There was a flicker of fire in the rusty stove. She thrust the wicking into the coals, and on the iron stalk a flame-flower sprang into huge blossom.
She burst through the hut's rear window and ran straight for the edge of the clearing, towards the fuel piled high in the forest aisles.
In that moment of blind and desperate fury she realized that the wind was swinging into the north. It was there that MacLeod was sitting at the foot of Pogey Notch. Ah, what a furnace-flue that would make!
She did not pause to reason. Her single wild desire was to send the fire leaping towards him.
The roar of voices behind--voices entreating, voices of malediction--made her smile. Above all was the Honorable Pulaski's bull roar. She began to drag the torch.
"Catch her! Damnation, catch that girl!" howled Britt.
She reached the edge of the distant woodland.
Immediately his cry changed to "Shoot her!" He did not mean it the first time he cried it. He did mean it the second time. The deputies stared after her and joggled their weapons on their arms.
"Shoot her, or fifty thousand acres of timber are gone!"
But that was quarry before which official guns quailed.
In his fury and his panic and his desperate fear for his fortune, Britt seized a gun from the nearest deputy and aimed it.
Wade struck it up, muttering an indignant oath. Britt made as though to club him out of the way. The young man clutched the gun and twisted it from Britt's quivering clutch. When Britt lunged forward to seize another rifle Wade struck him under the jaw, and he went down like a felled ox.
The girl was out of sight in the woods, but yellow smoke shot with bright flame marked her course.
"I could have told him," mused old Christopher, looking on the Honorable Pulaski, struggling dizzily to his feet, "havin' watched her more or less since I named her, that she wa'n't a real sociable kind of a girl to joke with on matters that's as serious to women as love is."
Sheriff Bennett Rodliff spoke the prologue to that conflagration:
"There is h--l in the core of that fire," he said.
Sometimes a little mischief, started by chance down the slopes of events, gathers like a rolling snowball into a vast bulk of evil. But more often in matters of evil it is the intent of the impulse that governs. It seems at such times as though inanimate nature were responding to human malevolence.