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He had blown out the brains of his first German. Fires of hell, in two long lines, bordering a barren, ghastly, hazy strip of land, burst forth from the earth. From holes where men hid poured thunder of guns and stream of smoke and screeching of iron. That worthless strip of land, barring deadly foes, shook as with repeated earthquakes.
But if he should come out into the open fields and road to cross the valley they would have him at an advantage. He was confirmed in this fear by seeing several little clouds of smoke rise up above the tops of the trees on the ridge. "There's a gang of rebels in camp over there," said he to himself, with a woodman's quick reading of every sign. "That smoke's from their fires.
However, he was entirely sure, in the depths of his subjugated masculine mind, that his wife and her sister had no legal authority whatever to interfere with their uncle's right to keep a hundred coal fires in his woodshed, for a thousand cats. He always had an inner sense of glee when he heard the two women talk over the matter.
The fires upon both banks blazed up more brightly just then, and their light was so intense that the whole fearful scene was pictured on the darkness with vivid distinctness.
He scanned narrowly the place where his own lodge had been and saw it fall before many hands to be taken to their fires. With raised shoulders and staring eyes he stood aghast. He drunk in the desecration in all its awful significance. The bat's skin the hand of the Good Gods was removed from him; his shadow was as naked as his back.
And behind this barrier were other logs, and yet others, as far as the eye could see, so that the entire surface of the stream was carpeted by the brown timbers. A man could have walked down the middle of that river as down a highway. On the bank, and in a small woods-opening, burned two fires, their smoke ducking and twisting under the buffeting of the wind.
These are they that shall shine as the stars, when those beaming so brilliantly in our eyes around the shrines of mere intellect and genius, shall have "paled their ineffectual fires" before the efflux of diviner light.
Out of your past illusions, make fires as the peasants do with the fallen leaves; the fresh grass, the new faith, will grow all the more thickly, for it is there waiting. Nature does not die, it changes shape continually; like her, let us cast off the garment of the past. Look carefully, and reckon up these hard years. You have fought and suffered for your country, and what have you gained by it?
Thad kept an eye on him, and others were a bit worried lest the boy who just doted on building fires overdo the matter, and set the forest ablaze. "Why, you've already got twice too much tinder, Giraffe," remonstrated Davy Jones, as he saw the boy with the knife start in again to cut more. "Do for starting the fire in the morning then," replied Giraffe.
But so it was, that excepting that in Cripplegate parish, and two or three little eruptions of fires, which were presently extinguished, there was no disaster of that kind happened in the whole year.
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