All the next day the boys were busy as badgers making garden, sawing
wood for the cookshack, fixing up the tennis court and putting the camp
in shape generally. The gangs were well organized for so early in the
season and did their work quickly. Merton and Scott, who had scoured the
country to the northward in search of eggs and butter reported a supply
sufficient for the first half of the summer at least. They also brought
back with them two cows which they had purchased through correspondence
with the foreman. Night found them feeling very much at home, with much
of the preliminary work completed. Professor Mertz had kept a friendly
eye on them all day, showing them better methods in their work, running
the gasoline engine for the woodsaw and helping them out of difficulties
at every turn, but interfering very little with their plans.
The rest of the week was devoted to their real introduction to the
forest. At eight o’clock in the morning with their lunches on their
belts they set out with Professor Mertz, sometimes on foot and sometimes
in the scow, but always with the assurance that they would get all the
walking they wanted before they returned to camp. Occasionally a road or
trail would take them where they wanted to go, but more often they
plowed through the untracked forest, through densely tangled alder and
hazelnut brush, across spongy tamarack swamps or grass meadows, into the
fragrant thickets of balsam second growth or over the open pine ridges,
skirting the shores of lakes or clambering over piled up windfalls. The
only rests were when Professor Mertz waited for some of the stragglers
to come up for general consultation on some new species, often one with
which they had all been familiar in the classroom, but failed to
recognize in its new surroundings. Hour by hour these strangers became
less frequent and they greeted old friends enthusiastically. It was
fascinating work, and led them on mile after mile almost without
realizing how far they were going till they found themselves at four in
the afternoon some five or six miles from home, with a race for supper
ahead of them. Most of them were well used to walking but they had done
the greater part of it on roads or pavements, and they found this cross
country work a very different thing. It was only pride and nerve which
kept them up with the long strides of the professor as they “hiked” back
to camp; they all admitted being tired.
When Scott thought that the park was little more than twenty thousand
acres in extent, and that all their hikes had covered but a very small
portion of it he began to realize what a really princely estate he would
have if he could only fill those conditions.
Among the other things that they had seen on their trips, especially
when they were on the lake, were the numerous columns of smoke, thin
gray lines in the early morning expanding toward mid-day into great
black storm clouds which fanned out over the whole sky and cast a gloom
over everything. To the inexperienced boys the columns seemed always to
be in exactly the same location, but the woodsmen could see them
advancing, retreating, sidestepping, like trained fighters, and, knowing
the country as they did, could explain almost every movement. They
watched the fires unceasingly, for it was so dry that only a high wind
from the right direction was needed to bring any one of them down on the
park with a terrific sweep that would be hard to stop. The older men
prayed for rain to relieve the unheard of drought and put a stop to the
fires, but the boys longed for a chance to try themselves against those
great smoke-breathing monsters.
One evening when they had returned late from a long tramp, Scott was
thoughtfully watching a great black formless mass standing out against
the western twilight and thinking regretfully that it must be ten miles
away. There was no wind and the great wavering column boiled upward till
it seemed lost in space.
“Fire, fire, everywhere,” he murmured, “and not a spark to fight.”
“Yes,” said Morris, “and from the way the fellows talked last year you’d
think that they did nothing else but fight fire.”
The foreman, who was passing by the porch, heard the remark and stopped,
leaning up against the screen.
“Don’t you worry yourselves about not getting any fire-fighting
experience,” he said. “Two of the patrolmen ’phoned in this afternoon
that the fires in the north and west were bad ones. If the wind comes up
from those directions they’ll need all the men they can get.”
“Do you think there is any chance of a wind?” Merton asked, eying the
sky inquiringly.
“If we don’t have one in the next three or four days,” the foreman
answered, “it will be the first chance it ever missed.”
“Three or four days,” Scott grumbled in disgust; “the fires may all be
out by that time.”
“Don’t you fool yourself,” the foreman answered him. “Those fires are
not in the habit of going out of themselves even in three or four weeks.
