Episode Six: The Jewel Aflame Chapter 1

Mike Clinch and his men "drove" Star Peak, and drew a blanket covert.

* * * * *

There was a new shanty atop, camp debris, plenty of signs of recent occupation everywhere, -- hot embers in which offal still smouldered, bottles odorous of claret dregs, and an aluminum culinary outfit, unwashed, as though Quintana and his men had departed in haste.

For in the still valley below, Mike Clinch squatted beside the runway he had chosen, a cocked rifle across his knees.

The glare in his small, pale eyes waned and flared as distant sounds broke the forest silence, grew vague, died out, -- the fairy clatter of a falling leaf, the sudden scurry of a squirrel, a feathery rustle of swift wings in play or combat, the soft crash of a rotten bough sagging earthward to enrich the soil that grew it.

And, as Clinch squatted there, murderously intent, ever the fixed obsession burned in his fever brain, stirring his thin lips incessant muttering, -- a sort of soundless invocation, part chronicle, part prayer: "O God A'mighty, in your big, swell mansion up there, all has went contrary with me sence you let that there damn millionaire, Harrod, come into this here forest. ... He went and built unto himself an habitation, and he put up a wall of law all around me where I was earnin' a lawful livin' in Thy nice, clean wilderness. ... And now comes this here Quintana and robs my girlie. ... I promised her mother I'd make a lady of her little Eve. ... I loved my wife, O Lord. ... Once she showed me a piece in the Bible, -- I ain't never found it sence, -- but it said: `And the woman, she fled into the wilderness where there was a place prepared for her of God.' ... That's what you wrote into your own Bible, O God! You can't go back on it. I seen it.