IV
At these and similar occupations the latter days of June slipped by. Bobhad little leisure, for the Service was undermanned for the work it mustdo. Curtis sooned resigned, to everybody's joy and relief.
On only one occasion did Bob gain a chance to ride over to the scenes ofhis old activities. This was on a Sunday when, by a miracle, nothingunexpected came up to tie him to his duty. He had rather anunsatisfactory visit with Mr. Welton. It was cordial enough on bothsides, for the men were genuinely fond of each other; but they had losttouch of each other's interests. Welton persisted in regarding Bob witha covert amusement, as an older man regards a younger who is having hisfling, and will later settle down. Bob asked after the work, and wasanswered. Neither felt any real human interest in the questions northeir replies. A certain constraint held them, to Bob's very genuineregret. He rode back through the westering shadows vaguely uneasy in hismind.
He and two of the new mountain men had been for two days cutting up somedead and down trees that encumbered the enclosure at headquarters. Theycross-cut the trunks into handy lengths; bored holes in them with atwo-inch augur; loaded the holes with blasting powder and a fuse, andtouched them off. The powder split the logs into rough posts smallenough to handle. These fragments they carried laboriously to the middleof the meadow, where they stacked them rack-fashion and on end. The ideawas to combine business with pleasure by having a grand bonfire thenight of the Fourth of July.
For this day other preparations were forward. Amy promised a spread foreverybody, if she could get a little help at the last moment. As many ofthe outlying rangers as could manage it would come in for the occasion.A shooting match, roping and chopping contests, and other sports were incontemplation.
As the time drew near, various mysteries were plainly afoot. Men claimedtheir turns in riding down the mountain for the mail. They took withthem pack horses. These they unpacked secretly and apart. Amy gave Bobto understand that this holiday, when the ranks were fullest andconditions ripe, went far as a substitute for Christmas among these men.
Then at noon of July second Charley Morton dashed down the trail fromthe Upper Meadow, rode rapidly to Headquarters, flung himself from hishorse, and dove into the office. After a moment he reappeared, followedby Thorne.
"Saddle up, boys," said the latter. "Fire over beyond Baldy. Ride andgather in the men who are about here," he told Bob.
Bob sprang on Charley Morton's horse and rode about instructing theworkers to gather. When he returned, Thorne gave his instructions.
"We're short-handed," he stated, "and it'll be hard to get help just atthis time. Charley, you take Ware, Elliott and Carroll and see what itlooks like. Start a fire line, and do the best you can. Orde, you andPollock can get up some pack horses and follow later with grub,blankets, and so forth. I'll ride down the mountain to see what I can doabout help. It may be I can catch somebody by phone at the Power Housewho can let the boys know at the north end. You say it's a big fire?"
"I see quite a lot of smoke," said Charley.
"Then the boys over Jackass way and by the Crossing ought to see it forthemselves."
The four men designated caught up their horses, saddled them, andmounted. Thorne handed them each a broad hoe, a rake and an axe. Theyrode off up the trail. Thorne mounted on his own horse.
"Pack up and follow as fast as you can," he told the two who stillremained.
"What you want we should take?" asked Jack.
"Amy will tell you. Get started early as you can. You'll have to followtheir tracks."
Amy took direction of them promptly. While they caught and saddled thepack horses, she was busy in the storeroom. They found laid out for thema few cooking utensils, a variety of provisions tied up in strong littlesacks, several more hoes, axes and rakes, two mattocks, a half-dozenflat files, and as many big zinc canteens.
"Now hurry!" she commanded them; "pack these, and then get some blanketsfrom your camp, and some hobbles and picket ropes."
With Bob's rather awkward help everything was made fast. By the time thetwo had packed the blankets and returned to headquarters on their way tothe upper trail, they found Amy had changed her clothes, caught andsaddled her own horse, tied on well-filled saddle bags, and stoodawaiting them. She wore her broad hat looped back by the pine tree badgeof the Service, a soft shirtwaist of gray flannel, a short divided skirtof khaki and high-laced boots. A red neckerchief matched her cheeks,which were glowing with excitement. Immediately they appeared, she swungaboard with the easy grace of one long accustomed to the saddle. Bob'slower jaw dropped in amazement.
"You going?" he gasped, unable even yet to comprehend the everyday factthat so many gently nurtured Western girls are accustomed to thoserough-and-ready bivouacs.
"I wouldn't stay away for worlds!" she cried, turning her pony's head upthe trail.
