OUT OF THE FLAMES
WITH the bursting into flames of the great pine tree so near the hotel
wing, a new danger threatened those imprisoned by the circle of forest
fire. Yet it was not so much a new danger as an extension of that
already menacing them.
“Quick with that hose!” cried Mr. Thorndyke, as his crew of amateur
firemen responded to the summons. “Hurry, men!”
“Can any of us help?” asked Mr. Damon.
“We’ll do our share,” added Mr. Nestor.
“You may have to—later,” said the manager, as he directed his men.
“This is an isolated blaze at present. It will easily be put out. But
the fire from below is drawing nearer. Unless the wardens and their men
can check it, I don’t see what is to become of us!”
By this time the water was spurting through the hose that had been run
out through a lower door. The hotel was provided with great tanks on the
roof, thus affording a gravity supply to different rooms. But the long,
dry season had depleted the springs from which water was pumped to the
roof tanks, so they were not more than half full.
Suddenly, just as the first sprays of water were directed at the blazing
pine tree, the forest giant exploded with a loud report. The heated
pitch and other sap within had reached a temperature where they must
expand, and they did so, rending the bark and trunk.
This explosion, which felled the tree, sent more masses of blazing
material in every direction, and for a moment it looked as if that whole
wing of the hotel would catch fire, even though the actual burning
forest was some distance down the mountain side.
“Run out another hose!” ordered Mr. Thorndyke; and when this had been
done, the blaze, after hard work, was sufficiently wet down to afford
temporary relief.
However, all this time the circle of fire about the seemingly doomed
hotel was slowly growing closer. The conflagration was eating its way up
the mountain, as well as down, but more slowly in the latter direction,
as the wind was sweeping toward the summit.
“They should make a back-fire!” declared Mr. Damon, who, with the other
guests, including Mr. Swift, Mary, and her parents, was watching the
progress of the fire from a veranda. “It’s the only way.”
“I think they are doing that,” said Mr. Nestor.
Mr. Swift said nothing, but every now and then he would look up toward
the smoke-obscured sky, trying to pierce the murky haze.
“What are you looking for?” asked Mary, coming to his side.
“For my son Tom,” answered the aged inventor. “He said in his note that
he would save us.”
“And he will, too! I am sure of it!” declared Mary earnestly.
“Then he must make haste,” said the old man in a low voice. “It is
getting hard to breathe up here. Don’t you feel the heated air, Mary? It
is getting closer—the fire!”
“Oh, I hardly think the air is any hotter than it was two hours ago,”
Mary answered, more because she wanted to reassure the old man than
because she really believed it. She felt a sense of oppression and she
did have difficulty in breathing, just as Mr. Swift had.
“He can’t be long now,” went on Tom’s father, his weary eyes scanning
the sky. “Do you see anything of an airplane, Mary?”
“Not yet, Father. But it would have to be a very big airplane to save
all at this hotel, even if he could land and take a few in at a time.
How do you think Tom will manage?”
“I don’t know. But he’ll find a way,” said the old man. “I’ll leave it
to my son Tom. He’ll know what to do.”
“Yes,” said Mary softly.
“If he had the big aerial warship that we sold to the government, that
might do,” went on Mr. Swift. “I wonder if Tom thinks of that? But the
warship is far away. However, he might get another big craft from the
government and come for us in that.”
“If he comes at all, I think it will be in the new dirigible,” said
Mary.
“Oh, Tom will come!” his father declared. “But he would not dare hover
the dirigible above the forest of fire.”
“Why not?”
“The gas in it would explode. It would mean death for all on board. But
Tom will save us somehow.”
With weary eyes, the anxious ones in the hotel looked first to the
efforts of the men below them, fighting the flames, and again toward the
sky, for the message Tom had dropped from the _Wasp_ had been picked up,
carried to Mary, and had been eagerly read aloud, so that all in the
hotel knew its contents and looked for the young inventor to save them.
How, they did not know, nor did even Tom’s friends. So they could only
wait and hope while the fire hemmed them in closer and closer.
