Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 31

“What’s all this?” he said, for there were six of them, the equivalent of large leaf bags, filled full and fastened with wire ties. “I don’t have anything in the trailer. We can carry them all right. But where will we put them when we get back up there?”

“You’ll see,” said Merry. There was very nearly a gleeful look on her face. “Most of it’s light, anyway, and some of the other stuff won’t have to go into the cave at all.”

“What is it?” Jeebee asked.

“Odds and ends—useful things, though,” said Merry, “and a lot of root vegetables from the garden. Some we’ll eat, but a lot we’ll keep as seed to start next spring.”

Jeebee opened his mouth to tell her they would be moving on as soon as the weather was good enough to travel in the spring. But he was stilled by the thought that after what she had been through, it would be wrong to rob her of this moment of pleasure. There would be plenty of time for her to find out that wherever they would be, it would not be around here, when any vegetables they had planted in the spring were ready for harvest.

He had been surprised by the amount of things she had gathered. But he was more surprised—and impressed—when they got back to the cave and she showed him exactly what she had found. The variety was large, from the outdoor thermometer she had talked about earlier, to a number of small cans of various spices, including supplies of salt, sugar, baking powder and baking soda, sacks of dried beans, peas, and other dried vegetables that Jeebee had not even thought to look for.

In addition to these were a number of other small but useful items, including hooks that could be screwed into their plank walls so they could hang up things, and old throw rugs full of holes or half worn away, which had been ignored by the looters—but which Merry now pointed out would be useful not to only make the floor of their cave’s inner room warmer but possibly the walls as well.

She had also brought back a great deal of yarn of various colors.

“Have you done any knitting?” she asked Jeebee.

Jeebee guiltily remembered her pushing knitting needles and yarn on him when he was ready to leave the wagon and emphasizing that he knit things like gloves and caps for his own use.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t had time.”

“Well, you’ll have time this winter,” she told him.

Merry was right about what she had said about the things she had gathered not taking up as much room in the inner part of the cave as Jeebee had expected, once they were stored in an orderly fashion. This was mostly around the walls, except for those things that would be of direct use in the cooking, and these she put next to the fireplace, saying that she would build shelves within reach of the fire to put them.

“In fact,” she said, “we could use a lot of shelving in here. That’s something else I can do while you’re busy with other things.”

Jeebee had to agree with her. Shelves were an obvious thing. He had even thought of them, but not as anything he would get to in the near future. Other things—even the forge for the smithy he needed to build—ranked before such things. But now, of course, the situation was changed.

Jeebee skinned the rabbits—it was a small pat to his ego that he was more experienced at this than Merry. She freely admitted this, saying that she was quite at home with cleaning and preparing domestic animals for cooking, but had little experience with wild game simply because at the wagon they had not eaten much of it.

They put the rabbits on to boil, and Merry cleaned and cut some of the vegetables into the pot with them. Jeebee had taken some from the garden himself, but only from time to time, figuring that it did not have enough vegetables in it so that he could eat them regularly without exhausting the supply.

The vegetables, with the rabbit, therefore, were a treat. The long-term problem of balancing their diet had also been met by Merry in an unexpected way. It had never occurred to Jeebee to look for vitamin pills down at the ranch.

Merry had gone looking and found nearly a year’s supply. She had also come upon a greater find. Jeebee had stared earlier when she pulled a number of bags of dried beans and dried peas from one sack. He had stared harder when, after that, she pulled a good six-inch-wide two-inch-thick wheel of paraffin-covered cheese out of one of the other bags.

“Where did that come from?” Jeebee said. “I could swear I went through that house a dozen times looking for some food that had been missed by the people who robbed it; and they’d taken everything that was ready to eat. I did find some flour, and things like that. But I even looked for a root cellar all around the place and couldn’t find one.”

“Did you think of looking under the kitchen floor?” said Merry.

“Under the kitchen floor?”

“Of course,” Merry said. “Where else would you put foods that you might want to get at in a hurry, but wanted to keep out of the way in the kitchen? Someplace cool but dry, and sure not to freeze?”

“The kitchen… ” said Jeebee thoughtfully. “I didn’t notice anything in the kitchen that looked like it was a trapdoor to a place below it.”

