
To David Carrigan this interesting experience in his life might have
covered an hour, a day, or a month. Or a year for that matter, for he
seemed to have had an indefinite association with Pretty Eyes. He had
known her for a long time and very intimately, it seemed. Yet he had
no memory of the long fight in the hot sun, or of the river, or of the
singing warblers, or of the inquisitive sandpiper that had marked out
the line which his enemy's last bullet had traveled. He had entered into
a new world in which everything was vague and unreal except that
vision of dark hair, dark eyes, and pale, beautiful face. Several times he
saw it with marvelous clearness, and each time he drifted away into
darkness again with the sound of a voice growing fainter and fainter in
his ears.
Then came a time of utter chaos and soundless gloom. He was in a pit,
where even his subconscious self was almost dead under a crushing
oppression. At last a star began to glimmer in this pit, a star pale and
indistinct and a vast distance away. But it crept steadily up through the
eternity of darkness, and the nearer it came, the less there was of the
blackness of night. From a star it grew into a sun, and with the sun
came dawn. In that dawn he heard the singing of a bird, and the bird
was just over his head. When Carrigan opened his eyes, and
understanding came to him, he found himself under the silver birch that
belonged to the wood warbler.
For a space he did not ask himself how he had come there. He was
looking at the river and the white strip of sand. Out there were the rock
and his dunnage pack. Also his rifle. Instinctively his eyes turned to the
balsam ambush farther down. That, too, was in a blaze of sunlight now.
But where he lay, or sat, or stood--he was not sure what he was doing at
that moment--it was shady and deliciously cool. The green of the cedar

and spruce and balsam was close about him, inset with the silver and
gold of the thickly- leaved birch. He discovered that he was bolstered
up partly against the trunk of this birch and partly against a spruce
sapling. Between these two, where his head rested, was a pile of soft
moss freshly torn from the earth. And within reach of him was his own
kit pail filled with water.
He