The crackling of the flames could now be plainly heard by those on the
hotel grounds and verandas. Every one was outside, for it could not be
told at what moment some burning masses might be wafted by the wind and
fall on the roof, to set it ablaze.
No one thought of eating, though some of the cooks had prepared a
breakfast. A few took coffee, but it was no time to spend over food.
When the blazing pine tree had been well doused with water, Mr.
Thorndyke sent a crew of men with a hose up to the roof to watch for an
outbreak of flames there.
Meanwhile, Tom Swift and Ned Newton, in charge of the big dirigible, had
guided the craft until by afternoon it was directly over the hotel, with
the circle of fire ever drawing tighter. For a time the smoke was so
thick that it obscured the woods and the buildings, and more than once,
as Tom gave the signal to descend, such a blast of heated air, tipped
with red flames, arose that he had to increase his gas pressure and go
up.
“Looks as if we couldn’t make it, Tom,” gasped Ned, for some smoke had
gotten into the control cabin.
“We’ve got to make it!” was the fierce answer.
“My fortune is yours if you save my wife and children!” cried Mr.
Jardine.
“That looks like an opening,” Ned cried, pointing down through a rift
which appeared in the pall of smoke. “If the wind only holds that way
for a time, we can go down and let them know we have come to save them.”
“Yes!” exclaimed Tom Swift, and he gave the signal for going down.
Fortunately the wind held, and, for a time at least, the summit of the
mountain was comparatively free of the hot, white vapor.
The airship went down rapidly, almost as straight as a descending
elevator. It was now within a few hundred feet of the hotel, and
suddenly, above a temporary lull in the crackling of the flames, voices
from below cried:
“There it is!”
“The big airship!”
“Tom Swift has come to save us!”
Mary, her parents, Mr. Swift, and Mr. Damon heard the cries of joy and
hastened toward the rear of the hotel whence came the shouts and on
toward the ball field, the largest space around the hotel where there
were no trees or shrubbery to catch fire.
“Yes, that’s Tom!” cried Mary, recognizing the big dirigible. She waved
her hands and kissed them to Tom, but it is doubtful if he saw her.
Slowly the giant of the clouds descended lower and lower.
Then came a cry of despair from a crowd at the rear of the hotel. A
great mass of blazing material, matted together, came floating up, borne
by a strong wind and, landing in a pile of broken boxes and other débris
piled near the main building of the hotel, set it on fire.
“The hose! The hose!” came the appeal.
But before the men with the hose could run the nozzle of it around to
the new point of danger the dry wooden structure of the hotel, parched
by many days of hot sunshine, had burst into flames almost with the
rapidity of an explosion.
“The place is doomed now!” cried Mr. Damon.
“Only Tom Swift and his big dirigible can save us!” exclaimed Mr.
Nestor.
Leaving the end of the hotel to burn, and knowing the fire would soon
communicate to the entire structure, the guests and help gathered at the
ball field, looking up to observe the _Silver Cloud_.
The crowd had no sooner reached the place than flames broke out in the
trees and bushes around the ball field. So with one end of the hotel
afire and the underbrush at the edges of the recreation ground burning,
the guests were fairly hemmed in.
“Get shovels and dig up the field!” cried Mr. Thorndyke. “If we can make
a wide enough patch of bare earth the flames may not cross it. Dig,
everybody!”
Shovels were hastily procured and the men and even some of the women,
Mary and Mrs. Nestor among them, worked desperately to keep the fire
from their little patch of safety. It was an island in a sea of flames.
Tom’s airship was now directly above the flames and was coming still
lower.
“He’ll explode if he comes down any further!” cried Mr. Swift. “That gas
can stand so much heat and no more! Go back, Tom! Go back!”
But the _Silver Cloud_ came lower and lower, closer to the raging fire
that was now consuming the north end of the hotel. Below and all around
was a seething caldron of leaping flames.
The dirigible was soon within two hundred feet of the ground. Tom Swift
dared not go lower. But it was enough. He gave the word:
“Lower the metal cage!”