“The trap door was in that little pantry area with all the shelves around it,” Merry said. “The people that went through it simply grabbed what they wanted off the shelves and never looked down. You did the same thing, didn’t you? You looked into the pantry, saw practically nothing there but these spice cans, and gave up. Right?” Jeebee nodded slowly.

“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t check the floor there. What made you do it?”

“I was just pretty sure that there had to be something like that. I’ve seen a lot of entries like that in the kitchens of houses off by themselves. It’s a natural thing to have. By the way, there’s a lot more still down there that we’d better pick up and take away before the really cold weather comes. Things that wouldn’t have frozen, ordinarily, because the house above them would be heated. But now it’s just a ruin, stuff will freeze as hard there as they will in our meat pit in the cold room, out front. There’re more cheeses for one thing. Oh yes, and more of this.”

It was then she had held up a large bottle full of long, dark tablets.

“Vitamins,” she said, “the one-a-day kind. We’re both going to take them from now on, as long as we have to live on so much meat. And the cheese’ll help. Good source of vitamins C and D.”

While the food cooked, Jeebee stepped into the outer room to see how far Merry had gotten with the freeze pit she had been digging in the floor of the cold room. It had occurred to him that he might use his time right now to finish it. But he saw that she had done remarkably well with the time she had. She was either stronger in some ways than he had thought, already, or else she had a particular pride in being able to do this bit of excavation. In either case, perhaps it would be best not to seem to step in and finish it for her.

Since he was outside and had the time, he went along the length of the cold room, past the corner where Wolf was now in the habit of curling up, and stepped into the area that would be the smithy.

There was nothing here yet but some stones he had already gathered, and a large pile of clay. He had found a clay deposit after searching down the bed of the larger stream for some distance and brought what was there back, load by load, in a couple of the buckets from the ranch.

The two full buckets each time had been a good load to carry that distance, but it was invaluable. The stone, mortared by clay, would make an excellent firepit. But it struck him now that he had better get the clay to the inner room before it froze where it sat. Or else he would never be able to break it into chunks to warm up, soften, and mix with added water for use as mortar.

The two buckets were still here. He got a shovel from the inner cave, where he kept the tools so that Wolf would not chew their handles to bits, and went out to load buckets and start bringing the clay inside.

“What’s that?” Merry demanded when he brought in the first two buckets.

He told her briefly.

“And you were worried about me filling up the space in here!” she said.

That was all she said, however. He managed to transfer the clay before the food was ready. He made a rough pyramid of it against their innermost wall of sand, the one wall of the cave that he would be excavating further once he was confined to the cave by weather and could only work inside.

The rabbits were tender and tasty.

“A change for the better, from beef all the time,” Merry said as they were eating, “don’t you think so?”

“Yes,” Jeebee answered.

The truth was, however, the change did not make a great deal of difference to him. Sometime since he had left Stoketon, appetite had become unimportant to him. Hunger was important, and food was good when he ate it. But he did not miss any particular taste, or regret things that he used to be able to eat that were no longer available.

The fact of the matter was that the feeling he looked for was that of a full stomach rather than the satisfaction of a particular taste.

But Merry had gone to some trouble with the rabbits, including using some of the spices she had brought back up. Jeebee did not want to hurt her feelings. But privately, he would have been as happy with anything else that was meat, along with the vegetables.

That evening, as they sat before the fire, she began for the first time to tell him about some parts of the last few days of her search for him.

Most of the people she had stopped with had been very helpful. Some had been indifferent. Some had been hospitable only out of a sense of obligation, or a consideration of the future contact they might want to have with Paul and the wagon.

Nearly all of them had thought Merry was foolish to go looking for someone who had probably vanished. Somebody, who under the new conditions of the present time, was not likely to be found. But until she passed out of the area in which she, Paul, and the wagon were known, the visiting had been pleasant.

What struck Jeebee as she talked was a sense of wonder. Not just a wonder that she should venture on such a search for him, but that she should stick so single-mindedly to the goal of finding him. There was a driving force in her he had never really appreciated.

“You know,” she told him as they finally banked the fire and started to bed, “we ought to change places for a few days. Let me take over the hunting. You work up here, or down at the ranch, whichever you want. Which do you want, by the way?”

“There’s things I ought to get started on here, like building the forge,” he said, because that was at the top of his thoughts, “before it gets too cold out there. The clay’ll freeze on me, if I wait too long.”

