The plowed furrows lengthened, the horses sweating and throwing their heads up and down with the discomfort of the pace they must keep. Whiplashes whistled and the drivers urged them on with much shouting. Blumenthall, cut off, with his men, from reaching his own ranch, was directing a group about to set a back fire. His voice boomed as if he were shouting across a milling herd. A roll of his eye brought his attention momentarily from the work, and he ran toward a horseman who was gesticulating wildly and seemed on the point of riding straight toward the fire.
"Hi! Fleetwood, we need you here!" he yelled. "You can"t get home now, and you know it. The fire"s past your place already; you"d have to ride through it, you fool! Hey? Your wife home alone--_alone!_"
He stood absolutely still and stared out to the southwest, where the smoke cloud was rolling closer with every breath. He drew his fingers across his forehead and glanced at the men around him, also stunned into inactivity by the tragedy behind the words.
"Well--get to work, men. We"ve got to save the town. Fine time to burn guards--when a fire"s loping up on you! But that"s the way it goes, generally. This ought to"ve been done a month ago. Put it off and put it off--while they haggle over bids--Brinberg, you and I"ll string the fire.
The rest of you watch it don"t jump back. And, say!" he shouted to the group around Manley. "Don"t let that crazy fool start off now. Put him to work. Best thing for him. But--my G.o.d, that"s awful!" He did not shout the last sentence. He spoke so that only the nearest man heard him--heard, and nodded dumb a.s.sent.
Manley raged, sitting helpless there upon his horse. They would not let him ride out toward that sweeping wave of fire. He could not have gone five miles toward home before he met the flames. He stood in the stirrups and shook his fists impotently. He strained his eyes to see what it was impossible for him to see--his ranch and Val, and how they had fared. He pictured mentally the guard he had burned beyond the coulee to protect them from just this danger, and his heart squeezed tight at the realization of his own shiftlessness. That guard! A twelve-foot strip of half-burned sod, with tufts of gra.s.s left standing here and there--and he had meant to burn it wider, and had put it off from day to day, until now. _Now!_
His clenched fist dropped upon the saddle horn, and he stared dully at the rushing, rolling smoke and fire. It was not _that_ he saw--it was Val, with cinder-blackened ruffles, grimy face, and yellow hair falling in loose locks upon her cheeks--locks which she must stop to push out of her eyes, so that she could see where to swing the sodden sack while she helped him--him, Manley, who had permitted her to do work it for none but a man"s hard muscles, so that he might finish the sooner and ride to town upon some flimsy pretext. And he could not even reach her now--or the place where she had been!
The group had thinned around him, for there was something to do besides give sympathy to a man bereaved. Unless they bestirred themselves, they might all be in need of sympathy before the day was done. Manley took his eyes from the coming fire and glanced around him, saw that he was alone, and, with a despairing oath, wheeled his horse and raced back down the hill to town, as if fiends rode behind the saddle.
At the saloon opposite the Hawley Hotel he drew up; rather, his horse stopped there of his own accord, as if he were quite at home at that particular hitching pole. Manley dismounted heavily and lurched inside. The place was deserted save for Jim, who was paid to watch the wares of his employer, and was now standing upon a chair at the window, that he might see over the top of Hawley"s coal shed and glimpse the hilltop beyond. Jim stepped down and came toward him.
"How"s the fire?" he demanded anxiously. "Think she"ll swing over this way?"
But Manley had sunk into a chair and buried his face in his arms, folded upon a whisky-spotted card table.
"Val--my Val!" he wailed, "Back there alone--get me a drink," he added thickly, "or I"ll go crazy!"
Jim hastily poured a full gla.s.s, and stood over him anxiously.
"Here it is. Drink "er down, and brace up. What you mean? Is your wife--"
Manley lifted his head long enough to gulp the whisky, then dropped it again upon his arms and groaned.
CHAPTER IX
KENT TO THE RESCUE
The fire had been burning a possible half-hour when Kent, jogging aimlessly toward a log ridge with the lazy notion of riding to the top and taking a look at the country to the west before returning to the ranch, first smelled the stronger tang of burned gra.s.s and swung instinctively into the wind. He galloped to higher ground, and, trained by long watching of the prairie to detect the smoke of a nearer fire in the haze of those long distant, saw at once what must have happened, and knew also the danger. His horse was fresh, and he raced him over the uneven prairie toward the blaze.
