WITH THE AIR PATROL
"Signal them!" chorused the three boys, acting on Norris's suggestion,
(flashing their distress with their pocket mirrors), while Long Lester
stood measuring the flight of the aeroplane.
His practiced eye also detected a faint bluish haze that rose behind the
ridge at the North,--a haze altogether unlike that which foretells a
storm. In fact, the sun glinting from the wings of the giant wings and
from the glacial-polished slopes beneath forbade that explanation.
Like most backwoodsmen, the old prospector said the least when he felt
the most. His lean body suddenly grew tense. "It's a fire," he told
himself. "An everlastingly big one, too."
"That's a DeHaviland," decided Ace, as the huge bombing-plane came
nearer. "Must be the Fire Patrol!"
A moment more and the buzzing apparatus began sinking into a "pancake"
landing,--fortunately, just above the wide sweep of the granite butte.
Could it be engine trouble, Norris wondered, or had it seen their
signals? Lucky they were on an elevation.
With the sound like a saw-mill in full blast, the great ship jolted to
terra firma, within shouting distance,--and hardly had she come to a full
stop than the boys had raced to her side.
"I say!" exclaimed a familiar voice, as the observer climbed out. It was
Ranger Radcliffe! "Where did _you_ folks drop from?"
Norris explained the marooned camping expedition.
Radcliffe's face was lined with fatigue and anxiety. "Big fire off
there!" he motioned. "Been directing a hundred men. Broke out in three
places, all within twenty-four hours, and not even an electric storm to
account for it. Want to help?" And as the little party voiced unanimous
consent, he proceeded to draft them in, at the Government nine dollars
per day.
He could have compelled their services, as he had that of a party of
campers down towards Kings' River. In a few words, his voice vibrating to
his high nervous tension, the young forest officer had them all thrilling
with patriotic fervor.
"Now get your things," he directed. "May have to fight it for a week! You
can turn your burros out to forage for themselves, and I guess you'll
find them again when this is over. If you don't the Government will
probably square it with you."
The chums swiftly retraced their steps to where the animals waited
patiently, removing the packs and sending the little donkeys down the
trail to better pasturage. They might wander, but they would be safe.
With their swift heels they could defend themselves from even a mountain
lion. And they were apt to keep to the mountain meadows, where was food
and water.
Their run at such an altitude had given Pedro a touch of mountain
sickness, and he had to lie flat till his heart beat more normally and
his nose stopped bleeding.
The big 'plane carried a relay of provisions for the fire fighters
already established, whom it had brought for the purpose from the Zuni
Mine. As corned beef and hardtack were distributed, the hungry campers
thought they had never tasted anything so good in their lives. Not even
the Thanksgiving turkeys of later years were ever spiced with such
appetites.
This fire,--or rather, these three fires, so mysteriously concomitant,
the Ranger explained when the boys returned, had broken so far from any
ranch or work camp that they were hard pressed for men to fight it.
"You fellows will have a mighty important part to play for the next few
days," he assured them, "or I miss my guess."
"Hurray!" shouted Ace. "Three cheers for the U. S. Airplane Patrol!" For
he knew something of the work started at the close of the war. Following
regular daily routes, this patrol not only detects fires and follows up
campers or others who may have started them, (carelessly or otherwise),
but in times of emergency carries the fire leader from one strategic
point to another,--where as likely as not there are neither roads for him
to go in his machine, nor even horseback trails,--till he has shown the
volunteer firemen how to trench and back-fire.
They needed some one, the Ranger said, to hold the top of the next
ridge,--between which and the boys lay that inaccessible canyon it would
have taken them days to have scaled afoot. By day they were merely to
watch for flying brands. Their chief work would come at night, when the
wind would turn and blow down canyon, and they might successfully
back-fire.
The fire had started in two places on the opposite bank of the Kawa, and
in one place this side of the river, and was eating its way along the
slopes with the wind which swept them by day. It certainly looked like
the work of incendiaries.
Ace begged permission to wireless for his little Spanish 'plane, in its
hangar in Burlingame, that it might be employed in some volunteer
capacity, and Radcliffe accepted his offer.
The huge DeHaviland required all of the flat surface afforded by the
butte, for its preliminary run. They were off with a roar. As they glided
across to the flat-topped ridge on the other side of the canyon, they
could see the ravenous flames climbing tall pines and firs, racing from
limb to limb, through the forest roof, devouring the steeps, doubtless
richly coated with underbrush and down-wood. The roar and crackle of it
filled their ears sickeningly, as they thought of the naked mountainsides
that would be left,--mere skeletons of barkless tree trunks, where they
had camped on brown pine needles,--smooth, silent, inches deep, soft
under their tired feet, dry as tinder and aromatic with Nature's finest
perfume.
How the devourer would relish the pitch and resin oozing from the juicy
bark! How secure it must feel, on those slopes never climbed by man, with
the autumn rains months away, and the fire fighters like so many ants
trying with axe and shovel to mark off on the hot forest floor a boundary
beyond which the fiery tongues must not lick.