“It’s strange you didn’t find some kind of forge down there in that outbuilding you said must have been a blacksmithing place for the ranch,” said Merry. “A forge wouldn’t burn.”

“They may have used a portable forge, and the looters took it with them,” said Jeebee. “Nick told me about the portable forges. Sears, or Montgomery Ward’s, used to sell them, once upon a time. Maybe they still do—I mean, did right up until the Collapse. It was a sort of three-legged metal bowl that you could pick up and carry, and build a coal fire in. It wouldn’t be hard to carry that off.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Merry.

The next morning she left with the two horses and the rifle.

She did not take the trailer, planning to use Sally as a packhorse instead. The weather was still good, if crisp, and the sky was clear. Jeebee worried about her, in spite of himself. Still, she had said she would stay close to the foothills.

Left alone at the cave, he began work on the forge. It was a matter of building up a round, well-like affair out of stones he had gathered. They were all about six inches in diameter, and as close to roundness as he could find. He built a small, circular wall with them, packing the spaces between with mortar. The sides went up around a log that he had laid in at an angle when the walls were about six inches off the ground so that its upper end would project into the firepit at the top.

The space left by the log when he took it out would be the channel for the draft of forced air he would provide with the foot bellows he planned to build later.

In the next few days, while Merry gathered meat, he built the wall up until it was about three feet off the ground. Then filled it with the remaining rocks to the level at which the angled log came out and the firepit had its bottom.

He pulled the log out, finally, and coated the firepit and the inside of the air passage with a smooth coat of clay.

By the third day, the forge itself was done and the clay of it drying. Meanwhile he was hard at work building his bellows. These he made simply of two large triangular pieces of plank, joined together along the sides with leather that widened from some three inches at the wooden nozzle that fitted into the air channel, to a good twelve inches around the broad end of the back, where he had attached two solid handles ten inches long, each to one plank side.

Pulled apart by the handles, the bellows sucked air in through the leather valve on the underside of a hole in the top wooden side of the bellows, then forced the air up the channel in the forge when the two sides were pushed together again with the handles.

He had planned to fasten one handle and side by staking it into the earth floor, and pump the bellows by stepping on the top handle to force the two wooden sides together, once the bellows had inflated. For that, however, he needed some mechanism that would pull the upper side away from the lower to inflate it.

He solved that by attaching to its top side a rope that ran up and through a pulley screwed tight to one of the two-by-four rafters of his slim roof. The far end of the cord through the pulley was counterweighted.

Now he could push the top handle down to the floor with his foot, collapsing the bellows, and the counterweight would pull it up again, inflating them, when he took his foot off the handle. He could now pump air into the fire, once he had one going in the forge, while still having both his hands free for work.

All this took a little better than the three days. Every evening, after Merry had gotten home, they ate; and after, as they sat with the fire, Merry spoke a little more freely about her long trip to find him. It was as if she could not leave the trip alone, but at the same time he had the feeling that she was dodging around a part of it, something to do with it that she found hard to tell.

Jeebee began to feel uneasy about what might be bothering her. But he had now grown so unused to asking questions that he could not push her to tell him.

The day after he finished the forge itself, he rigged a hood over it with a length of leftover stovepipe to carry the vapors from the fire out the front wall. He could not remember, and his one course in undergraduate chemistry was not good enough for him to figure out, what kind of dangerous vapors his homemade charcoal might put out.

But with a draft from the bottom and the stovepipe open to the outside above the forge fire, most of its gases ought to be carried out, and the unchinked walls around him should let plenty of air in. At last, he built a small fire with wood in the forge, and when it was going well enough, added the charcoal.

He was both excited and pleased at the way the charcoal caught from the small wood fire. He had brought up the anvil from the ashes of the ranch’s smithy some days before. He had kept it ready by the forge; and now simply as an experiment, he tried heating and bending a piece of angle iron, using the six-pound hammer from the ranch once the iron had turned a bright cherry red.

The angle iron bent. Not elegantly but more easily than it ever would have cold, it responded to the hammer blows.

He was full of triumph. Merry was not home yet, or he would have gone to get her immediately to show her that his smithy was now a working device.

He stopped pumping the bellows, and left the charcoal to die down by itself.