It was tearing straight across the high ground between Dry Creek and Cold Spring Coulee when he first saw it plainly, and he altered his course a trifle. The roar of it came faintly on the wind, like the sound of storm-beaten surf pounding heavily upon a sand bar when the tide is out, except that this roar was continuous, and was full of sharp cracklings and sputterings; and there was also the red line of flame to visualize the sound.
When his eyes first swept the mile-long blaze, he felt his helplessness, and cursed aloud the man who had drawn all the fighting force from the prairie that day. They might at least have been able to harry it and hamper it and turn the savage sweep of it into barren ground upon some rock-bound coulee"s rim. If they could have caught it at the start, or even in the first mile of its burning--or, even now, if Blumenthall"s outfit were on the spot--or if Manley Fleetwood"s fire guards held it back--He hoped some of them had stayed at home, so that they could help fight it.
In that brief glimpse before he rode down into a hollow and so lost sight of it, he knew that the fire they had fought and vanquished before had been a puny blaze compared with this one. The ground it had burned was not broad enough to do more than check this fire temporarily. It would simply burn around the blackened area and rush on and on, until the bend of the river turned it back to the north, where the river"s first tributary stream would stop it for good and all. But before that happened it would have done its worst--and its worst was enough to pale the face of every prairie dweller.
Once more he caught sight of the fire as he was riding swiftly across the level land to the east of Cold Spring Coulee. He was going to see if Manley"s fire guards were any good, and if anyone was there ready to fight it when it came up; they could set a back fire from the guards, he thought, even if the guards themselves were not wide enough to hold the main fire.
He pounded heavily down the long trail into the coulee, pa.s.sed close by the house with a glance sidelong to see if anybody was in sight there, rounded the corral to follow the trail which wound zigzag up the farther coulee wall, and overtook Val, running bareheaded up the hill, dragging a wet sack after her. She was panting already from the climb, and she had on thin slippers with high heels, he noticed, that impeded her progress and promised a sprained ankle before she reached the top. Kent laughed grimly when he overtook her; he thought it was like a five-year-old child running with a cup of water to put out a burning house.
"Where do you think you"re going with that sack?" he called out, by way of greeting.
She turned a pale, terrified face toward him, and reached up a hand mechanically to push her fair hair out of her eyes. "So much smoke was rolling into the coulee," she panted, "and I knew there must be a fire. And I"ve never felt quite easy about our guards since Polycarp Jenks said--Do you know where it is--the fire?"
"It"s between here and the railroad. Give me that sack, and you go on back to the house. You can"t do any good." And when she handed the sack up to him and then kept on up the hill, he became autocratic in his tone. "Go on back to the house, I tell you!"
"I shall not do anything of the kind," she retorted indignantly, and Kent gave a snort of disapproval, kicked his horse into a lunging gallop, and left her.
"You"ll spoil your complexion," he cried over his shoulder, "and that"s about all you will do. You better go back and get a parasol."
Val did not attempt to reply, but she refused to let his taunts turn her back, and kept stubbornly climbing, though tears of pure rage filled her eyes and even slipped over the lids to her cheeks. Before she had reached the top, he was charging down upon her again, and the pallor of his face told her much.
"All h.e.l.l couldn"t stop that fire!" he cried, before he was near her, and the words were barely distinguishable in the roar which was growing louder and more terrifying. _"Get back!_ You want to stand there till it comes down on you?" Then, just as he was pa.s.sing, he saw how white and trembling she was, and he pulled up, with Michael sliding his front feet in the loose soil that he might stop on that steep slope.
"You don"t want to go and faint," he remonstrated in a more kindly tone, vaguely conscious that he had perhaps seemed brutal. "Here, give me your hand, and stick your toe in the stirrup. Ah, don"t waste time trying to make up your mind--up you come! Don"t you want to save the house and corrals--and the haystacks? We"ve got our work cut out, let me tell you, if we do it"
He had leaned and lifted her up bodily, helped her to put her foot in the stirrup from which he had drawn his own, and he held her beside him while he sent Michael down the trail as fast as he dared. It was a good deal of a nuisance, having to look after her when seconds were so precious, but he couldn"t go on and leave her, though she might easily have reached the bottom as soon as he if she had not been so frightened. He was afraid to trust her; she looked, to him, as if she were going to faint in his arms.
