The following afternoon, the stage rolled in an hour late. Meggy unclenched her hands and walked outside into the glare, and the grizzled driver leaned down from his perch. “That yer trunk, ma’am?”
She nodded, unable to speak over the ache in her throat.
“Wherebouts ya headin’, ma’am?”
“East,” she managed to reply.
“Hop in, then. I’ll load yer baggage after I wet my whistle. Ain’t no other passengers, so make yourself to home.”
Meggy hoisted her carpetbag into the coach and stepped in after it. The shades had been drawn over the window openings to keep out the heat, and with a sigh of resignation she settled into the dim interior and closed her swollen eyelids.
She had come out West to marry Walter Peabody, to find for herself what all women long for—a home, a family, a man she could love for the rest of her days. Perhaps she was destined never to have such things. The only man she had ever felt strongly about was not her Southern kinsman, Walter Peabody, but her Northern enemy, Colonel Tom Randall.
And Tom was a man so scarred by his past losses he would never be able to consider a relationship of commitment.
The carriage jiggled as the driver climbed back up onto his seat. “All aboard,” he yelled. He snapped the reins over the four-horse team and the coach plunged forward. Meggy opened her eyes, felt her stomach tighten. Now what?
She pulled up the shade over the window and leaned forward for one last look at the timbered mountains to the north. Oh, it was beautiful, she had to admit. So lush, so many shades of green even though seared by the relentless sun all summer long. Tall, straight fir trees covered the steep slopes, and sugar pine and vine maples filled in the lower levels.
Her gaze followed the ridge line, where at this very moment the Devil’s Camp crew would be cutting timber. The top of the tree-furred mountain blended into the sky, and a golden haze hung over the forest. Sunset this evening would be lovely. Already the sky glowed rosy-orange behind the—
Meggy shot upright on the hard leather seat. It was midday, too early for the sky to color like that. It took a full minute for the truth to register.
“Stop!” she screamed.
At the same instant she heard the driver’s guttural shout. “Fire on the mountain!”
“Stop!”
“Cain’t stop, ma’am. When the mountains burn, ya cain’t do nuthin’ but run like hell. Hang on!”
His whip cracked and the coach picked up speed. Dazed with horror, Meggy stared up the mountainside while her heart thumped wildly under her white muslin waist. The narrow road to Devil’s Camp snaked up the grade to her left.
She could barely discern its path.
She poked her head out the opening and shouted at the driver. “Will it spread?”
“Shore thing, ma’am. But don’t you worry none, we got the fastest horses this side of the Willamette. We’ll be to the camp trail and beyond in a quarter of an hour. Fire won’t catch us.”
But the crew! Nobby and Seth and the others. Tom.
Dear God, they would be trapped!
The stage hurtled on. Meggy hung out the window, straining to see through the thickening haze. Her eyes smarted and now she could smell the acrid scent of burning brush. Halfway up the mountain, dirty gray smoke billowed into the air. As she watched, the dark line of smoke and ash moved upward, toward the summit.
Toward Devil’s Camp.
The stagecoach headed into the spreading haze. The sunlight dimmed, and a strange yellow glow lit the sky. Flecks of feathery ash floated in the air, coating the road ahead with gray frost.
All at once the carriage slowed. Meggy leaned out of the window to see why.
Up ahead, where the Tennant road met the wagon trail up to Devil’s Camp, stood a huddle of men. Loggers. Meggy recognized Swede Jensen’s red wool cap.
The stage drew up in a cloud of dust. “You fellers needin’ transport?” the driver yelled.
“Ve haf oxen and two wagons,” Swede shouted back. “Ve be fine.”
Meggy scrabbled at the door handle, yanked it open and scrambled out. The crew stood in a knot between a team of oxen and three or four horses and some wagons, one of which she recognized. The wagon Tom had used to bring her into Tennant yesterday.
She caught sight of Sergeant O’Malley, standing with one arm around Seth’s trussed-up shoulder. A white-faced Nobby clung to Swede’s trouser leg. Meggy headed toward them.
“Where’s Tom?”
O’Malley stepped forward to intercept her. “Now, don’t you be worryin’ none, Miss Meggy.”
“Then where is he? I see the wagon, but—”
The sergeant laid a restraining hand on her shoulder. “We met him coming up from town. He left us the wagon, took a horse and went back up. Seems we forgot to bring his pet raven.”
Meggy’s brain reeled. “He went back to camp to rescue a bird? How could you have let him—”
“Oh, now, Miss Meggy. ’Tis not a matter of ‘let.’ Nobody gives order to Colonel Tom. You oughtta know that by now.”
“What I know is that he’s a d-damn fool Y-Yankee,” Meggy stammered. Oh, she wished she wouldn’t cry in front of the men!