Nothing short of a week’s rain or an army can put them out now.”
“I’ll bet if it does blow it will be from the south,” Bill grunted;
“there’s a conspiracy to do us out of part of our rightful education.”
As the foreman moved off chuckling, he called back over his shoulder:
“The wagons are all packed ready to start, and I’ll bet pop for the
crowd that we’re on the fireline somewhere in thirty-six hours.”
“Done,” yelled a half-dozen voices at once.
“Better sleep while you can,” the voice called back, “you won’t get much
at the fire. Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Sort of a poor bet,” Bill mused, “because he is the man who can order
us out; but I’m willing to pay up all right for the chance, if we have
to go ten miles to find the fire.”
“Well,” Morris yawned, “I guess he’s right about the sleep, anyway, and
I’m going to turn in.”
Everyone else seemed to be of the same opinion and they filed off to
bed. In half an hour the chorus of snores rolling up from the upper
porches bore witness to the fatigues of the day’s hike and complete loss
of interest in the fire situation. The stillness of the forest—really
made up of the countless small noises of the insects, birds, and roaming
night-walkers of the animal world—settled over everything. Not a leaf
stirred. Even the columns of black smoke which rolled up incessantly on
the horizon thinned out to a wavering gray streak as the dampness of the
night cooled the ferocity of the fires.
In spite of the stillness and the favorable prospects of a peaceful
night a faint light still glowed in the office and the foreman, ready
dressed, slept on a couch beside the telephone. About midnight the
lonely call of a timber wolf brought an answering hoot from an old owl
in a neighboring swamp, and as though in recognition of these gruesome
sounds of life a shiver passed through the leaves of the aspen trees. It
must have penetrated to the marrow of their limbs for they continued to
shiver more and more violently long after the reverberating echoes of
the night calls had died away. Here and there little ripples appeared on
the surface of the glassy lake. A dull roar to the southward, like the
groan of a mighty monster would have caused the city man to murmur
“Thunder,” and roll over for another nap, but to the foreman who sat up
wide-eyed in his couch at the first rumble, it spoke of the winds in the
pines and no gentle breeze at that.
“If there are any fires in the south, Jones will have his hands full.
And so will we,” he added, “if this wind keeps up and they don’t get her
blocked before morning. Well, I’m glad that it’s not from the north or
west.” And with that, after a long look out of the window behind him he
went back to sleep.
Already those menacing columns of smoke were answering to the call of
the wind. They no longer wandered hesitatingly upward in hazy fashion,
but bent sharply to the northward, stretching their covetous arms over
the doomed forest. The smoke rapidly increased in volume and blackened
the whole sky, while here and there a dull red glowed fretfully on the
horizon. The dew was keeping down the flames, but the wind was fanning
the glowing coals to a fury which needed only the help of the drying
morning sun to cause them to leap away like a cyclone over the whole
ill-fated woods. Under ordinary conditions such a wind storm could only
precede a rainstorm, but the drought had lasted so long that every
particle of moisture seemed to have dried from the atmosphere and the
dry wind seemed only to evaporate the dew and make the ground more dry.
Scarcely had the foreman picked up the lost thread of his dream when the
telephone bell rang long and violently. He was on his feet in an
instant.
“Hello.”
“Yes—Oh, hello, Long.”
There was a long pause as he listened. “Coming around east of Brown’s,
is she? That’s bad, isn’t it?—Can we head her north of Mantrap?—Think we
can. Well, I have the wagon here all loaded and we will leave here in
half an hour with fifteen men. We ought to be down there in two hours.
You scout her out till we come.
“Yes, I’ll bring ’em, good-bye.”
He hung up the receiver and slipped across the hall to call his wife.
“Come, Mamma, the fire is coming in at the southeast corner and we’ll
have to go down. You call the men and get the grub ready while I go call
the boys.”