"You don"t want to get scared," he said, as calmly as he could. "It"s back two or three miles on the bench yet, and I guess we can easy stop it from burning anything but the gra.s.s. It"s this wind, you see. Manley went to town, I suppose?"
"Yes," she answered weakly. "He went yesterday, and stayed over. I"m all alone, and I didn"t know what to do, only to go up and try--"
"No use, up there."
They were at the corral gate then, and he set her down carefully, then dismounted and turned Michael into the corral and shut the gate.
"If we can"t step it, and I ain"t close by, I wish you"d let Michael out,"
he said hurriedly, his eyes taking in the immediate surroundings and measuring the danger which lurked in weeds, gra.s.s, and scattered hay. "A horse don"t have much show when he"s shut up, and--Out there where that dry ditch runs, we"ll back-fire. You take this sack and come and watch out my fire don"t jump the ditch. We"ll carry it around the house, just the other side the trail." He was pulling a handful of gra.s.s for a torch, and while he was twisting it and feeling in his pocket for a match, he looked at her keenly. "You aren"t going to get hysterics and leave me to fight it alone, are you?" he challenged.
"I hope I"m not quite such a silly," she answered stiffly, and he smiled to himself as he ran along the far side of the ditch with his blazing tuft of gra.s.s, setting fire to the tangled, brown mat which covered the coulee bottom.
Val followed slowly behind him, watching that the blaze did not blow back across the ditch, and beating it out when it seemed likely to do so. Now that she could actually do something, she was no more excited than he, if one could judge by her manner. She did look sulky, however, at his way of treating her.
To back-fire on short notice, with no fresh-turned furrow of moist earth, but only a shallow little dry ditch with the gra.s.s almost meeting over its top in places, is ticklish business at best. Kent went slowly, stamping out incipient blazes that seemed likely to turn unruly, and not trusting Val any more than he was compelled to do. She was a woman, and Kent"s experience with women of her particular type had not been extensive enough to breed confidence in an emergency like this.
He had no more than finished stringing his line of fire in the irregular half circle which enclosed house, corral, stables, and haystacks, and had for its eastern half the muddy depression which, in seasons less dry, was a fair-sized creek fed by the spring, when a jagged line of fire with an upper wall of tumbling, brown smoke, leaped into view at the top of the bluff.
One thing was in his favor: The gra.s.s upon the hillside was scantier than on the level upland, and here and there were patches of yellow soil absolutely bare of vegetation, where a fire would be compelled to halt and creep slowly around. Also, fire usually burns slower down a hill than over a level. On the other hand, the long, seamlike depressions which ran to the top were filled with dry brush, and even the coulee bottom had clumps of rosebushes and wild currant, where the flames would revel briefly.
But already the black, smoking line which curved around the haystacks to the north, and around the house toward the south, was widening with every pa.s.sing second.
Val had a tub half filled with water at the house, and that helped amazingly by making it possible to keep the sacks wet, so that every blow counted as they beat out the ragged tongues of flame which, in that wind, would jump here and there the ditch and the road, and go creeping back toward the stacks and the buildings. For it was a long line they were guarding, and there was a good deal of running up and down in their endeavor to be in two places at once.
Then Val, in turning to strike a new-born flame behind her, swept her skirt across a tuft of smoldering gra.s.s and set herself afire. With the excitement of watching all points at once, and with the smoke and smell of fire all about her, she did not see what had happened, and must have paid a frightful penalty if Kent had not, at that moment, been running past her to reach a point where a blaze had jumped the ditch.
He swerved, and swung a newly wet sack around her with a force which would have knocked her down if he had not at the same time caught and held her.
Val screamed, and struggled in his arms, and Kent knew that it was of him she was afraid. As soon as he dared, he released her and backed away sullenly.
"Sorry I didn"t have time to say please--you were just ready to go up in smoke," he flung savagely over his shoulder. But he found himself shaking and weak, so that when he reached the blaze he must beat out, the sack was heavy as lead. "Afraid of _me_--women sure do beat h.e.l.l!" he told himself, when he was a bit steadier. He glanced back at her resentfully. Val was stooping, inspecting the damage done to her dress. She stood up, looked at him, and he saw that her face was white again, as it had been upon the hillside.