Theoretically, it should go out before it had burned itself completely to ash. He must remember to check, later. He had been making charcoal regularly by the old-fashioned method of getting a fire stoked with well-dried wood well started, then covering it with earth so that it burned slowly, away from the oxygen of the open air. The wood should have been from hardwoods like oak. Unfortunately, all he had to work with was pine, but dead wood, if it was firm and dry, seemed to make at least a usable charcoal.

Working this way, he had accumulated a fairly good pile of fuel for the forge. But, going out to look at the pile of it he had built up against the outside of the smithy wall, he realized that he would have to continue making it all winter long if he intended to use the forge at all regularly. With the bellows pumping air into it, the forge ate fuel.

He went back to work in the interior room of the cave. His plan since he had found Merry again, had been to dig back further into the sandy wall so that later on he would be able to build a somewhat larger inside room. Merry had not yet put down the layer of worn-out throw rugs she had planned, simply because he had told her that he intended to do this digging. There was no point in laying rugs and then strewing sand on top of them.

He worked as neatly as he could, but dust quickly accumulated in the air and fogged everything in sight under his dim illumination from the car-interior lights. He was tempted to use the yard floodlight he had found at the ranch. The solar blanket did an excellent job of charging up the rechargeable battery of that device. Some daylight was coming in through the front window of the cold room and the door of the inner room which he had left open, but it was not enough to help much. He needed to see exactly where and what he was digging.

He gave up at last to give the air of the inner room a chance to clear before Merry got home, and went out to his unending job of accumulating and chopping firewood for the fireplace.

They could not have too much of this and he was piling it ready against the outside wall of the cave, where it would act as an extra windbreak, if not extra insulation against the cold, later on. Merry came home eventually, with a good load of meat, as well as some light things from the ranch, to top out a fairly good-sized packload on Sally.

“I was lucky,” she told Jeebee as they were unloading and unsaddling the horses together. “I found a calf by itself, almost the minute I hit the flat down there. So I spent the rest of the time at the ranch. How’s the forge coming?”

“It’s done,” said Jeebee. “There’s no time tonight to rig lights in there, so if you can wait awhile in the morning before you go out, I’ll show you how it works.”

That afternoon and evening after she got home Merry did not talk about her journey to find Jeebee. She talked about everything else, about her hunting, about the ranch, about several dozen things. Her tone was excited and cheerful. She bustled about the interior of the cave. Finally, almost regretfully, she agreed that they should probably turn in for the night, since they were always up by dawn.

Jeebee fell asleep almost immediately, as had become a habit with him. He was roused to find Merry holding herself tightly against him and crying into his chest.

“What is it?” he said, putting his arms around her.

“Just hold me,” Merry choked.

He tightened his arms around her. She was crying very hard indeed. It was the kind of weeping that tears apart the one who weeps.

Once, Jeebee thought, his mind would have been flooded with a number of questions and guesses as to what was troubling her. But the past months had changed him in this, too. Her explanation would come eventually. There was no need to try to hurry it. She was being attacked by something, something her mind remembered; and all he could do was be a fortress about her and wait. So, he would wait.

He laid his cheek down tenderly upon the top of her soft hair and tried to encompass her as much as he could with his presence. For no reason at all, he thought of how Wolf had come to him in the river bottoms, and also when he had turned his ankle. Often Wolf had come when he was asleep, or when he was so caught between wakefulness and sleep that he was hardly conscious of the other appearing. Invariably, Wolf sniffed him all over and then nose-prodded at his arm or body. “Nose-lift,” he told himself, would be a better term, since essentially what Wolf did was slide the top of his nose under an arm or a leg and push upward, to see if Jeebee made any reaction.

The moment Jeebee did come full awake or respond, Wolf either greeted him or—more often—simply seemed to lose all interest, turned about, trotted off, and disappeared.

If it had not been for the wolf books, Jeebee would not have recognized what the other was doing. But with the help of the books, he now understood. Wolf was simply making sure that he was still alive. At first, his sudden switches to total indifference had been shocking to Jeebee. Yet this was the same animal who had brought him food the only way he could—in his own stomach.

Wolves dealt with things as they were, and, Jeebee told himself, he now had come to do pretty much the same thing.