His wife was too accustomed to this sort of thing to be surprised; in
fact, she had been prepared for it for several days. Sturgis, leaving
the house as she started to call the men, hurried over to notify the
boys and Professor Mertz, who inquired the particulars and promised to
join them at once.
A few minutes later a prolonged, “Tur-r-r-r-rn out” almost raised the
boys from their beds. A medley of answers came from all parts of the
upper regions of the bunkhouse: “Aye-aye, sir,” “What’s up?” “Who is
it?” “What happened?” “Is it a fire?”
“Yes, it’s a fire at the southeast corner of the park, and I want every
man I can get. The wagon will leave in fifteen minutes. Some of you go
up to the cookshack and bring the grub you find there down to the barn.”
He knew from the cries of joy and the general bustle that there would be
no delay on their account. He grinned to think what a different
reception his call for the next fire would meet. He hurried away to the
cookshack where he found Mike, awakened by the shouts, already up and
waiting for him.
“Where is she?” Mike asked cheerfully.
“Southeast corner,” Sturgis answered briefly, “and the whole outfit will
have to go. We’d better take all the bread and cooked stuff you have on
hand and they’ll probably want some more by tomorrow night. We’re liable
to be down there some time if this wind keeps up.”
“Aye-aye, it’s a bad one,” Mike assented, with a glance at the clear
sky, “and no sign of rain.”
“No,” Sturgis answered dolefully; “looks as though it had forgotten how.
Some of the boys will come up for that stuff,” he added as he moved
away.
The boys were so eager for the “fun”—as they called it—that they lost no
time in arranging niceties of dress. Some of them were already
scrambling up the hill towards the cookshack.
“This is some wind,” Scott grunted, as he panted up to the cookshack
door. “I wonder what they can do with a fire on a night like this?
Hello, Mike, when did you get up?”
“I got up with the wind,” Mike answered. “You can’t fight fire without
grub, so I knew they would be after me. There’s the stuff on the floor.”
“We _may_ come back sometime, Mike,” Bill said reproachfully, looking at
the small mountain of provisions.
“Yes,” Mike said serenely, “some of you will be back here tomorrow
afternoon for more grub. I fought forest fires before you were born, and
I know how much good victuals they can burn up. The wagon will be
leaving you if you stand here talking too long.”
By that time most of the boys had assembled. They took the hint, also
the supplies, and hurried to the barn in wild excitement. At the wagon
they met Professor Mertz who looked over the group with a grin.
“What have you with you?” he asked.
“Grub,” was the prompt answer.
“Well,” Professor Mertz continued, “all of you go back to the bunkhouse
and get your sweaters, coats, blankets and hats—soft felts if you have
them. I know that you want to travel light and think that because you
are going to a fire you’ll be plenty warm but if you do happen to get a
rest down there it will be cold. You may be gone a week and what little
sleep you get you’ll want to be comfortable.”
When the boys came back Professor Mertz hauled out a bag of lemons and
tossed one to each. “Here’s where we hand you each a lemon,” he said,
“but most of you won’t know how big a one it is till you get home. Keep
those till you need them. If you get dry when you can’t get to water try
a suck. It’ll taste pretty good then.”
They all clambered into the two wagons—one of them had just arrived from
the post office in response to a telephone call—and the expedition
started.
The boys were in fine feather and sang lustily every song they could
think of. For a long time after they had started, broken fragments of
the songs floated back on the high wind. When they passed the Lodge they
set up a mighty shout which made the few summer boarders who had
ventured into the woods so early in the season, think that they were
about to be the victims of an Indian massacre.
The thing which impressed all the boys most was the apparent lack of
hurry. They were used to seeing the fire engines tear up the city
streets at full speed and the slow plodding of the work horses seemed
the height of foolishness. Merton took advantage of his position on the
seat with Sturgis to inquire into the matter.
“Couldn’t we make better time walking?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” Sturgis answered, “you could make quicker time, but you’d
better save yourself for work later on.”
