In the night the heavens behind the hill
dissolved in rain, and the roar of the storm was borne in and mixed
with his dreaming, so that it moved him, still asleep, to get up
and out of the path of it.
What finally woke him was the crash of
pine logs as they went down before the unbridled flood, and the
swirl of foam that lashed him where he clung in the tangle of scrub
while the wall of water went by. It went on against the cabin of
Bill Gerry and laid Bill stripped and broken on a sand bar at the
mouth of the Grape-vine, seven miles away. There, when the sun was
up and the wrath of the rain spent, the Pocket Hunter found and
buried him; but he never laid his own escape at any door but the
unintelligible favor of the Powers.
The journeyings of the Pocket Hunter led him often into that
mysterious country beyond Hot Creek where a hidden force works
mischief, mole-like, under the crust of the earth. Whatever agency
is at work in that neighborhood, and it is popularly supposed to be
the devil, it changes means and direction without time or season.
It creeps up whole hillsides with insidious heat, unguessed
until one notes the pine woods dying at the top, and having
scorched out a good block of timber returns to steam and spout in
caked, forgotten crevices of years before.
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