He waited. Merry cried for some time. Eventually the emotion went out of her, her body relaxed, and the tears gave way to dry sobs, the sobs to silence. She lay still for what seemed a long while, simply holding to him. Then, almost abruptly, she took her arms away and sat up, wiping her eyes.

“Let’s get up and build up the fire,” she said.

She got out of the bed without waiting for his answer, wrapped a blanket around her, and went over to hunch down before the fire and feed its still-glowing coals. Jeebee rose, pulled on his pants and jacket, and went to join her.

The fire blazed up and they sat down together on the two chairs he had brought back from the ranch, just before the fireplace. Merry took the coffeepot off its hook and weighed it in her hand. Evidently satisfied that there was still tea water in it, she put it back on the hook and swung the rod about so that it was over the flames.

She continued to say nothing, so Jeebee did not speak, either. They sat together. After a while, when the water was hot, she filled his cup, then hers, and sat back in her chair, not sipping from the cup, but holding it in both hands as if to warm herself. The fire was now throwing enough heat so that extra warmth should not be necessary, but still she cradled the cup in her grasp.

“I haven’t cried,” she said to the fire. “I wasn’t able to, until now.”

“Do you want to tell me?” Jeebee asked.

“Yes,” she said, “I wanted to from the first moment I found you. But I couldn’t.” She paused.

“You remember the horses?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Jeebee, understanding which particular horses to which she referred.

“You know the ones I mean?” she persisted.

“The ones always saddled and ready, tied to the end of the wagon as you went,” Jeebee answered.

As he said the words the memory of them came back to him. The three horses—four, after he had joined the wagon’s crew—all saddled, the full pack behind the saddle, a loaded rifle scabbarded at each saddle and the ends of their reins tied to holding bars at the back of the wagon. He remembered that whatever horse Merry would be riding also always had a rifle at its saddle. Just as she at all times had a handgun in the holster of the gun-belt around her waist and a filled pack behind her saddle. These packs, he had learned, on his third day with the wagon, carried the essentials for survival, insofar as Paul could supply them. They carried some of Paul’s hidden store of antibiotics, ammunition and extra handguns, which were always valuable trade goods, bedrolls, clothing, and other needs. The horses that bore these things were for escape.

Merry had looked at him for a second as she asked the last question, but now her eyes were back on the fire.

“They were waiting for us,” she said in a steady voice. “We were on a pretty good highway—not a two-lane freeway, but a good local highway, with the ground clear back fifty to a hundred feet on each side and trees beyond—”

She laughed, unhappily.

“If it hadn’t been like that, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “They would have got me, too—”

Her voice died. He waited. Finally he spoke.

“The people in the area didn’t warn you that there was danger?” he asked.

What she wanted to tell him was not even now coming easily. It was up to him, plainly, to draw her out gently, to make it possible with questions for her to tell him.

“Nobody local had told us anything,” Merry answered dully. “I don’t think they knew themselves there were raiders around.”

“Someone local must have known, if they were waiting and ready for you.”

“Yes,” she answered, “they were waiting. I don’t know how they knew. Maybe they’d been camped nearby, in a patch of woods somewhere, or perhaps in some place that’d already been raided. Just—there was no warning. No warning at all. Just all of a sudden they were there, coming out of the trees on both sides of the road.”

“Then it was planned,” Jeebee said.

“Yes,” Merry said indifferently. Her words were still addressed to the fire. It was as if all that mattered could be seen there, among the alternately fading and bright-glowing embers, where the greatest heat of the fire was, under the flames.

“It was an ambush.” She shook her head, very slightly. “There were way too many of them for us, but they wanted it easy.”

She went silent, again. Jeebee waited. But this time it was as if she had run out of words to go on with. He prodded her with another question as Wolf had nosed up one of his arms when he was bedridden and unmoving.

“How did they think it’d go?”

“I don’t know,” Merry said in the same dead voice to the flames. “Easy, I suppose. There had to have been more than a hundred of them. They let the wagon get right into the middle of where they were waiting, before they came out of the trees. It was just luck I was back, further than usual, heading in Missy”—she glanced for only a second at Jeebee—“you don’t know her. We traded for her after you left us. She wasn’t full-trained to staying with the wagon and so she’d stray—”

Merry paused.

