The squealing and plunging of the horses, the rattling of their chains,
the shrieking of the wind, the reverberating cracks of thunder made
a deafening chorus in Nan's ears. She could scarcely hear what the
imperiled Tom shouted to her. Finally she got it:
“Not that way! Pull sideways!”
He beat his hands impotently upon the crust of sawdust to the left. Nan
tugged that way. Tom pulled, too, heaving his great body upward, and
scratching and scrambling along the sawdust with fingers spread like
claws. His right leg came out of the hole, and just then the rain
descended torrentially again.
The flames from this opening in the roof of the furnace were beaten
down. Tom got to his feet, shaking and panting. He hobbled painfully
when he walked.
But in a moment he seized upon the pole he had dropped and made for the
smoking timber cart. The terrified horses tried again and again to break
away; but the chain harnesses were too strong; nor did the mired wheel
budge.
“Oh, Tom! Oh, Tom!” begged Nan. “Let us make the poor horses free, and
run ourselves.”
“And lose my wagon?” returned her cousin, grimly. “Not much!”
The rain, which continued to descend with tropical violence, almost beat
Nan to the ground; but Tom Sherwood worked furiously.
He placed the butt of the lever he had cut under the hub of the great
wheel. There was a sound stump at hand to use as a fulcrum. Tom threw
himself upon the end of the lever. Nan ran to add her small weight to
the endeavor. The wheel creaked and began to rise slowly.
The sawdust was not clinging, it was not like real mire. There was no
suction to hold the wheel down. Merely the crust had broken in and the
wheel had encountered an impediment of a sound tree root in front of it
so that, when the horses tugged, the tire had come against the root and
dragged back the team.
Out poured the flames and smoke again, the flames hissing as they were
quenched by the falling water. Higher, higher rose the cart wheel. Nan,
who was behind her cousin, saw his neck and ears turn almost purple from
the strain he put in the effort to dislodge the wheel. Up, up it came,
and then-----
“Gid-ap! 'Ap, boys! Yah! Gid-ap!”
The horses strained. The yoke chains rattled. Tom gasped to Nan:
“Take my whip! Quick! Let 'em have it!”
The girl had always thought the drover's whip Tom used a very cruel
implement, and she wished he did not use it. But she knew now that it
was necessary. She leaped for the whip which Tom had thrown down and
showed that she knew its use.
The lash hissed and cracked over the horses' backs. Tom voiced one last,
ringing shout. The cart wheel rose up, the horses leaped forward, and
the big timber cart was out of its plight.
Flames and smoke poured out of the hole again. The rain dashing upon and
into the aperture could not entirely quell the stronger element. But the
wagon was safe, and so, too, were the two cousins.
Tom was rather painfully burned and Nan began to cry about it. “Oh! Oh!
You poor, poor dear!” she sobbed. “It must smart you dreadfully, Tommy.”
“Don't worry about me,” he answered. “Get aboard. Let's get out of
this.”
“Are you going home?”
“Bet you!” declared Tom. “Why, after this rain stops, this whole blamed
place may be in flames. Must warn folks and get out the fire guard.”
“But the rain will put out the fire, Tom,” said Nan, who could not
understand even now the fierce power of a conflagration of this kind.
“Look there!” yelled Tom, suddenly glancing back over her head as she
sat behind him on the wagon tongue.
With a roar like an exploding boiler, the flames leaped up the heart of
the hollow tree. The bursted crust of the sawdust heap had given free
ingress to the wind, and a draught being started, it sucked the flames
directly up the tall chimney the tree made.
The fire burst from the broken top. The flames met the falling rain as
though they were unquenchable. Indeed the clouds were scattering, and
second by second the downfall was decreasing. The tempest of rain was
almost over; but the wind remained to fan the flames that had now broken
cover in several spots, as well as through the tall and hollow tree.
Tom hastened his team toward the main road that passed through the
tamarack swamp. At one end of it was Pine Camp; in the other direction,
after passing the knoll on which the Vanderwillers lived, the roadway
came out upon a more traveled road to the forks and the railroad.
Pine Camp was the nearest place where help could be secured to beat down
the fire, if, indeed, this were at all possible. There was a telephone
line there which, in a roundabout way, could be made to carry the news
of the forest fire to all the settlements in the Big Woods and along the
railroad line.
But Nan seized Tom's arm and shook it to call his attention as the
horses neared the road.
“Tom! For goodness' sake!” she gasped.
“What's the matter now?” her cousin demanded, rather sharply, for his
burns were painful.
“Toby, the Vanderwillers! What will become of them?”
“What d'you mean?” asked Tom, aghast.
“That poor cripple! They can't get away, he and his grandmother. Perhaps
Toby hasn't come home yet.”
