CHAPTER X.
FIGHTING FIRE.
Before proceeding to relate the incidents which follows, it is necessaryto explain a little more fully the arrangement of the root fortress andthe drift-pile. The two trees, which were enormous ones, had originallygrown as close together as they could, and their roots had interlacedbeneath the soil. The sand in which they grew having been graduallywashed away, their great masses of roots were exposed for about fifteenfeet below the original level of the soil and as they spread out theymade two circles (one running a foot or two into the other), of abouttwelve or fifteen feet in diameter. Inside of this circle of greatroots, the roots were mostly small, and the boys had cut them away withtheir knives, leaving just enough of them to stop up all the holes andobscure the view from without. The drift-pile, or hammock, as it issometimes called at the South, had been years in forming, beingdrift-wood which had floated down the river during winter and springfreshets, and as it had lodged against the trees it lay only on theirupper side, where it was piled up into a perpendicular wall nearlytwenty feet high. Thence it stretched away up the river for a hundredyards or more. Now the only entrance big enough to admit a person intothe root fortress was on the side next to the drift, and it opened onlyinto an alley-way which the boys had partly found and partly madethrough the drift. This alley-way led past several little aisles runningout to the right and left for a dozen yards or so,--aisles formed by theirregular piling of the logs on top of each other. In the fortress therewere a dozen places at least, where the big roots were sufficiently wideapart to admit a grown man easily, but the boys had left the smallerroots which covered these gaps undisturbed, and cut only the oneentrance. After cutting that on the side next the hammock, they hadmoved some of the drift so as to close up the sides of the entrance andmake it open only into the alley-way. All this had been done under Sam'ssupervision, and as a result of his prudence and fore thought.
Joe had been gone nearly half an hour when he burst suddenly into thechamber in which the others were. His hands were full of the wildgrapes, but of those he was evidently not thinking. His face was of thatpeculiar hue which black faces assume when if they were white faces theywould grow pale; and his lips, usually red, were of an ashy brown. Hiseyes were of the shape of saucers, and seemed not much smaller. Hegasped for breath in an alarming way, and Tom saw that the poor fellowwas frightened almost out of his wits.
"What's the matter Joe? Tell me quick," said the younger boy.
"O Mas' Tom, we'se dun surrounded. I was jest a-gittin' de grapes when Iseed a'most a thousand Injuns a-comin,' an' I dun run my life a'most outa-gittin' here. Dey did not see me, but I seed dem, an' I tell you dey'sde biggest Injuns you ever did see. I 'clar dey's mos' as tall astrees."
"How many of 'em are there, Joe?" asked Tom standing up.
"I couldn't count 'em e'zactly, Mas' Tom, but I reckon dey's not less'na thousand of 'em,--maybe two thousan' for all I know."
"Where are they, and what were they doing?" asked Tom; but before Joecould answer, the voices of the Indians themselves indicated theirwhereabouts, and Tom discerned that they were disagreeably close to hiselbow.
Seeking a place in which to cook their breakfast the savages hadselected the corner formed by the root fortress and the drift-pile as aproper place for a fire, and were now breaking up sticks with which tostart one. They were just outside the fortress, and either of the boyscould have touched them by pushing his arm out between the roots. Tommotioned the others to keep absolutely silent, and going a little wayinto the hammock, through the passage way he managed to find a placefrom which he could see the intruders. He soon discovered that Joe'saccount of them was slightly exaggerated in two important particulars.They were only ordinary Indians, neither larger nor smaller than grownIndians usually are, and instead of a thousand there were but three ofthem in all.
But three fully grown Indians were enough to justify a good deal ofapprehension, and if they should discover the party in the tree, Tomknew very well they would make very short work of their destruction. Hecrept back to the tree therefore and again cautioned Joe and Judie, in awhisper, not to speak or make any other noise. Then he returned to hisplace of observation and watched the Indians. They soon made a cracklingfire and proceeded to broil some game they had killed, this and theeating which followed occupied perhaps an hour, during which Tom madefrequent journeys to the little room, nominally for the purpose ofcautioning the others to keep still, but really to work off some portionof his uneasiness, which was growing with every moment. He was terrifiedat first upon general principles, as any other boy of eleven years oldwould have been. Then he was afraid that the Indians would by someaccident, lean something against the curtain of small roots between twoother big trees, and that the curtain might not be strong enough tosupport it, in which event their hiding-place would be discovered atonce. He was afraid, too, that some slight noise inside the fortressmight catch the uncommonly quick ears of the Indians.