Beyond the upper meadow this trail suddenly began to climb. It made itsway by lacets in the dry earth, by scrambles in the rocks until, throughthe rapidly thinning ranks of the scrubby trees, Bob could look backover all the broad shelf of the mountain whereon grew the pines. It layspread before him as a soft green carpet of tops, miles of it, wrinklingand billowing gently as here and there the conformation of the countrychanged. At some distance it dropped over an edge. Beyond that, verydimly, he realized the brown shimmer rising from the plain. Far to theright was a tenuous smoke, a suggestion of thinning in the forest, aflash of blue water. This, Bob knew, must be the mill and the lake.
The trail shortly made its way over the shoulder of the ridge andemerged on the wide, gentle rounding of the crest. Here the trees weresmall, stunted and wind-blown. Huge curving sheets of unbroken granitelay like armour across the shoulder of the mountain. Decomposing graniteshale crunched under the horses' hoofs. Here and there on it grewisolated tiny tufts of the hardy upland flowers. Above, the sky wasdeeply, intensely blue; bluer than Bob had ever seen a sky before. Theair held in it a tang of wildness, as though it had breathed from greatspaces.
"I suppose this is the top of our ridge, isn't it?" Bob asked JackPollock.
The boy nodded.
Suddenly the trail dipped sharp to the left into a narrow and shallowlittle ravine. The bed of this was carpeted by a narrow stringer offresh grass and flowers, through which a tiny stream felt its hesitatingway. This ravine widened and narrowed, turned and doubled. Here andthere groups of cedars on a dry flat offered ideal shelter for a camp.Abruptly the stringer burst through a screen of azaleas to a round greenmeadow surrounded by the taller trees of the eastern slope of themountain.
In other circumstances Bob would have liked to stop for a better sightof this little gem of a meadow. It was ankle deep with new grasses,starred with flowers, bordered with pink and white azaleas. The air,prisoned in a pocket, warmed by the sun, perfumed heavily by theflowers, lay in the cup of the trees like a tepid bath. A hundred birdssang in June-tide ecstasy.
But Jack Pollock, without pause, skirted this meadow, crossed the tinysilver creek that bubbled from it down the slope, and stolidly mounted alittle knoll beyond. The trained pack horses swung along behind him,swaying gently from side to side that they might carry their packscomfortably and level. Bob turned involuntarily to glance at Amy. Theireyes met. She understood; and smiled at him brightly.
Jack led the way to the top of the knoll and stopped.
Here the edge of the mountain broke into a tiny outcropping spur thatshook itself free from the pines. It constituted a natural lookout tothe east. Bob drew rein so violently that even his well-trained mountainhorse shook its head in protest.
Before him, hushed with that tremendous calm of vast distances, lay theSierras he had never seen, as though embalmed in the sunlight of athousand afternoons. A tremendous, deep canon plunged below him, bluewith distance. It climbed again to his level eventually, but by thattime it was ten miles away. And over against him, very remote, were pineridges looking velvety and dark and ruffled and full of shadows, likethe erect fur of a beast that has been alarmed. Fr
om them here and thereprojected granite domes. And beyond them bald ranges; and beyond them,splintered granite with snow in the crevices; and beyond this the darkand frowning Pinnacles; and still beyond, other mountains so distant, soethereal, so delicately pink and rose and saffron that almost heexpected they might at any moment dissolve into the vivid sky. And,strangely enough, though he realized the tremendous heights and depthsof these peaks and canons, the whole effect to Bob was as somethingspread out broad. The sky, the wonderful over-arching, very blue sky,was the most important thing in the universe. Compared to itsinfinitudes these mountains lay spread like a fair and wrinkled footrugto a horizon inconceivably remote and mysterious.
Then his eye fell to the ridge opposite, across the blue canon. From onepoint on it a straight column of smoke rolled upward, to mushroom outand hang motionless above the top of the ridge. Its base was shot byhalf-seen, half-guessed flaming streaks.
Bob had vaguely expected to see a whole country-side ablaze. Thissingle, slender column was almost absurd. It looked like a camp-fire,magnified to fit the setting, of course.
"There's the fire, all right," said Jack. "We got to get across to itsomehow. Trail ends here."
"Why, that doesn't amount to much!" cried Bob.
"Don't it?" said Jack. "Well, I'd call that some shakes of a firemyself. It's covered mighty nigh three hundred acres by now."
"Three hundred acres! Better say ten."
"You're wrong," said Jack; "I've rode all that country with cattle."
"You'll find it fire enough, when you get there," put in Amy. "It'sright in good timber, too."
"All right," agreed Bob; "I'll believe anything--after this." He wavedhis hand abroad. "Jack," he called, as that young man led the way offthe edge, "can you see where Jack Main's Canon is from here?"
