The Mystery at Bob-White Cave (11 page)

The young people crowded around Mrs. Moore to thank her and pick up the last crumbs from the cake board. They watched her pack away the turkey and squirrels in the basket, to be taken to her cabin to cool in the cellar.

“Who brought them to you?” Mart asked.

Mrs. Moore didn’t answer. A rooster crowed. “The wind’s changed,” she said. “Looks like we may have rain tomorrow. Linnie and I will bid you good night.” Upstairs, Mart called in to Trixie, “Who
did
leave the things for Mrs. Moore?”

“A ghost,” answered Trixie.

“What did you say?”

“I said ‘a ghost.’ ”

“Have you gone batty?”

“I’m not real sure. I heard the ghost with my own ears. Jacob saw him, or acted as though he did. Mrs. Moore is sure she heard her husband Matthew’s spirit singing, ‘Sorrow... sweet sorrow.’ You heard all those ghost stories the people were telling tonight. They believe them. If I stay here long enough, I’ll believe them, too. Right now all I can think of is that out there in that cave, we do have a ghost—a ghost that really isn’t a ghost, yet it is. Oh, what am I saying, Mart? I’m so sleepy I can’t think straight. We have to be up early in the morning to go back to that cave— Mart! What was that noise? Jim! Brian! Is that Linnie screaming?... It is! And Mrs. Moore’s calling us. I smell smoke!”

Fire in the Night ● 10

IN THE YARD, pandemonium had replaced the peace of a short while before. The sharp, acrid smell of burning brush and wood filled the air. Smoke billowed from the level below, obscuring Mrs. Moore’s cabin.

“My chickens!” she cried, wringing her hands. “They’re shut up in the chicken house! The fire’s making right for them. Jim! Brian! Trixie! Help save my chickens!”

The boys leaped over the ledge that separated the lodge grounds from the place where Mrs. Moore’s collection of little buildings stood. They rushed to the chicken house and released the door catch, which had been firmly fixed against marauding skunks and foxes. Then, squawking and with feathers flying, the chickens scurried out and disappeared in all directions.

Linnie hurried to the cow shed and led resisting, protesting brown Martha to higher ground at the lodge. The mules, never tied in their shed, were milling around the back lawn of the lodge, where Honey caught and tethered them.

Baleful little tongues of fire traced a definite path along the dividing line between lodge and cabin, eloquent evidence that the fire had been set—that it was meant to destroy the lodge. The wind that changed as the guests left sent the flames hungrily creeping in the opposite direction, to threaten, instead, Mrs. Moore’s quarters.

Everyone rushed around frantically, beating out flames, carrying water, trying to save the cabin home. Trixie dragged the lawn hose through the kitchen to the hydrant where spring water came down from above.

“That’s the girl!” Uncle Andrew called when she brought the gushing hose. “We
must
stop the fire before it reaches the underbrush on that slope. If it ever gets started up there, heaven help the whole pine woods and our neighbors’ cabins.”

The shouts and cries and the smell of smoke had brought the last of the departing guests hurrying back on the crooked trail to the lodge. Now these men and boys joined the fire fighters, while the girls, obeying Trixie’s uncle, took the children inside the lodge.

“We’d better build a backfire over there forty or fifty feet this side of the underbrush,” Bill Hawkins cried. “That’s our best chance. Bring some shovels, boys. Start here!”

Jim, Brian, and Mart, working with all the mountain men and boys, labored frantically, digging the backfire ditch and twisting sedge grass to kindle the opposing flames.

Frightened by the smoke and heat of the burning brush, little animals ran out across the level ground —small ground-nesting birds, chipmunks, skunks, a fat coon, and even a red fox. Jacob, who’d been racing about barking and getting in the way, took after the wild things and raced them up the hill toward the road.

Huge clouds scurried across the sky, and flashes of lightning crinkled around the horizon. The moon disappeared. The wind that had whipped up the flames subsided. But the rain did not come.

Mrs. Moore’s chicken house burned like straw. The cow shed collapsed in a smoldering heap. But the fire fighters’ quick, hard work saved the little home.

Now, if the backfire failed, the men well knew that most of their own homes would be lost in the flaming pines.