At last there came an exultant shout from the boys. A long line of fire
was visible on a ridge to the southward. The singing ceased and all was
suppressed excitement which one moment expressed itself in silence, the
next turned into a babel of wild speculations. The fire had appeared to
be very close when they first sighted it, but as they mounted hill after
hill and obtained new views it seemed to get no closer till a man
suddenly appeared in the road to tell them that they had arrived.
The air was loaded with smoke which made the eyes smart uncomfortably
but there was no other sign of the fire. The smoke intensified the
darkness so that in spite of the breaking day an object could not be
distinguished ten feet away. The boys piled out in the darkness eager
for orders and were somewhat disappointed when Sturgis told them to
build a fire and sleep if they could. “We’ll size up the fire and be
back as soon as we can tell what to do.”
There was a murmur of disgust from the crowd and Bill voiced the general
sentiment. “Humph, I thought we came down here to put out a fire, not to
build one.”
The three men moved off into the woods, the lanterns bobbing weirdly
over the uneven ground. The boys watched them dolefully out of sight.
“They say Diogenes hunted for an honest man with a lantern,” Bill mused,
“but that’s nothing to those three guys going out to look for a fire. It
must be a whale of a fire.”
The forest was full of strange noises which would have spoken volumes to
an old woodsman. Every few minutes a sharp rending sound followed after
a pause by a dull boom told of some old dead stub, the lonely silent
sentinel of two or three centuries, undermined by the fire and hurled
crashing to the earth by the wind, triumphant at last after so many
defeats. The roar of the wind through the waving needles told of the
violent struggle which the growing pines waged continuously with that
same wind which would in the end hurl them down as it had just hurled
down the deadened stub. A hissing roar like great skyrockets
occasionally painted a vivid picture of a noble spruce turned into a
torch for the sport of the flames. Violent snapping of the twigs and
brush told of some woods creature driven from its home, and in its
confusion making short terrified dashes broken by long intervals of
shivering, startled listening. All in between these strange noises the
absence of the insects silenced by the wind and smoke, seemed to produce
a weird, unnatural stillness.
The boys had shivered around the fire for more than an hour when Sturgis
appeared suddenly. “Well, I guess we’ve found her. Jones reports that
she has already jumped him to the east of here and we’ll have to hustle
to head her off. She’s in the park by now.”
They tumbled into the wagon again, and the big farm horses, whipped into
a lively trot now, jangled back up the road the way they had come. Even
yet no great amount of fire was visible.
At a sharp turn in the road where there was a considerable clearing, a
scene was revealed that stunned them with a realization of the true
state of affairs. The clearing was bounded on the east by a wall of
flame, a bloody red, streaked here and there by the black resinous
smoke. The brush was burning violently with a dull roar, and every few
minutes the flames rushed with a hiss to the tops of the scrubby jack
pines. At the north end the smoke streamed out under pressure of the
wind almost parallel with the ground, a sooty black slashed here and
there with disconnected tongues of red flame which leaped far ahead of
the main body of the fire and licked eagerly at the resinous tops of the
pines. It was a sight to send cold shivers up the back of the bravest
man, and the boys gazed at it in awestruck silence.
On the left side of the road and within the park another fire crackled
and snapped across a half-mile of front. It was seemingly entirely
separated from the other fire a quarter-mile to the eastward, but a
careful observation revealed a narrow trail of blackened stubble where
an offshoot of the original fire had skimmed a corn row, jumped the road
and started another conflagration in the dense brush within the park.
Already it was beyond any hope of immediate control.
Sturgis drove into the brush beside the road and stopped. He waited for
the crew to assemble before giving his simple directions.
“Here’s where you have to do it, boys. That fire has to be stopped today
or this whole park will be wiped out clean. We cannot do much with it in
the daytime without backfiring and we can’t backfire till we get a
fireline to work from. I figure that we have enough lead on it now to
make a break across the front of it before it gets here. It will be due
here before very long. Every man must do exactly as he is told or he
will run the chance of being burnt up. We’ll start in here at this road
and run a trench to those lakes. Franklin has already gone across to see
how far west it reaches. From the other end of the lakes we’ll have to
trench on around it. It means many hours of hard work and it’s up to you
fellows to show what you’re made of. We’ll eat a little lunch and start
in.”
