They had reached a rise in the road around one of the myriad unexpected bends; and for sheer wonder Ellery stopped the car. Hundreds of feet below and to the left lay Tomahawk Valley, already cloaked in the purple mantle which had dropped so swiftly from the green battlements jutting against the sky. The mantle billowed as if something huge and warm and softly animal stirred beneath it. A faint gray tapeworm of road slithered along far down, already half-smothered by the purple mantle. There were no lights, no signs of human beings or habitations. The whole sky overhead was suffused now, and the last cantaloupe sliver of sun was sinking behind the distant range across the Valley. The edge of the road was ten feet away; there it dipped sharply and cascaded in green sheets toward the Valley floor.
Ellery turned and looked up. Arrow Mountain swelled above them, a dark emerald tapestry closely woven out of pine and scrub oak and matted underbrush. The bristly fabric of foliage towered, it seemed, for miles above their heads.
He started the Duesenberg again. “Almost worth the torture,” he chuckled. “Feel better already. Come out of it, Inspector! This is the real thing — Nature in the raw.”
“Too damn raw to suit me.”
The night suddenly overpowered them and Ellery switched his headlights on. They bounced along in silence. Both stared ahead, Ellery dreamily and the old gentleman with irritation. A peculiar haze had begun to dance in the shafts of light stabbing the road before them; it drifted and curled and eddied like lazy fog.
“Seems to me we ought to be getting there,” growled the Inspector, blinking in the darkness. “Road’s going down now, isn’t it? Or is it my imagination?”
“It’s been dipping for some time,” murmured Ellery. “Getting warmer, isn’t it? How far did that hulking countryman with the lisp — that garageman in Tuckesas — say it was to Osquewa?”
“Fifty miles. Tuckesas! Osquewa! Gripes, this country’s enough to make a man throw up.”
“No romance,” grinned Ellery. “Don’t you recognize the beauty of old Indian etymology? At that, it’s ironic. Our compatriots visiting abroad complain bitterly about the ‘foreign’ names — Lwów, Prague (now why Pra-ha, in the name of merciful heaven?), Brescia, Valdepeñaz, and even good old British Harwich and Leicestershire. Yet those are words of one syllable—”
“Hmm,” said the Inspector in an odd tone; he blinked again.
“—compared with our own native Arkansas and Winnebago and Schoharie and Otsego and Sioux City and Susquehanna and goodness knows what else. Talk about heritage! Yes, sir, painted redskins roamed them thar hills across the Valley and this here mounting falling on our heads. Redskins in moccasins and tanned deerskin, braided hair and turkey feathers. The smoke of their signal fires—”
“Hmm,” said the Inspector again, suddenly bolting upright. “Looks damned near as if they were still setting ’em!”
“Eh?”
“Smoke, smoke, you, son! See it?” The Inspector rose, pointing ahead. “There!” he cried. “Right in front of us!”
“Nonsense,” said Ellery in a sharp voice; “What would smoke be doing up here, of all places? That’s probably some manifestation of evening mist. These hills play peculiar pranks sometimes.”
“This one’s acting up,” said Inspector Queen grimly. The dusty scarf fell into his lap, unheeded. His sharp little eyes were no longer dull and bored. He craned backward and stared for a long time. Ellery frowned, snatching a glimpse into his windshield mirror, and then looked quickly ahead again. The road was definitely dipping toward the Valley now, and the peculiar haze thickened with every downward foot.
“What’s the matter, dad?” he said in a small voice. His nostrils quivered. There was an odd and faintly disagreeable pungency in the air.
“I think,” said the Inspector, sinking back, “I think, El, you’d better step on it.”
“Is it—?” began Ellery feebly, and swallowed hard.
“Looks mighty like it.”
“Forest fire?”
“Forest fire. Smell it now?”
Ellery’s right foot squeezed the accelerator. The Duesenberg leaped forward. The Inspector, his grumpiness gone, reached over the edge of the car on his side and switched on a powerful sidelamp which swept the slope of the mountain like a broom of light.
Ellery’s lips tightened; neither spoke.
Despite their altitude and the mountain chill of evening, a queer heat suffused the air. The swirling mist through which the Duesenberg plowed was yellowish now, and thick as cotton. It was smoke, the smoke of desiccated wood and dusty foliage burning. Its acrid molecules suddenly invaded their nostrils, burned their lungs, made them cough, brought smarting tears to their eyes.
To the left, where the Valley lay, there was nothing to be seen but a dark smother, like the sea at night.
The Inspector stirred. “Better stop, son.”
“Yes,” muttered Ellery. “I was just thinking that myself.”
The Duesenberg halted, panting. Ahead of them the smoke was whipping in furious dark waves. And beyond — not far, a hundred feet or so — little orange teeth began to show, biting into the smoke. Down toward the Valley, too, were more little orange teeth, thousands of them; and tongues, long nicking orange tongues.
“It’s directly in our path,” said Ellery in the same queer tone. “We’d better turn round and go back.”
“Can you turn here?” sighed the Inspector.
“I’ll try.”
It was nervous, delicate work in the boiling darkness. The Duesenberg, an old racing relic Ellery had picked up out of perverted sentiment years before and had had reconditioned for private use, had never seemed so long-legged and cantankerous. He sweated and swore beneath his breath as he swung it back, forward, back, forward — inching his way around by imperceptible degrees while the Inspector’s little gray hand clutched the windshield and the ends of his mustache fluttered in the hot wind.
“Better make it snappy, son,” said the Inspector quietly. His eyes darted upward to the silent dark slope of Arrow Mountain. “I think—”
“Yes?” panted Ellery, negotiating the last turn.
“I think the fire’s climbed up to the road — behind us.”
“Lord, no, dad!”
The Duesenberg shuddered as Ellery stared fiercely into the murk. He felt the impulse to laugh. It was all too silly. A firetrap!... The Inspector sat forward, alert and quiet as a mouse. Then Ellery shouted and brought his heel down, hard, upon the accelerator. They surged forward.
The whole mountainside below them was burning. The mantle was ripped in thousands of places and the little orange teeth and the long orange tongues were greedily nibbling and licking away at the slope, hostile and palpable in their own light. An entire landscape, miles long, seen in miniature from their elevation, had suddenly burst into flames. In that numbing moment as they rushed back along the crazy road they both realized what must have happened. It was late July, and the month had been one of the hottest and driest in years. This was almost virgin timberland — a tangled mat of tree and bush long since sapped by the sun of its water. It was crumbly tinder inviting flame. A camper’s carelessly trodden fire, or a forgotten cigarette, even the friction of two dead limbs rubbed against each other by a breeze, might have started it. Then it would slither swiftly along beneath the trees, eating its way along the sole of an entire mountain foot, and suddenly the slope would burst into flame spontaneously as the fire burned through to the dry upper air...
The Duesenberg slowed down, hesitated, lunged forward, stopped with a screeching of brakes.
“We’re hemmed in!” cried Ellery, half rising behind the wheel. “Back and front!” Then, calming suddenly, he sank back and fumbled for a cigarette. His chuckle was ghostly. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Trial by fire! What sins have you committed?”