“And the wind's that way,” Tom interrupted.
It was indeed. The storm had come up from the west and the wind was
still blowing almost directly into the east. A sheet of flame flew from
the top of the old dead tree even as the boy spoke, and was carried
toward the thick forest. It did not reach it, and as the blazing brand
fell it was quenched on the wet surface of the sawdust.
Nevertheless, the fire was spreading under the crust and soon the few
other dead trees left standing on the tract would burst into flame. As
they looked, the fire burst out at the foot of the tree and began to
send long tongues of flame licking up the shredded bark.
The effect of the drenching rain would soon be gone and the fire would
secure great headway.
“Those poor folks are right in the track of the fire, I allow,” admitted
Tom. “I wonder if he's got a good wide fire strip ploughed?”
“Oh! I know what you mean,” Nan cried. “You mean all around the edge of
his farm where it meets the woods?”
“Yes. A ploughed strip may save his buildings. Fire can't easily cross
ploughed ground. Only, if these woods get really ablaze, the fire will
jump half a mile!”
“Oh no, Tom! You don't mean that?”
“Yes, I do,” said her cousin, gloomily. “Tobe's in a bad place. You
don't know what a forest fire means, nor the damage it does, Nannie. I'm
right troubled by old Tobe's case.”
“But there's no danger for Pine Camp, is there?” asked the girl,
eagerly.
“Plenty of folks there to make a fire-guard. Besides, the wind's not
that way, exactly opposite. And she's not likely to switch around so
soon, neither. I, don't, know”
“The folks at home ought to know about it,” Nan interrupted.
“They'll know it, come dark,” Tom said briefly. “They'll be looking for
you and they'll see the blaze. Why! After dark that old dead tree will
look like a lighthouse for miles 'n' miles!”
“I suppose it will,” agreed Nan. “But I do want to get home, Tom.”
“Maybe the storm's not over,” said her cousin, cocking an eye towards
the clouded heavens. “If it sets in for a long rain (and one's due about
this time according to the Farmer's Almanac) it would keep the fire
down, put it out entirely, maybe. But we can't tell.”
Nan sighed and patted his shoulder. “I know it's our duty to go to the
island, Tommy. You're a conscientious old thing. Drive on.”
Tom clucked to the horses. He steered them into the roadway, but headed
away from home. Another boy with the pain he was bearing would not have
thought of the old lumberman and his family. They were the only people
likely to be in immediate danger from the fire if it spread. The cousins
might easily reach the Vanderwiller's island, warn them of the fire, and
return to town before it got very late, or before the fire crossed the
wood-road.
They rumbled along, soon striking the corduroy road, having the thick
forest on either hand again. The ditches were running bank full. Over
a quagmire the logs, held down by cross timbers spiked to the sleepers,
shook under the wheels, and the water spurted up through the interstices
as the horses put down their heavy feet.
“An awful lot of water fell,” Tom said soberly.
“Goodness! The swamp is full,” agreed Nan.
“We may have some trouble in reaching Toby's place,” the boy added. “But
maybe--”
He halted in his speech, and the next instant pulled the horses down to
a willing stop. “Hark-a-that!” whispered Tom.
“Can it be anybody crying? Maybe it's a wildcat,” said Nan, with a vivid
remembrance of her adventure in the snow that she had never yet told to
any member of the family.
“It's somebody shouting, all right,” observed Tom. “Up ahead a way.
Gid-ap!”
He hurried the horses on, and they slopped through the water which, in
places, flowed over the road, while in others it actually lifted the
logs from their foundation and threatened to spoil the roadway entirely.
Again and again they heard the faint cry, a man's voice. Tom stood up
and sent a loud cry across the swamp in answer:
“We're coming! Hold on!
“Don't know what's the matter with him,” he remarked, dropping down
beside Nan again, and stirring the horses to a faster pace. “S'pose he's
got into a mud-hold, team and all, maybe.”
“Oh, Tom! Maybe he'll be sucked right down into this awful mud.”
“Not likely. There aren't many quicksands, or the like, hereabout. Never
heard tell of 'em, if there are. Old Tobe lost a cow once in some
slough.”
They came to a small opening in the forest just then. Here a great tree
had been uprooted by the wind and leaned precariously over a quagmire
beside the roadway. Fortunately only some of the lower branches touched
the road line and Tom could get his team around them.
Then the person in trouble came into sight. Nan and her cousin saw him
immediately. He was in the middle of the shaking morass waist deep in
the mire, and clinging to one of the small hanging limbs of the uprooted
tree.
“Hickory splits!” ejaculated Tom, stopping the team. “It's old Tobe
himself! Did you ever see the like!”