The stage driver leaned down. “You comin’, ma’am? Gotta keep movin’ east or else head on back to Tennant. Otherwise t’aint safe.”
“I’m…” Meggy closed her mouth and clutched both arms over her chest. She wanted to, oh, how she wanted to climb back onto her seat and leave Oregon and everything in it far, far behind.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t make her feet move toward the stagecoach.
“I will be staying,” she said at last. “Take my trunk on to your next stop, if you please.”
“Now, Miss Meggy,” O’Malley began. “A lady like yourself can’t just—”
“Fiddlesticks! A lady can do anything any other woman can do. Just you watch me!”
The coach rumbled on its way. In its wake of swirling dust and ash, Meggy stood absolutely still.
Just what was it a woman would do?
“Stand out of my path, Sergeant O’Malley.”
“Meggy, girl, you don’t know what you’re doin’. The horse you can take and welcome, but ’tis daft to head up a mountain that’s on fire.”
“That is precisely what Tom did, however. Are you saying your colonel is daft?”
“Ah, now, miss, don’t you be puttin’ words in me mouth.”
Meggy leaned forward in the saddle. “Release the bridle, Mr. O’Malley. Do it now, so I will waste no more time.”
“I can’t, lass. I can’t bring myself to let you do this.”
Meggy pulled her father’s revolver from the travel bag she’d stowed across her lap. With trembling hands, she cocked it and leveled it at O’Malley’s red-bearded chin. “You know I can shoot straight,” she said in as level a tone as she could manage.
“But you wouldn’t, I’m guessin’. Now, would you, Meggy?”
“I would not want to,” she admitted. “But I will if I have to. You must let me go after him.”
O’Malley tightened his hold on the mare’s bridle. “It’s too dangerous. People die in timber fires. Even the colonel—why, he might take a wrong trail, find himself trapped and not be able to—”
“All the more reason why I must go. There is something I must tell him.” She slipped the revolver inside her travel bag, then reached down and laid her small hand over the sergeant’s beefy paw. “Please, Michael. Please.”
The sergeant released his breath in a whoosh. “I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. All right, then, away with you. Never could stand a woman’s tears. Never could argue a woman out of a single thing.”
Meggy turned the horse onto the Devil’s Camp trail and jabbed her heels into its flanks. The mare bolted forward. She pulled her travel valise tight against her chest and held on.
Tom’s eyes burned as the smoke thickened around him. Keeping a sharp eye on the wind direction, he headed up the back side of the ridge. No sign of flames yet. He might still have time.
The raven’s wooden cage dangled off the horse’s rump, tied to the saddle with a length of braided manila rope. “Damn-broke-damn-broke,” the raven chirped in a gravelly singsong voice.
“Shut up,” Tom growled. He twitched a blanket over the cage. He wasn’t broke yet, but he would be if he couldn’t reach the side-stacked timber the crew had stashed along the river’s edge. There were three piles, each one a triangle-shaped tower of thick Douglas fir and cedar logs, anchored by a single key log wedged at just the right angle and pinned by a single stake driven into the ground. All he had to do was chop through the stake and knock the key log loose, then get out of the way before the whole shebang rolled over him on its way down the steep incline into the river.
Where the trail leveled out, he reined in and pulled his neckerchief up over his mouth and nose. The air smelled acrid, and the smoke was so thick he could barely see. Still, if he stuck close to the river, he’d stumble across one of the side-stacks sooner or later; they were only a mile or two apart.
The timber would float downriver, carried by the current all the way to the valley floor, if he was lucky. Once it was there, the crew could attack the jammed-up logs with peavey hooks. That way, he could still salvage some of the timber from the season’s cut—maybe enough to pay the men’s wages and move them on to a new camp.
He ran his hand over his stinging eyes. If he was really lucky he’d get out of this alive.
He headed the horse cross-country, toward what he knew was the most remote pile of stacked timber. If he worked fast, he could get to the second stack before the logs from the first one reached that far downstream, and so on until he’d released all three stacks. This way, in case the fire caught up to him—or, worse, started chasing him—he could work his way back down the mountain.
“Broke-broke-broke,” the raven croaked from under the blanket. “Meggy-meggy-broke.”
Blasted bird. The first chance he got he’d toss it, cage and all, onto a floating log raft and hope a spike-booted lumberjack with a sense of humor would adopt it. Reaching behind him, Tom patted the double-edged ax he’d tied in back of the saddle. His ticket out of debt. That and locating one of those side-stacks before he was burned to a crisp.
The wind gusted, and a shower of gray-white ash rained down on his shoulders and thighs. Thicker than it was half an hour ago, Tom noted. He lowered his head and picked up his pace.
Meggy lifted the flap and peered into the dim interior of Tom’s tent. “Tom? Tom, are you here?”
Everything looked as it had before, except that the raven’s cage was gone. She backed out of the tent, remounted and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Tom? Tom, where are you?”
