In the Carquinez Woods

B >> Bret Harte >> In the Carquinez Woods


She caught him by the knees, and lifted her face imploringly to his.

"Say that again!" she cried, passionately. "Tell me it was Teresa you
called, and no other! You have come back for me! You would not let me
die here alone!"

He lifted her tenderly in his arms, and cast a rapid glance around
him. It might have been his fancy, but there seemed a dull glow in the
direction he had come.

"You do not speak!" she said. "Tell me! You did not come here to seek
her?"

"Whom?" he said quickly.

"Nellie!"

With a sharp cry he let her slip to the ground. All the pent-up
agony, rage, and mortification of the last hour broke from him in that
inarticulate outburst. Then, catching her hands again, he dragged her to
his level.

"Hear me!" he cried, disregarding the whirling smoke and the fiery
baptism that sprinkled them--"hear me! If you value your life, if you
value your soul, and if you do not want me to cast you to the beasts
like Jezebel of old, never--never take that accursed name again upon
your lips. Seek her--HER? Yes! Seek her to tie her like a witch's
daughter of hell to that blazing tree!" He stopped. "Forgive me," he
said in a changed voice. "I'm mad, and forgetting myself and you. Come."

Without noticing the expression of half-savage delight that had passed
across her face, he lifted her in his arms.

"Which way are you going?" she asked, passing her hands vaguely across
his breast, as if to reassure herself of his identity.

"To our camp by the scarred tree," he replied.

"Not there, not there," she said, hurriedly. "I was driven from there
just now. I thought the fire began there until I came here."

Then it was as he feared. Obeying the same mysterious law that had
launched this fatal fire like a thunderbolt from the burning mountain
crest five miles away into the heart of the Carquinez Woods, it had
again leaped a mile beyond, and was hemming them between two narrowing
lines of fire. But Low was not daunted. Retracing his steps through
the blinding smoke, he strode off at right angles to the trail near the
point where he had entered the wood. It was the spot where he had first
lifted Nellie in his arms to carry her to the hidden spring. If any
recollection of it crossed his mind at that moment, it was only shown in
his redoubled energy. He did not glide through the thick underbrush, as
on that day, but seemed to take a savage pleasure in breaking through it
with sheer brute force. Once Teresa insisted upon relieving him of
the burden of her weight, but after a few steps she staggered blindly
against him, and would fain have recourse once more to his strong arms.
And so, alternately staggering, bending, crouching, or bounding and
crashing on, but always in one direction, they burst through the jealous
rampart, and came upon the sylvan haunt of the hidden spring. The
great angle of the half-fallen tree acted as a harrier to the wind and
drifting smoke, and the cool spring sparkled and bubbled in the almost
translucent air. He laid her down beside the water, and bathed her
face and hands. As he did so his quick eye caught sight of a woman's
handkerchief lying at the foot of the disrupted root. Dropping Teresa's
hand, he walked towards it, and with the toe of his moccasin gave it one
vigorous kick into the ooze at the overflow of the spring. He turned to
Teresa, but she evidently had not noticed the act.

"Where are you?" she asked, with a smile.

Something in her movement struck him! He came towards her, and bending
down looked into her face. "Teresa! Good God!--look at me! What has
happened?"

She raised her eyes to his. There was a slight film across them; the
lids were blackened; the beautiful lashes gone forever!

"I see you a little now, I think," she said, with a smile, passing her
hands vaguely over his face. "It must have happened when he fainted, and
I had to drag him through the blazing brush; both my hands were full,
and I could not cover my eyes."

"Drag whom?" said Low, quickly.

"Why, Dunn."

"Dunn! He here?" said Low, hoarsely.

"Yes; didn't you read the note I left on the herbarium? Didn't you come
to the camp-fire?" she asked hurriedly, clasping his hands. "Tell me
quickly!"

"No!"

"Then you were not there--then you didn't leave me to die?"

"No! I swear it, Teresa!" the stoicism that had upheld his own agony
breaking down before her strong emotion.

"Thank God!" She threw her arms around him, and hid her aching eyes in
his troubled breast.

"Tell me all, Teresa," he whispered in her listening ear. "Don't move;
stay there, and tell me all."

