Conquering Kilmarni (17 page)

"What for? We nuh can change the way things are."

"Yes, we can, Zackie. We have to."

They were silent again, both boys staring into space. Peter wondered what time it was, and what his father was doing, and if Dad would be worried about him. He had told Miss Lorrie he might be gone a long time, he remembered, so maybe Dad wouldn't worry. That was something. But he couldn't stay here much longer, no matter what Zackie decided. He had to get home, even if Merrick Leonard had gone to the police and Corporal Buckley was waiting to question him.

"How far are we from the house, Zackie?"

"'Bout a hour, me guess."

"I'll have to go home, you know. Even if you don't come with me."

"Me know."

"I don't want to leave you, but my dad—"

"Me understand, Peter. Anyway, the police won't treat you the same as them would me."

"What do you mean?"

"Me daddy a drunk."

"You can't help that," Peter argued. "And your mother is a nice lady. A real nice lady."

"Yeah."

Peter continued to sit there. He ought to start for home, he told himself. Staying at the pool was stupid, no matter what. Then he wondered why they had heard no sounds of pursuit. If Zackie's father had followed them, wouldn't the mule have made a lot of noise?

A sudden movement on the ledge interrupted his thoughts. Mongoose had left Zackie and trotted to the edge of the pool, but it was not water he wanted this time. His oversize ears stood straight up as he sat and fixed his gaze on the top of the gorge. Suddenly he began barking.

"What you seeing?" Zackie said, apparently aroused from some deep thinking of his own. "What you barking at, fella?"

"Could your father have followed us here, after all?" Peter asked anxiously.

"Uh-uh. Him was too crazy on ganja to try it on foot, and the mule couldn't able to get down here."

Again Mongoose barked.

"Oh-oh," Zackie said, getting quickly to his feet. "Look there, Peter, above that tall bulletwood tree on the ridge!" Without thinking, he lifted his injured arm to point, then lowered it with a gasp of pain and lifted the other.

The tree was the tallest on the ridge, and Peter saw a
thin column of what looked like mist rising above it. The mist they had encountered earlier hadn't behaved that way, though—and, besides, the morning sun had burned that away. "Smoke?" he said.

Zackie nodded, and suddenly Peter realized that a column of smoke in that part of the property had to be serious. His father lived in constant fear that some careless worker tossing away a cigarette might start a fire in the coffee fields. There was almost always a breeze on the mountain, and any such fire could easily spread through grass or ferrel and destroy everything in its path.

"Maybe we can stop it!" Zackie yelled. "Come quick, Peter!"

Climbing the wall of the gorge was not as scary as coming down it, Peter discovered then. Maybe it was just as dangerous—if a shrub or sapling pulled loose when he grabbed it, he could just as easily lose his footing and fall—but he didn't have to look down all the time.

Trying to reach the column of smoke in the shortest possible time, Zackie took a different route to the top. Mongoose wriggled up behind him, not playing games now. Peter brought up the rear.

Every now and then, looking up as he climbed, Peter saw Zackie reach out with the wrong hand for a bush or a rock, then pull the hand back and use the other one. With his own arms aching fiercely from the strain, he could imagine the pain Zackie must be enduring. Yet not once did the Jamaican boy stop to rest.

Tired from the climb, Peter reached the top at last and found Zackie waiting impatiently for him. "There it is!" Zackie yelled, pointing.

The fire was close enough for Peter to hear it as well as see it. Through the trees on the ridge he saw smoke boiling up to blacken the sky and heard a sound like grease crackling in a pot. What was burning, he saw, was the strip of forest Zackie and he had passed through to reach the top of the gorge after struggling with the ferrel.

"The wind will blow it into the coffee!" Zackie yelled then. "We must have to put it out somehow!" In his eagerness, he reached for Peter with the wrong hand and gasped in pain, but grabbed again with his good hand and pulled Peter along. "Come! Me think me know a way!"

He had to be crazy, Peter thought. A way to put out a forest fire so hot it was already making trees burst with pistol-clap explosions? But he accepted the Jamaican boy's leadership and raced after him. This time even the dog was outdistanced.

It was not toward the fire that Zackie was running. Before the heat became a problem, he veered to his left and Peter realized they were heading back the way they had come when they escaped from Merrick Leonard. All at once they were out of the big-tree forest and back in the belt of ferrel.

Were they returning to the garden hut, maybe? For some tools to fight the fire with? It didn't make sense. The ferrel would be a sea of flames by the time they got back to it...

But the garden hut was not what Zackie had in mind. When they reached the other side of the ferrel, where the coffee began, he stopped short and Peter stumbled into him, fighting for breath and almost too tired to stand.

"Listen," Zackie said.

Peter heard the fire behind them—the pistol shots of exploding trees, the sounds that were so like the sputtering of hot grease in a fry pan—and swung about to look.

"Not that," Zackie said. "The alarm. You nuh hear the alarm?"

Yes, the alarm. Someone down in the plantation house yard was standing at the iron hoop that hung by the garage, and was pounding it with the iron bar that hung there beside it. It sounded, Peter thought, like a distant church bell tolling.

"Them see the smoke," Zackie yelled. "There will be workers coming, Peter, and it not far to here, not like to my garden! Mek we get to work on a fire lane!" With a backward glance at the approaching blaze he spread his legs wide, reached down between them, and got a grip on a clump of the fern.

Watching to see how it was done, Peter knew it was not going to work. When Zackie straightened to pull up the ferrel, his face twisted with pain. The clump did come out of the ground, but when he turned to throw it away, the pain caused him to wince again. Though it was obviously hurting him, he bent at once for a second clump.