“Oh,
why
doesn’t it rain?” Mrs. Moore moaned. The other women, trying to comfort her, watched the sky with anxious eyes. Thunder rumbled. Zigzag lightning illuminated the grim faces of the men who worked doggedly on. With tragic persistence, the fire, smothered in one place, flared up in another. Newly turned earth and backfire, which caught and was fanned to mounting flames, all seemed futile.

Now the underbrush beyond the backfire kindled and flared. Slowly the flames crept toward the ledge, where resinous pines rose against the sky. In the glow, a man’s figure was silhouetted against the skyline. He appeared and reappeared, carrying buckets, pouring water. As the wave of flame advanced, the hose fell short by twenty feet, and the arc of water from it could not bridge the gap. With stolid tenacity, the men and boys worked on, relaying buckets of water, beating out the creeping fire, encouraging the growing fierceness of the backfire till they realized that it threatened finally to be as destructive as the danger it was supposed to avert.

Trixie, who had flattened her face against the living room windowpane, watching, could stand it no longer. In spite of her uncle’s injunction to stay inside and mind the little ones, she turned them over to Honey and went outside to work side by side with Linnie and the men and boys.

It clearly was a losing battle. The scrub pines on the slope were almost a solid wall of fire. One by one, the fire fighters fell back—exhausted, defeated.

Then, as the first pine on the skyline flamed to a torch, the sky opened and the rain came. It came in sheets of water, quenching the holocaust as quickly and completely as snubbing a cigarette in an ashtray.

The men sprawled on the lodge lawn and let the rain drench them—too tired to move or talk.

Trixie, Mrs. Moore, Linnie, and the neighbor women slowly walked to the house to prepare food and coffee. Honey had made pallets of quilts for the children, and they slept on the living room floor.

For a while, the women and girls did not talk. Instead they cut bread, made sandwiches, opened cans of fruit, brought out cream and sugar, and heaped the kitchen table with food.

Slowly the men filed in, washed their sooty faces at the sink, then reached for sandwiches and cups of steaming coffee.

“That fire was set,” one man said.

“For a purpose,” another one added.

“I don’t know who your enemy is, do you, Andy?” a third asked. “Do any of these young ’uns know?” Trixie started to answer, but her Uncle Andrew gently stopped her. “If we do, we’ll name no names until there is proof,” he said. “When there is proof, there will be speedy punishment. Of that I’m sure.”

“We ain’t had a hangin’ in this part of the mountains for many a day,” one of the neighbors said, “but the devil that set that fire deserves to swing. When you decide to name names, Andy, there’s those among us that knows how to take care of the scoundrel that threatened your home and ours. Now we’ll get our kids and womenfolk together and get on.”

“You won’t go without my thanks,” Mrs. Moore said warmly.

“And mine, too,” Uncle Andrew said as he shook hands all around.

“We were fighting for the same thing, Andy,” the men assured him. “And we appreciate the play-party you all gave us tonight. If it hadn’t been for that, we’d never been on hand.”

“With no one here to help fight the fire, it would have been too late when the rain finally came,” Mrs. Moore said, shuddering. “It seems now as though the Lord sent rain just for us, doesn’t it? The sky’s clear, and look at that moon! I hope the creek’s not up so’s you can’t cross it.”

“We’ll manage,” Bill Hawkins replied. “When you start rebuilding the sheds, let me know, Andy.”

“That’ll be tomorrow,” Uncle Andrew replied.

“I’ll be here, in the late morning.”

It was nearly four o’clock in the morning when Mrs. Moore and the others finished washing the dishes and setting things to rights. The smell of damp burned wood filled the air, reminding them constantly of the averted tragedy.

By common understanding, no one discussed the origin of the fire. “We’d better all get to bed now,” Uncle Andrew said. “There’ll be work to do tomorrow to clean things up, and there’ll be things to talk over.” When the Bob-Whites went upstairs, Trixie couldn’t settle down to sleep. She heard the boys tossing and turning in the next room. Honey, exhausted, slept restlessly, mumbling and moaning.

Trixie could hear her Uncle Andrew pacing back and forth, back and forth, downstairs. In Mrs. Moore’s scorched cabin, a light burned.