"Jack Main's!" repeated young Pollock. "Why, if you was on the top ofthe farthest mountain in sight, you couldn't see any place you could seeit from."
"Good Lord!" said Bob.
The way zigzagged down the slope of the mountain. As Jack had said,there was no trail, but the tracks left by the four rangers were plainlyto be discerned. Bob, following the pack horses, had leisure to observehow skilfully this way had been picked out. Always it held to the easyfooting, but always it was evident that if certain turns had not beenmade some distance back this easy footing would have lacked. At timesthe tracks led far to the left at nearly the same level until one, twoor three little streams had been crossed. Then without apparent reasonthey turned directly down the backbone of a steep ridge exactly like ahalf-dozen others they had passed over. But later Bob saw that thisridge was the only one of the lot that dipped over gently to lowerlevels; all the rest broke off abruptly in precipitous rocks. Bob was agood woodsman, but this was his first experience in that mountaineeringskill which noses its way by the "lay of the country."
In the meantime they were steadily descending. The trees hemmed themcloser. Thickets of willows and alders had to be crossed. Dimly throughthe tree-tops they seemed to see the sky darkening by degrees as theyworked their way down. At first Bob thought it the lateness of theafternoon; then he concluded it must be the smoke of the fire; finally,through a clear opening, he saw this apparent darkening of the horizonwas in reality the blue of the canon wall opposite, rising as theydescended. But, too, as they drew nearer, the heavy smoke of theconflagration began to spread over them. In time it usurped the heavens,and Bob had difficulty in believing that it could appear to any oneanywhere as so simple a mushroom-head over a slender smoke column.
By the time the horses stepped from the slope to the bed of the canon,it was quite dark. Jack turned down stream.
"We'll cut the trail to Burro Rock pretty quick," said he.
Within five minutes of travel they did cut it; a narrow brown trough,trodden by the hoofs of many generations of cattlemen bound for the backcountry. Almost immediately it began to mount the slope.
Now ahead, through the gathering twilight, lights began to show,sometimes scattered, sometimes grouped, like the camp-fires of animmense army. These were the stubs, stumps, down logs and the like leftstill blazing after all the more readily inflammable material had beenburned away. As the little cavalcade laboured upward, stopping every fewminutes to breathe the horses, these flickering lights definedthemselves. In particular one tall dead yellow pine standing boldlyprominent, afire to the top, alternately glowed and paled as the windbreathed or died. A smell of stale burning drifted down the damp nightair. Pretty soon Jack Pollock halted for a moment to call back:
"Here's their fire line!"
Bob spurred forward. Just beyond Jack's horse the country lay blackened.The pine needles had burned down to the soil; the seedlings and youngertrees had been withered away; the larger trees scorched; the fuel withwhich every forest is littered consumed in the fierceness of theconflagration. Here and there some stub or trunk still blazed andcrackled, outposts of the army whose camp-fires seemed to dot the hills.
The line of demarcation between the burned and the unburned areas seemedextraordinarily well defined. Bob looked closer and saw that thisdefinition was due to a peculiar path, perhaps two yards wide. It lookedas though some one had gone along there with a huge broom, sweeping asone would sweep a path in deep dust. Only in this case the broom musthave been a powerful implement as well as one of wide reach. The brushedmarks went not only through the carpet of pine needles, but through thetarweed, the snow brush, the manzanita. This was technically the fireline. At the sight of the positiveness with which it had checked thespread of the flames, Bob's spirits rose.
"They seem to have stopped it here easy enough, already," he cried.
"Being as how this is the windward side of the fire, and on a downslope, I should think they might," remarked Jack Pollock drily.
Bob chuckled and glanced at the girl.
"I'm finding out every day how little I know," said he; "at my age,too!"
"The hard work is down wind," said Amy.
"Of course."
They entered the burned area, and climbed on up the hill. Thoughevidently here the ferocity of the conflagration had passed, it had leftits rear guard behind. Fallen trees still blazed; standing trees flamedlike torches--but all harmlessly within the magic circle drawn by thedesperate quick work of the rangers. They threaded their way cautiouslyamong these isolated fires, watching lest some dead giant should fallacross their path. The ground smoked under their feet. Against thebackground of a faint and distant roaring, which now made itselfevident, the immediate surroundings seemed very quiet. The individualcracklings of flames were an undertone. Only once in a while a dullheavy crash smote the air as some great tree gave up the unequalstruggle.
They passed as rapidly as they could through this stricken field. Thenight had fallen, but the forest was still bright, the trail stillplain. They followed it for an hour until it had topped the lower ridge.