Mongoose, perhaps sensing something was wrong, kept an eye on him while scratching at the ground.

Peter waited only long enough to see where Zackie wanted the fire lane to go, then worked along with him. With two good hands it should be easier, he told himself. In a moment he knew better.

The fern stems stung his palms, and before he had pulled up half a dozen roots, his arms felt as though they were burned to the elbows. He even looked at a clump of pulled-up fern to see if it was covered with the ferocious little ants the coffee workers called "Pity Me Likkle"— meaning, Dad always insisted, "It's a good thing I'm no bigger, or I'd eat you alive." But there were no ants on the root he examined. The fern itself was causing the burning.

And the roots were big and tenacious. Pulling up a clump involved more than just straightening up after getting a good grip on it. You had to use your back and legs, your whole body. In a very little while Peter's body had developed aches and pains he had never experienced before.

He looked at the fire. With flames leaping madly for the last of the treetops, it was at the edge of the forest strip now and starting to burn the ferrel. Bits of the blazing fern soared skyward on the currents of hot air.
Peter
could even feel the heat of the advancing flames now, and realized he was sweating so much it was affecting his vision. Everything he looked at suddenly seemed blurred.

Even Zackie. But when he looked to see how Zackie was getting along, he still could see the boy well enough to know he was in big trouble. Suddenly, in yanking up a clump of the ferrel, Zackie fell over backward and was slow getting up. When he did gain his feet, he stumbled and fell again. Mongoose ran to him and began whining. Peter ran to him, too.

On his knees, Peter gripped Zackie's shoulders and peered into his face. Zackie's eyes were half-closed but he opened them. In a voice that was little more than a hoarse whisper, he said, "It me arm, Peter, it hurt too much." Then his good hand came up and closed on Peter's shirt, and he said almost fiercely, "But me just need a little rest! You keep working!"

"I have to get you to somewhere safe," Peter protested.

"No, no! Keep working!"

"But—"

"Look at the fire!"

Peter glanced back at the forest again and realized there was no safe place anywhere within reach. The wind was still blowing toward them. The fire was roaring out of the forest and into the ferrel. Even if he could lift Zackie onto his shoulder and run with him, he wouldn't be able to go far enough before he, too, collapsed from exhaustion.

He turned again to Zackie and saw that the pain had won out at last. The old, dirty bandage on Zackie's arm was soaked with fresh blood. His eyes were closed. Now the mountain boy was dependent on the tenderfoot. In a rush, Peter went to work again on the ferrel.

It became almost a mechanical effort. Spread legs. Reach down. Get hold of a clump of stems that sears the hands. Straighten up and pull. Turn at the waist and throw the clump away, as far as possible from the onrushing fire.

Then do it again.

And again.

The fire was out of the forest and wholly into the ferrel now, so there were no more gun-shot explosions as trees burst. But the air was full of dark smoke and Peter was coughing and it hurt to cough. It hurt his throat and his chest, and the smoke hurt his eyes, too. No part of him was to be spared, it seemed. His arms and back were one big pain. His hands had been bleeding for a long time.

Would the fire lane work?

Peter straightened up, wincing, to see how long it was. It was long! From where he stood to where Zackie lay unconscious was three times as far as the stretch the two of them had done together. He looked at the fire, so close now he nearly lost his nerve and ran from it. If he could just keep on for another hundred feet or so, it wouldn't get into the coffee. The strip of bare ground would stop it. Only another hundred feet . . .

Then he heard voices.

The men yelling were coming toward him through the coffee—Mr. Campbell, Dad, a whole crowd of workers. He straightened with still another clump of ferrel in his hands and turned to look at them, and saw that the workers were armed with machetes and hoes and shovels. He
took a step toward them, feeling lightheaded with relief. Then Dad's arms were around him, holding him, and the workers were finishing the fire lane that he and Zackie had started, and he knew everything would be all right.

Except, of course, that Zackie Leonard would still be accused of stealing, and Corporal Buckley was probably waiting at the house to arrest him.

B
ecause he was so tired, Peter was only dimly aware of what happened in the next hour or so. Mr. Campbell picked him up gently and carried him between rows of coffee bushes, then set him down at the base of a tall shade tree. Another man brought Zackie and laid him down at Peter's side. Zackie had regained consciousness. Reaching out, he touched Peter on the arm and said, "You did stop that fire!"

Not quite, Peter guessed, because the men were still working to widen the fire lane. He could hear them shouting to one another as they worked, and he could hear the sounds made by the tools they were using. But that other noise, the terrifying roar of the fire, had subsided, and he no longer could see any flames, not even when he struggled to his feet to look where they ought to be. Evidently the fire had reached the strip of bare ground and burned itself out, and if any of the bits of flaming ferrel had jumped across to start new fires, the men had been there to put them out.

Two of the workers came to the shade tree then, and
one of them, Natty Anderson, said with a grin, "Mr. Campbell declare we must have to carry you two boys down to the house. Which of you want to ride with me? You, Peter?"

"We able to walk down," Zackie protested.

"After what you did do just now, me nuh doubt the two of you could spread you arms out and fly down like John Crows," the man replied solemnly. "But we must have to
carry
you down in style to show how we proud of you." Dropping to one knee, he looked over his shoulder and nodded to Peter, then rose again with Peter riding him piggyback. The other man carried Zackie.

"Someone ought to carry Mongoose," Zackie said. But no one did, of course. Mongoose simply trotted along, as usual.

"Is the fire out, Natty?" Peter asked.