Then Trixie slept.

Operation Fix-Up • 11

WHEN THE BOB-WHITES came down for a late breakfast, a sorry sight waited for them in the area around the lodge. The chicken house was completely destroyed, and the chickens were running wild. The ruins of the cow shed still smoldered. Nothing was left of the mule shed but a pile of charred boards.

Uncle Andrew’s face was stern. “It’s hard to believe that anyone would be so low as to deliberately set fire to someone’s home. All the men seemed certain that the fire was set.”

“It burned in such a straight line above Mrs. Moore’s house,” Jim said. “Fires don’t burn that way unless they
are
set.”

“We don’t have to hunt far to know who did it.

Uncle Andrew, what are you going to do to Slim?” Trixie asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Trixie cried. “After all the damage he did to Mrs. Moore’s home? You just have to take one look at her yard. Her flowers are all burned, her hollyhocks, daisies, four-o’clocks. They were so pretty. Why, the fire even burned the vines on her porch.”

“Thank heavens, it didn’t get her home. I didn’t mean, Trixie, that whoever set that fire isn’t to be punished. I meant that I’m not the one to do it. Too many Ozark men take the law into their own hands. Here comes Mrs. Moore now. I hate to see this happen to her. She hasn’t had an easy life.”

Mrs. Moore came in from the cold cellar, where she’d gone for butter, cream, and milk for their breakfast. Her face was calm, but her eyes were red-rimmed from weeping. “My chickens are scattered every which way,” she said. “I’ll never get them together again. And if I did, where would I put them? Oh, Mr. Belden, your beautiful lawn! It’s terrible.”

“My lawn will be put in order in a short time. As for the chickens, they’ll sleep tonight in the new chicken house the boys and I will build for you today. Right, boys?”

“Right! We’ll get started right after breakfast,” Jim answered. As soon as they had finished the hearty meal, Jim got up from the table, and Mart and Brian followed him.

“We’ll use the lumber in the far end of the yard,” Uncle Andrew said, “the lumber I ordered in town to build that new room off the kitchen. It isn’t quite the right kind, but it’ll do. We can put a stout door on the chicken house to keep out coons and skunks and foxes. There’ll be enough material to build a shelter for Martha, too, Mrs. Moore. Don’t fret. It’ll all be done before you can say Kalamazoo.”

Mrs. Moore put her apron to her eyes, then busied herself at the sink.

Trixie put her arm around Mrs. Moore’s waist. “Honey and I are going out to your house now, to help Linnie clear up the damage there.”

Mrs. Moore patted Trixie’s hand gratefully and went on washing the dishes. “You girls and Linnie go ahead and fix the house up any way she wants.”

Before the girls left, Bill Hawkins arrived to help Uncle Andrew and the boys. “Is someone living in that old ghost cabin, Andy?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Bill. The boys and Trixie saved an Englishman from drowning out there in the lake. Linnie and Mrs. Moore took him home in the mule wagon. They sort of thought
he
was living there.”

“Was he an old man with a billowy white beard?”

“No. Why?”

“I wonder. When we came over here to the play-party yesterday, we saw a man with the whitest hair I ever saw on a human. And he was creeping through the woods, going toward the ghost cabin. He had a pack on his back. My kids called him Santa Claus. He sure acted queer, as though he might be....” Bill Hawkins made a gesture toward his forehead to indicate that he thought the man might have been crazy. “Say, maybe—say, Andy, I told my wife a person would have to be crazy to set fire to this lodge.”

Uncle Andrew looked at Trixie. “This whole thing will take a lot of investigation before the blame is laid on anyone. It’s no use jumping to conclusions. Right now we have jobs to do. Trixie and Honey, you see what you can do to help Linnie. Bill and the boys and I will get busy with the sheds.”

Mrs. Moore’s three-room home was a sturdy log cabin. A porch covered the front of the house, and there was a hallway between the living room on one side and the bedroom on the other. Back of the living room, a kitchen had been added. Mrs. Moore’s grandfather, who built the house, had taken pride in his work. He had built it of carefully selected logs, on a thick foundation of fitted rock.