Part 31 (1/2)
Molly turned a glowing, quivering face of pride on Sylvia, and then looked past her shoulder with a startled expression into the eyes of one of the fire-fighters, a tall, lean, stooping man, blackened and briar-torn like the rest. ”Why, Cousin Austin!” she cried with vehement surprise, ”what in the world--” In spite of his grime, she gave him a hearty, astonished, affectionate kiss.
”I was just wondering,” said the man, smiling indulgently down on her, ”how soon you'd recognize me, you little scatter-brain.”
”I thought you were going to stick in Colorado all summer,” said Molly.
”Well, I heard they were short of help at Austin Farm and I came on to help get in the hay,” said the man. Both he and Molly seemed to consider this a humorous speech. Then, remembering Sylvia, Molly went through a casual introduction. ”This is my cousin--Austin Page--my _favorite_ cousin! He's really awfully nice, though so plain to look at.” She went on, still astonished, ”But how'd you get _here?_”
”Why, how does anybody in Vermont get to a forest fire?” he answered.
”We were out in the hayfield, saw the smoke, left the horses, grabbed what tools we could find, and beat it through the woods. That's the technique of the game up here.”
”I didn't know your farm ran anywhere near here,” said Molly.
”It isn't so terribly near. We came across lots tolerable fast. But there's a little field, back up on the edge of the woods that isn't so far. Grandfather used to raise potatoes there. I've got it into hay now,” he explained.
As they talked, the fire beyond them gave definite signs of yielding.
It had evidently been stopped on the far side and now advanced nowhere, showed no longer a malign yellow crest, but only rolling sullenly heavenward a diminis.h.i.+ng cloud of smoke. The fire-fighters began to straggle back across the burned tract towards the road, their eyeb.a.l.l.s gleaming white in their dark faces.
”Oh, they mustn't walk! I'll take them back--the darlings!” said Molly, starting for her car. She was quite her usual brisk, free-and-easy self now. ”Cracky! I hope I've got gas enough. I've certainly been going _some!_”
”Why don't you leave me here?” suggested Sylvia. ”I'll walk home.
That'll leave room for one more.”
”Oh, you can't do that!” protested Molly faintly, though she was evidently at once struck with the plan. ”How'd you find your way home?” She turned to her cousin. ”See here, Austin, why don't _you_ take Sylvia home? You ought to go anyhow and see Grandfather. h.e.l.l be awfully hurt to think you're here and haven't been to see him.” She threw instantly into this just conceived idea the force which always carried through her plans. ”Do go! I feel so grateful to these men I don't want one of them to walk a step!”
Sylvia had thought of a solitary walk, longing intensely for isolation, and she did not at all welcome the suggestion of adapting herself to a stranger. The stranger, on his part, looked a very unchivalrous hesitation; but this proved to be only a doubt of Sylvia's capacity as a walker.
”If you don't mind climbing a bit, I can take you over the gap between Hemlock and Windward Mountain and make a bee-line for Lydford. It's not an hour from here, that way, but it's ten miles around by the road--and hot and dusty too.”
”Can she _climb_!” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Molly scornfully, impatient to be off with her men. ”She went up to Prospect Rock in forty minutes.”
She high-handedly a.s.sumed that everything was settled as she wished it, and running towards the car, called with an easy geniality to the group of men, starting down the road on foot, ”Here, wait a minute, folks, I'll take you back!”
She mounted the car, started the engine, waved her hand to the two behind her, and was off.
The lean, stooping man looked dubiously at Sylvia. ”You're sure you don't mind a little climb?” he said.
”Oh no, I like it,” she said listlessly. The moment for her was of stale, wearied return to real life, to the actual world which she was continually finding uglier than she hoped. The recollection of Felix Morrison came back to her in a bitter tide.
”All ready?” asked her companion, mopping his forehead with a very dirty handkerchief.
”All ready,” she said and turned, with a hanging head, to follow him.
CHAPTER XXVII
BETWEEN WINDWARD AND HEMLOCK MOUNTAINS
For a time as they plodded up the steep wood-road, overgrown with ferns and rank gra.s.s, with dense green walls of beech and oak saplings on either side, what few desultory remarks they exchanged related to Molly, she being literally the only topic of common knowledge between them. Sylvia, automatically responding to her deep-lying impulse to give pleasure, to be pleasing, made an effort to overcome her somber la.s.situde and spoke of Molly's miraculous competence in dealing with the fire. Her companion said that of course Molly hadn't made all that up out of her head on the spur of the moment. After spending every summer of her life in Lydford, it would be surprising if so energetic a child as Molly hadn't a.s.similated the Vermont formula for fighting fire. ”They always put for the nearest factory and get all hands out,”
he explained, adding meditatively, as he chewed on a twig: ”All the same, the incident shows what I've always maintained about Molly: that she is, like 'most everybody, lamentably miscast. Molly's spirit oughtn't to have taken up its abiding place in that highly ornamental blond sh.e.l.l, condemned after a fas.h.i.+onable girl's education to pendulum swings between Paris and New York and Lydford. It doesn't fit for a cent. It ought to have for habitation a big, gaunt, powerful man's body, and for occupation the running of a big factory.” He seemed to be philosophizing more to himself than to Sylvia, and beyond a surprised look into his extremely grimy face, she made no comment.
She had taken for granted from the talk between him and Molly that he was one of the ”forceful, impossible Montgomery cousins,” and had cast her own first remarks in a tone calculated to fit in with the supposit.i.tious dialect of such a person. But his voice, his intonations, and his whimsical idea about Molly fitted in with the conception of an ”impossible” as little as with the actual visible facts of his ragged s.h.i.+rt-sleeves and faded, earth-stained overalls.