“If I hadn’t gone back after her… but I did, and when they swarmed the wagon, they were all up ahead of me. I heard the alarm siren when Dad pulled it; and I looked back, to see them riding in on it from both sides. Then the siren quit; and I knew Dad must already be inside with Nick. Almost at the same time, I heard our machine guns, both of them…”

She ran down. Jeebee waited. “You know what he always said,” she went on dully. “‘Ride, fast as you can. Don’t look back.’”

She stopped speaking. The firelight glanced off her hair. She was sitting with her elbows on her knees, apparently all her attention concentrated on the fire. The moments stretched out.

“I rode,” she said at last, in a monotone. “I think some of them even chased me a little ways—I’m not sure of that. But I rode; and after a while I was too far away to hear the firing…”

She broke off. Again, a silence. Only the fire crackled and snapped.

“They couldn’t have known how well Dad and Nick were prepared to fight them off,” she went on finally. “They must have been surprised… ”

She lifted her head slowly and looked steadily at Jeebee.

“You know what else he said.” She waited.

Jeebee nodded and she went on.

“‘Don’t try to come back’—that’s what he always told us. ‘Never come back.’”

Her eyes were still on Jeebee. He wanted to reach out and touch her, comfortingly, but he was afraid that even that might be wrong at this moment.

“You went back,” Jeebee said. She dropped her eyes and nodded. He waited.

“I went deep into some woods and waited there—oh, a couple of hours perhaps,” she said to the embers. “Finally, I went back… slowly. I had the binoculars. I found a good spot I could see, from maybe a hundred yards or more away. I could have been even closer. They weren’t paying attention to anything but the wagon. They’d tried to burn it. The front seat was gone, the wooden facings over the front and back ends were gone, the canvas with our sign on it was burned away and so were the tires. All that was left was the steel underneath. They were up by the steel box of the wagon itself, and they must’ve realized by that time that it wasn’t the ordinary sort of thing they went after. The machine guns would have let them know that. It wasn’t going to be that easy for them to get at Dad and Nick.”

Her eyes clung to Jeebee’s now, as if she was holding on to him with her gaze alone.

“They’d spread out in two fans front and back so that they were out of traverse range of the slots the machine guns could fire through,” she said. “And the fire they’d started at first had gone out. But just as I started watching they got a new fire going, between the wheels and under the bed of the wagon. They were going to heat the metal shell of the wagon, until it drove Dad and Nick out, or cooked them alive.

“I could see them there. They were as thick as crowds used to be at circuses when I was a little girl,” she said. “They were waiting for the fire under the wagon to do their work for them. There was nothing I could do; and I didn’t know what Dad and Nick could do anymore. But he had something to do. He’d just never told me, Dad hadn’t.”

He waited. She bit her lip.

“You didn’t know either what they’d planned, did you?” she said to Jeebee. “They didn’t tell you? No. No, of course, if they wouldn’t tell me, neither Dad nor Nick would ever tell you that. They didn’t tell me because they didn’t want me to know, for fear I might not have ridden off then, in the first place.”

She took a deep breath.

“All of a sudden,” she said, “there was an explosion. It was as if the wagon was one large stick of dynamite. I saw a bright flash for just part of a second, then even from where I was standing, I could feel the air push me, and the sound of it made me deaf for a moment. I was deaf and blind, both, there for a bit—and then I could see that the wagon was gone. All gone. And the raiders who’d been close to it were gone, too. Fifty feet or more away there were things lying that were other, dead raiders. There was no one moving. No one. It was all over. It was done.”

She closed her eyes and sat back in her chair as if she were very weary.

Jeebee got out of his own chair, knelt beside hers, and put his arms around her, holding her head to his head, with the palm of one hand.

“They did it to make sure you got away,” he said. Against the side of his head, he felt her head move in a faint nod.

“Yes,” she whispered.

They stayed together, not moving for some little time. Then Merry stirred, pulling herself out of his arms, and turned to look into his face. She smiled and took his arm, pushing him upward and back toward his seat.

She smiled at him.

“It’s all right now,” she said, “it’s all right now I’ve told you. It’ll never be that bad for me again, now that you know, too.”

Jeebee seated himself, still looking back at her, trying to think of something to say.

There was nothing. After a while she took the coffeepot and filled his cup carefully, then poured a little more into her own and sipped it. They sat there in silence, both of them watching the fire, and from time to time Jeebee bent down to pick up another piece of wood and put it on the fire.