She shouted until her throat hurt, but heard nothing except the sighing of pine branches above her head. No chittering of birds. Nothing. The quiet was unnatural. Even the light was strange, hazy and yellow, with flecks of ash drifting over everything.
Where would he go? Surely not farther up the mountain?
She hadn’t met him on the trail she’d ridden up, and as far as she knew there was no other way down to the valley. Had he left the logging path and headed into the timber?
Instinctively, she headed for the river, then began working her way slowly upstream. The air grew thick as pea soup, choking her lungs as she tried to breathe. Pulling the mare up, she groped under her skirt and ripped off a strip of her muslin petticoat. She tied it about her face, leaving only her eyes and the top of her head exposed, and then headed again for the river. She would soak the cloth in the water, and wet her skirts down as well.
Tom’s throat was raw. His eyes stung from the smoke-thickened air. He urged his horse upriver through the choking haze until he stumbled on the first of the timber piles he and his crew had stacked along the bank.
He looked up into the orange-tinted sky. He could hear the insistent roar of flames from the other side of the summit, a mile farther up, and the distant crack of trees exploding in the heat. How much time did he have before the blaze reached him?
He drew up his mount and mopped his eyes with his shirtsleeve. He’d been caught in only one forest fire, on an army reconnaissance patrol in the Okanagan wilderness. One experience like that in a lifetime was plenty. From the amount of smoke and the look of the sky, he’d better get moving if he wanted to live through this one.
He edged the horse clear of the timber stack, dismounted and dragged the double-edged ax from behind the saddle. The riverbank was steep here, and slippery. Back in June he’d purposely chosen this spot to pile the lengths of timber; the bank dropped off sharply, and once the key log was released, the logs would tumble free and roll into the water, to be carried downstream.
He hoped. He ran his thumb gingerly over the ax blade. Sharp enough to slice through steel. He moved into position between the stack and the river and planted his feet apart. He’d have to chop through the pole that pinned the key log, then jump clear before the rolling timber caught him.
Checking the location of his horse, he raised the ax to his shoulder. One well-aimed blow should do it.
He kept his eyes on the pinning pole, lifted the ax off his shoulder and stepped into his backstroke. He swung the head high and to the right, then brought it down. The blade bit through the peeled pine branch, and the key log shuddered.
The pole twisted to one side and the stack began to groan. Tom grabbed the ax and sprinted toward his horse just as the key log shifted and broke free.
The entire pile crumbled into a rolling mass of timber, hurtling past him to hit the river with a great splash. Under different circumstances, a team of river-rats with cant hooks and peaveys would be waiting downstream to corral the floating timbers into a log boom. Working alone, Tom figured the best he could do was to get them moving and hope they didn’t jam up.
But the more logs he released, the greater the chances of a log jam. Which meant he had to race downriver and release the next stack before the first load reached it. Might have been easier to work up the mountain instead of down, but with a forest fire nipping at his heels, he wanted to save as much timber as he could.
He stowed the ax and pulled himself into the saddle. He could make it to the next side-stack in time, if he was careful.
And if the fire didn’t swallow up the ridge too soon.
Meggy tightened her hand on the reins and nosed her mount to the right, as close to the river’s edge as she could manage. The heavy air pressed down on her, searing her throat with ashy grit at every breath. The scrap of petticoat muslin she’d dipped in the river just minutes ago was already dry; she’d have to soak it again. Before her, the bank eased into a narrow stretch of sand. Behind her, tree branches sighed. The wind was picking up.
Up ahead…
She wiped her burning eyes with her dampened skirt hem and tried to focus. The sky, rosy-orange a moment ago, now looked yellow and slightly grainy with bits of swirling ash. The forest floor, once the rich brown of pine needles and soft duff, grew more and more indistinct as the dirty gray flecks sifted over everything.
She was correct in deciding to skirt the river. Otherwise, without a clear path and with no way to determine the position of the sun, she would become hopelessly disoriented. Lost on a mountain that was on fire.
Despite the searing heat, a chill went through her. She would not get lost. She would keep her head clear, keep her eyes on the river and find Tom. Any moment now, she would see his tall form riding toward her. Any moment now the fear that clogged her throat and made her forearms prickle would melt away. Tom was all right.
He had to be.
She kneed the mare forward, picked her way carefully through huckleberry bushes and patches of nettle, keeping her head down to make breathing easier. She would not think about how far up into the timber she had pushed herself. How much closer she would have to get to the fire she knew was raging just over the ridge before she found Tom and they could flee downstream, out of danger.
Every muscle in her body tensed as she pressed on. Instinct told her to turn back, to go down the mountain now, while she had a chance.
She could not do it. It would be unthinkable to leave the man she loved alone in this hellish place.
She would keep going.