With her face buried in his bosom, as if speaking to his heart alone,
she told him part, but not all. With her eyes filled with tears, but a
smile on her lips, radiant with new-found happiness, she told him how
she had overheard the plans of Dunn and Brace, how she had stolen their
conveyance to warn him in time. But here she stopped, dreading to say
a word that would shatter the hope she was building upon his sudden
revulsion of feeling for Nellie. She could not bring herself to repeat
their interview--that would come later, when they were safe and out of
danger; now not even the secret of his birth must come between them with
its distraction, to mar their perfect communion. She faltered that Dunn
had fainted from weakness, and that she had dragged him out of danger.
"He will never interfere with us--I mean," she said softly, "with ME
again. I can promise you that as well as if he had sworn it."

"Let him pass, now," said Low; "that will come later on," he added,
unconsciously repeating her thought in a tone that made her heart sick.
"But tell me, Teresa, why did you go to Excelsior?"

She buried her head still deeper, as if to hide it. He felt her broken
heart beat against his own; he was conscious of a depth of feeling her
rival had never awakened in him. The possibility of Teresa loving him
had never occurred to his simple nature. He bent his head and kissed
her. She was frightened, and unloosed her clinging arms; but he retained
her hand, and said, "We will leave this accursed place, and you shall
go with me as you said you would; nor need you ever leave me, unless you
wish it."

She could hear the beating of her own heart through his words; she
longed to look at the eyes and lips that told her this, and read the
meaning his voice alone could not entirely convey. For the first time
she felt the loss of her sight. She did not know that it was, in this
moment of happiness, the last blessing vouchsafed to her miserable life.

A few moments of silence followed, broken only by the distant rumor of
the conflagration and the crash of falling boughs.

"It may be an hour yet," he whispered, "before the fire has swept a path
for us to the road below. We are safe here, unless some sudden current
should draw the fire down upon us. You are not frightened?" She pressed
his hand; she was thinking of the pale face of Dunn, lying in the
secure retreat she had purchased for him at such a sacrifice. Yet
the possibility of danger to him now for a moment marred her present
happiness and security. "You think the fire will not go north of where
you found me?" she asked softly.

"I think not," he said, "but I will reconnoitre. Stay where you are."

They pressed hands, and parted. He leaped upon the slanting trunk and
ascended it rapidly. She waited in mute expectation.

There was a sudden movement of the root on which she sat, a deafening
crash, and she was thrown forward on her face.

The vast bulk of the leaning tree, dislodged from its aerial support by
the gradual sapping of the spring at its roots, or by the crumbling
of the bark from the heat, had slipped, made a half revolution, and,
falling, overbore the lesser trees in its path, and tore, in its
resistless momentum, a broad opening to the underbrush.

With a cry to Low, Teresa staggered to her feet. There was an interval
of hideous silence, but no reply. She called again. There was a sudden
deepening roar, the blast of a fiery furnace swept through the opening,
a thousand luminous points around her burst into fire, and in an instant
she was lost in a whirlwind of smoke and flame! From the onset of its
fury to its culmination twenty minutes did not elapse; but in that
interval a radius of two hundred yards around the hidden spring was
swept of life and light and motion.

For the rest of that day and part of the night a pall of smoke hung
above the scene of desolation. It lifted only towards the morning, when
the moon, rising high, picked out in black and silver the shrunken and
silent columns of those roofless vaults, shorn of base and capital. It
flickered on the still, overflowing pool of the hidden spring, and
shone upon the white face of Low, who, with a rootlet of the fallen tree
holding him down like an arm across his breast, seemed to be sleeping
peacefully in the sleeping water.

* * * * *

Contemporaneous history touched him as briefly, but not as gently. "It
is now definitely ascertained," said "The Slumgullion Mirror," "that
Sheriff Dunn met his fate in the Carquinez Woods in the performance
of his duty; that fearless man having received information of
the concealment of a band of horse thieves in their recesses. The
desperadoes are presumed to have escaped, as the only remains found are
those of two wretched tramps, one of whom is said to have been a digger,
who supported himself upon roots and herbs, and the other a degraded
half-white woman. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the fire
originated through their carelessness, although Father Wynn of the First
Baptist Church, in his powerful discourse of last Sunday, pointed at the
warning and lesson of such catastrophes. It may not be out of place
here to say that the rumors regarding an engagement between the pastor's
accomplished daughter and the late lamented sheriff are utterly without
foundation, as it has been an on dit for some time in all well-informed
circles that the indefatigable Mr. Brace, of Wells, Fargo and Co.'s
Express, will shortly lead the lady to the hymeneal altar."