Then far ahead, down through the dark trunks of trees, they saw,wavering, flickering, leaping and dying, a line of fire. In some placesit was a dozen feet high; in others it sank to within a few inches ofthe ground--but nowhere could the eye discern an opening through it. Aroar and a crackling filled the air. Sparks were shooting upward in thesuction. A blast of heat rushed against Bob's cheek. All at once herealized that a forest fire was not a widespread general conflagration,like the burning of a city block. It was a line of battle, a ring offlame advancing steadily. All they had passed had been negligible. Herewas the true enemy, now charging rapidly through the dry, inflammablelow growth, now creeping stealthily in the needles and among the rocks;always making way, always gathering itself for one of its wild leapswhich should lay an entire new province under its ravaging. Somewhere onthe other side of that ring of fire were four men. They were trying tocut a lane over which the fire could not leap.
Bob gazed at the wall of flame with some dismay.
"How we going to get through?" he asked.
"We got to find a rock outcrop somewheres up the ridge," explained
Jack,"where there'll be a break in the fire."
He turned up the side of the mountain again, leading the way. After atime they came to an outcrop of the sort described, which, with somedifficulty and stumbling, they succeeded in crossing.
Ahead, in the darkness, showed a tiny licking little fire, only a fewinches high.
"The fire has jumped!" cried Bob.
"No, that's their backfire," Pollock corrected him.
They found this to be true. The rangers had hastily hoed and raked out anarrow path. Over this a very small fire could not pass; but there couldbe no doubt that the larger conflagration would take the slight obstaclein its stride. Therefore the rangers had themselves ignited the smallfire. This would eat away the fuel, and automatically widen the path.Between the main fire and the back fire were still several hundred yardsof good, unburned country. To Bob's expression of surprise Amy added tothe two principles of fire-fighting he had learned from Pollock.
"It doesn't do to try to stop a fire anywhere and everywhere," said she."A good man knows his country, and he takes advantage of it. This fireline probably runs along the line of natural defence."
They followed it down the mountain for a long distance through theeddying smoke. The flames to their right shot up and died and crept. Theshadows to their left--their own among the number--leaped and fell.After a while, down through the mists, they made out a small figure,very busy at something. When they approached, they found this to beCharley Morton. The fire had leaped the cleared path and was greedilyeating in all directions through the short, pitchy growth of tarweed. Itwas as yet only a tiny leak, but once let it get started, the wholeforest beyond the fire line would be ablaze. The ranger had started tocut around this a half-circle connected at both ends with the main fireline. With short, quick jabs of his hoe, he was tearing away at thetough tarweed.
"Hullo!" said he without looking up. "You'll find camp on the bald ridgenorth the fire line. There's a little feed there."
Having completed his defence, he straightened his back to look at them.His face was grimed a dingy black through which rivulets of sweat hadmade streaks.
"Had it pretty hot all afternoon," he proffered. "Got the fire linedone, though. How're those canteens--full? I'll trade you my empty one."He took a long draught. "That tastes good. Went dry about three o'clock,and haven't had a drop since."
They left him there, leaning on the handle of his hoe. Jack Pollockseemed to know where the place described as the camp-site was located,for after various detours and false starts, he led them over the brow ofa knoll to a tiny flat among the pine needles where they were greeted bywhinnies from unseen animals. It was here very dark. Jack scrapedtogether and lit some of the pine needles. By the flickering light theysaw the four saddles dumped down in a heap.
"There's a side hill over yander with a few bunches of grass and some ofthese blue lupins," said Jack. "It ain't much in the way of hoss-feed,but it'll have to do."
He gathered fuel and soon had enough of a fire to furnish light.
"It certainly does seem plumb foolish to be lightin' _more_ fires!" heremarked.
In the meantime Amy had unsaddled her own horse and was busy unpackingone of the pack animals. Bob followed her example.
"There," she said; "now here are the canteens, all full; and here's sixlunches already tied together that I put up before we started. You canget them to the other boys. Take your tools and run along. I'llstraighten up, and be ready for you when you can come back."
"What if the fire gets over to you?" asked Bob.
"I'll turn the horses loose and ride away," she said gaily.
"It won't get clost to there," put in Jack. "This little ridge is rockall round it. That's why they put the camp here."
"Where's water?" asked Amy.
"I don't rightly remember," confessed Pollock. "I've only been in hereonce."
"I'll find out in the morning. Good luck!"
Jack handed Bob three of the canteens, a hoe and rake and one of theflat files.
"What's this for?" asked Bob.
"To keep the edge of your hoe sharp," replied Jack.
They shouldered their implements and felt their way in the darkness overthe tumbled rock outcrop. As they surmounted the shoulder of the hill,they saw once more flickering before them the fire line.