Had the wind not been in the other direction, they would have been
overwhelmed with the smoke that billowed darkly till it could have been
seen 50 miles away, the red sun scarcely lightening the gloom. Even where
they landed, an occasional hot breath scorched their faces and set their
eyes to smarting, while their winged ship nosed frantically up and away
again before she should meet Icarus' fate.
"Some day," Radcliffe had told them that day at the rodeo, "the Forest
Service Air Patrol, which serves now to give warning of the tiniest
smoke, and so saves men and millions where every minute counts, will
fight with glass bombs of fire extinguisher, whose trajectory falling
from a 'plane in rapid flight will have to be calculated to a nicety, but
which, delivered while the fire is in its infancy, will do the work of
many men."
The worst difficulty would be at night, when though the fire shows
plainer, the pilot would have to depend largely on his own sense of
equilibrium to tell him at what angle his ship was inclined. True,
acetylene gas lamps properly protected from the wind could be made to
light up the ground below when alighting, but at an altitude of even a
mile, little can be seen of the landscape to guide one on one's course.
The 2,000-foot firs of the Sierra slopes appear but as green-black
billows.
As the great ship raced toward the flaming forest, their talk at the
barbecue raced through the mind of the Senator's son. "Some day,"
Radcliffe had challenged them, "you want to see Glacier National Park,
with its ice-capped peaks and its precipices thousands of feet deep, its
glacier-fed lakes and Alpine scenery. And of course you must all see the
geysers of the Yellowstone, its petrified forests and mud volcanoes."
"And bears?" Ted had laughed with a glance at Pedro.
"Yes, all sorts of wild animals. And some time you want to explore the
cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and the 14,000-foot peaks in Rocky Mountain
National Park. By that time you will be ready to go to Southern Alaska
and try Mt. McKinley, which is worth while not so much because it is the
highest mountain in North America, (Mt. Whitney is nearly as high), but
because it stands the highest above the surrounding country of any
mountain in the world. Mt. Whitney is just an easy climb above a sea of
surrounding peaks; you don't realize the height at all.
"Then you know we have a National Park in Hawaii?--But Roosevelt,--or
Greater Sequoia Park,--is going to remain an unspoiled wilderness for a
good many years to come, with three great canyons larger than that of
Yosemite itself."
"Kings' River and the Kern," Ace had agreed, "but what is the third?"
"Tehipite."
"Oh, of course."
"We wanted to go over the John Muir Trail right along the crest of the
Sierras to Yosemite."
"You've hundreds of miles of almost unexplored country! Enough vacation
places to last a lifetime! Rivers alive with trout! Bears! Cougars!" the
Ranger had commented.
"And rattlers," Long Lester had added grimly.
"And rattlers. And they're the only living thing we need fear."
"Not excluding range cattle?" Pedro had wanted to be assured.
"Not when you're all together. Of course if you were alone you might
break a leg or something that would leave you helpless, and you'd sure be
a long way from anything to eat unless you had it with you.
"But unless we look alive the Big Interests are going to wrest away these
beauty spots that we have set aside for our National playgrounds,"
Radcliffe had declared.
"That's just what Dad says!" Ace had remembered.
"And why? Not because they need the irrigation and water power of the big
falls, for they can have it after the streams leave the parks, but
because it would cost them a good deal less to secure these things of
Uncle Sam than it would to build their projects outside Park limits.
There isn't a beauty spot in the West that some commercial interest
hasn't designs on."
"That's one thing I mean to fight!" Ace squared his chin as the
DeHaviland whisked them to their particular ridge, a table mountain, or
butte, where half a dozen recruits had already been landed with tools and
grub.
"Sure seems as if these fires had been set," mused Long Lester, as
Radcliffe bade them good-by,--for he had to be in a dozen places at once,
that day.
"But who did it?" demanded Ace fiercely.
"No savvy dat kind feller," said a Canadian half breed, who was just
starting off with a pick. "'E's bad feller, dat!"
"Sure is!" agreed Ace. "I don't savvy him either,--any one who would
deliberately burn--_that!_" with a wave of his arm toward the forested
gorge, up which already rose a noticeable heat. The red tongues, racing
through the spruce and cedar tops, shone through the smoke gloom, whence
issued a distant roaring which was the wind created by the super-heated
stretch of territory.
To the left, a gleaming-eyed cougar crept through the shadows, himself a
shadow. To the right, a huge, furry looking shadow ran clumsily,
flat-footedly. A tiny shadow hopped from almost under their feet, and
above their heads flapped a small covey of lighter shadows. Writhing
above the dark tops of the doomed trees rose the yellow-gray smoke that
was their departing shades.
The faces of the fire-fighters were grimly blackened with smoke and
grime, their shirts clung wet with perspiration to their swelling
muscles, and their dry throats clacked when they tried to swallow.
"I'd sure like to find the fellow that started _that!_" muttered Ace.