The lunch was hastily pulled from the wagon and gulped in silence. The
boys were at last convinced that something serious was really going on.
In ten minutes they picked up their tools ready to start. Sturgis strung
them out rather close together on a line leading to the lakes and
himself disappeared into the brush to the westward.
For a while the boys worked in silence digging their little trenches and
spreading the dirt on the leaves on the side toward the fire. When no
immediate signs of the fire appeared they began to relax a little and
call to one another.
“Do you really believe that fire can burn clear up here by this
afternoon?” Scott called to Merton who was working next to him.
“Search me,” Merton called back. “Sturgis and Dan seem to think so and
they must know. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”
“No, not if we can judge by the way it was traveling this morning.
Still, it was going some on the other side of that clearing.”
They had just about finished the ditch assigned them when Sturgis
appeared again with Dan and two of the men.
“You haven’t any time to lose, fellows. Start the backfire there right
at the edge of the trench. Then watch it like a hawk to see that no
sparks blow over on you.”
He lighted a handful of leaves with a match and thrust them into the
litter to start the fire in the brush. It was not a difficult task. The
dry leaves and brush ignited readily and the fire spread rapidly. By
picking up bunches of burning leaves and carrying them a little farther
along the line the fire was soon spread over the entire distance from
the road to the lakes. It ate back slowly against the wind and sparks
were continually jumping the narrow space across the little break. Nor
were they as easily handled as they had been in the early morning. Every
spark which landed started a fire immediately and several times fires
were started in dead pinetops which required the whole force to put them
out. Dan and the men aided in the work where they were needed.
The boys found it hot and exciting work. The lack of sleep the night
before, the ride in the springless wagon and the early morning work were
beginning to tell on their untried muscles. Gradually as the front of
fire crawled back farther from the trench fewer sparks were carried
across and they were enabled to devote part of their time to putting out
the dead stubs and wiping out every trace of inflammable material in the
burned area.
The backfire had burned some hundred feet from the trench and yet there
was no sign of the approach of the main fire other than the thick pall
of smoke which the wind drove down close to the ground. It irritated
their nostrils and stung their eyes, especially the smoke from the
hardwood brush in the backfire, till the tears streamed down their
faces.
Scott found himself enjoying a few minutes rest near Dan. “It seems as
though this backfire would burn up more of the forest than the other
one. Couldn’t you start it closer to the main fire?” he asked.
“You ain’t any too far away from it now,” Dan answered. “Listen.”
The crackling of the backfire near at hand made it hard to distinguish
more distant sounds, but Scott could hear a dull roar which seemed to
dominate everything like the base viol in an enormous orchestra and it
was apparently growing rapidly louder. The dull boom of falling trees
became more and more frequent. Suddenly, as he listened, this indistinct
roar swelled to a terrific burst of thunder. It was like to nothing he
had ever heard before, and yet in it he recognized the elements of a
great fire, the same sound that he had heard in a big fireplace, but
magnified so tremendously that it was almost beyond comprehension. His
instinct was to run, run anywhere, no matter where, but he stood there
too terrified to move.
[Illustration: His instinct was to run ... but he stood there too
terrified to move.]
“Ain’t she going some now?”
The calm voice close beside him brought him to his senses and the sight
of Dan gazing unmoved at the opposite hill reassured him. He shuddered
to think how near he had come to disgracing himself and laying himself
open to the everlasting jibes of Bill Price. He felt the blood coming
back into his pale face and was thankful for the soot which covered it.
He tried to look unconcerned, but the frequent bursts of ever increased
fury on the other side of the hill made him start in spite of himself.
“Will that little line of burned brush stop such a fire as that?” he
asked as calmly as he could.