All these were dangers well worth considering; but now a new, and muchgreater danger began to show itself. The drift was largely composed oflight wood, and from his hiding-place Tom could see that the fire builtby the trees had communicated itself to the hammock, and that the flameswere rapidly spreading. The danger now was that the fire would burn intothe alley-way and so cut off retreat from the fortress, and if so thoseinside would be burned alive. Quitting his place of observationtherefore, he established himself as a sentry in the alley-way, havingdetermined, if the fire should approach the passage, to take Joe andJudie out of the fortress and into one of the aisles near the fartheredge of the drift-pile. Having begun to plan he saw all thepossibilities of the case and tried to provide for all. He knew that ifthe wind should drive the flames into the drift the whole pile would bedestroyed in a very brief time, but in that case, he reasoned, the blacksmoke of the resinous pine would make it impossible for the Indians tosee very far in that direction, and so he resolved, if the worst came,to lead his companions out of the upper end of the hammock, into thebushes and so escape to the creek, where he hoped to find a hiding-placeof some sort. He had got this far in his planning when he heard Judiecough, and stepping quickly into the room found it full of smoke. Seeingthat to stay there was to suffocate, he beckoned his companions tofollow, and stepping lightly they passed down the alley-way and sat downin one of the aisles, behind a great sycamore log which ran across thepile. Peeping over this log Tom saw the three Indians shoulder theirguns and walk away. He ran at once to the look-out, and though the smokealmost blinded him he observed all their movements. He wanted them awayspeedily, so that he and Joe might extinguish the fire if that werestill possible, and as every minute served to increase the difficultyand lessen the chances of doing so, the loitering of the savages seemedinterminable. They stopped first to drink at the spring. Then theyamused themselves by throwing sticks, and pebbles and shells at a turtlewhich was sunning himself on a log in the stream. Then they stopped toexamine the track of a turkey or of some animal, in the sand, and itreally seemed to Tom that they did not mean to go away at all.
All things have an end, however, and even the stay of disagreeablevisitors cannot last always. The three savages finally disappeared amile down the river, and Tom, after scanning the surrounding country andsatisfying himself that there were no others in the immediateneighborhood, hurried to the place where Joe and Judie were hidden.
"They've gone at least," he said, "and now Joe, we must put this fireout, if we can. Judie, you stay here, and if you find the smoke bothersyou, go further down the alley that way. Don't try to stay if the smokecomes."
How to stop the fire was the problem. Fortunately there was very littlewind, and what there was blew chiefly from up the river. The flames hadspread over a considerable space, however, and the boys had hardlyanything with which to work.
They carried water in their hats from the river, which was only a fewyards away, now that it had risen to the bottom of the second bank.This was altogether too slow a way of working,
however, and the fire wasvisibly gaining on the boys. But, slow as this process was, it served toteach Tom a lesson or rather to remind him of one he had learned andforgotten. He found that a hatful of water thrown on the bottom of thefire did more good than two hatfuls thrown on top, and he rememberedthat when the soot in the chimney at home caught fire once, his fatherwould not allow anybody to pour water down the chimney, but stoodhimself by the fireplace throwing a little water, not up the chimneybut, on the blazing fire below. This water, turned into steam, went upthe chimney and soon extinguished the fire there. In the same way Tomnow discovered that when he threw a hatful of water on a burning log atthe bottom of the pile it had a perceptible effect all the way to thetop. Thinking of the chimney fire he remembered also that his father hadsaid at the time that a plank laid over the top of a burning chimney, ora screen fastened over the fireplace would stop the burning of the sootby stopping the air, and so smothering the fire. This suggested a newplan of operations for present use. The long gray moss grew in greatabundance all around the place, and gathering this he dipped it in theriver and then threw it on top of the fire. A bunch of the moss heldgreatly more water than his hat, and it served also to smother the fire.He and Joe repeated the operation, putting some of the moss on top andsome against the sides of the burning pile of timber. The steam fromthese perceptibly checked the burning, and an hour's work covered thefire almost entirely up, so far at least as the exposed side of thedrift-pile was concerned. But just as they were disposed to congratulatethemselves upon their success in subduing the flames, they discoveredthat while they had been smothering the fire on one side it had beenburning freely further in. The openness of the hammock gave free accessto the air from the other side, and just beyond the line of moss theysaw a blaze licking its tongue out from below. They were tired out,already, and this added discouragement to weariness. Little Judie,although the boys had urged her to remain quiet, had been hard at workbringing moss to them, insisting upon her right to work as well asthey. She had discovered too that the sand, just below the surface waswet, and that this served almost as good a purpose as the moss itselfwhen thrown on the fire. The poor little girl was utterly tired out atlast, however, and when the fire seemed to be subsiding, she had yieldedto Tom's entreaties, and going into the drift-pile had laid down torest. Now that all their work promised to accomplish nothing, the boyswere vexed with themselves for having permitted the frail little girl towear herself out in so fruitless a task. This, with theirdisappointment, served to make them utterly wretched.