“Nothing would stop it up there,” Dan answered, “but she’ll slow up some
when she gets to the top of that hill. How about starting the backfire a
little closer to it?” he grinned.
Before Scott could answer the taunt the fire burst over the entire
length of the ridge in front of them with one mighty, deafening roar and
the red flames shot a hundred feet in the air. It was a sublime sight,
those red flames shooting wildly up through the dense pall of black
smoke but Scott would have felt more comfortable a mile or two away. The
scant two hundred yards to the top of that ridge seemed as nothing in
the face of that raging conflagration. A deer maddened with fright and
blinded by the smoke, bursting through the backfire and dashing close to
him in its flight, almost threw him into a panic.
“Poor chap,” Dan murmured, looking after the fleeing deer, “he’s safe
now, but the wolves will be eating many a roast partridge and quill pig
back in there about next week.”
The rush of the fire died as suddenly as it had started. Only for a few
minutes the flames raged furiously along the brow of the hill, then it
dropped down to the ground and became a mere brush fire, crawling slowly
down the slope to meet the backfire which was already creeping close to
the foot of the hill. Ominous crackling, snapping and booming told of
the destructive work going on beyond the ridge, but the mighty initial
rush of the flames was over. The blast of hot air made the sting of the
smoke almost unbearable, and it hastened the burning of the backfire. It
swept up the hill with a speed and roar which would, a few minutes
before, have seemed marvelous but now in comparison with that fury of
the main fire driven by that furnace heat seemed but a paltry bonfire.
The fronts of the two fires met, consumed whatever was within their
reach and died away to a few smoldering logs.
Sturgis appeared once more, this time from the direction of the road
where he had been scouting to the eastward to see what progress the fire
was making outside of the park. He addressed himself to Dan.
“That fire that just came up over the hill crossed the road from the
eastward just north of Alcohol Lake away ahead of the fire we saw in the
Park. Good thing we did not try to head it farther down. The fire on the
other side of the road is still a half-mile south.”
“What made her go so much faster inside?” Dan objected.
“Don’t you remember that tangle of dead brush and slashings between here
and Alcohol?” Sturgis asked. “That’s what did it. They have been burned
up on the outside. You take Pat and Phil and see that the fire does not
cross the road behind us. Let Phil take the teams up to the Lodge. I
think maybe you can stop that outside fire at the turn of the road. It’s
four o’clock and she’ll begin to run a little slower before long.”
“Leave that to us,” Dan answered confidently; “she’ll never get in
behind you.”
“All right,” said Sturgis, “I’ll get the boys together over there at the
lake for lunch and by that time Franklin ought to be back.”
Scott went out with Sturgis to the wagons to get the lunch and they
carried it over to the little lakes, collecting the fellows as they
went. It was a tired, hungry crew that sat around the campfire and
swapped adventures.
“When I saw that fire this morning,” Bill Price said, “I thought those
fellows last year were telling us some fairy stories, but when I heard
them feeding the lions over back of that ridge and saw the fireworks on
top of the hill I concluded they had never been to a forest fire. How
did you fellows feel over there in the brush when that little inferno
stunt was pulled off?”
Scott did not mind telling his sensations as long as he had not yielded
to them and he found most of the others had felt about the same way.
“Strange,” Bill said, “all you fellows felt like running. Such a thing
never occurred to me, but,” he added, with a grin, “I pulled up a
four-inch sapling trying to keep from jumping in this lake.”
“I wonder if we’ll be going home now?” Greenleaf asked, as he stretched
wearily out on the flat of his back.
“No,” Scott said, “Sturgis sent the wagons up to the Lodge just before
he came over here.”
“I suppose we’ll have to patrol this line all night,” Spencer grunted.
“Where’s Sturgis now?”
“Went west again.”
“Holy mackinaw!” Bill exclaimed. “That man has walked just one thousand
miles since morning. _I’m_ going to sleep.”