CHAPTER XXXIII
Bobby Kildare ran shrieking across the dooryard to the big bell and began ringing furiously. In the garage Joe and the cook lowered the platform of fire extinguishers to the car and clamped it fast. Helen was on the driver's seat, waiting for Aunty May who hurried toward her.
"'Phone Raymer at the mill to turn out everybody. Keep Bobby ringing and Milt will hear the bell. Tell him to send all men to me on lot eighteen—eighteen—south of the old cranberry marsh. Remember that: Eighteen, south of the marsh." She spoke slowly and very distinctly.
"Have Milt get Sim Burns on the wire and make him come here with men. Threaten him if he tries to lie down. You stay by the telephone when he is through and get Humphrey Bryant and have him send help from Pancake, if we send word to you we need it.
"All ready, Joe?"
"Let her go!"
The motor spun; the exhaust roared in the small building; the car shot forward and careening drunkenly rounded the house, throwing sand from the ruts and rocking the chemical tanks on its platform. With throttle open to the last notch the girl, heart racing with her motor, tore into the murk, the smell of burning pine growing strong in her nostrils. They crossed the pole bridge that spanned the river with a bouncing and a terrific clatter, due west, then north, slowing on the turns, into denser smoke with each rod traveled; to the westward again and Helen fancied she could feel the heat of burning wood in her face.
"There she is!" cried Joe.
The brakes set and the car stopped in twice its length.
They were on the ground in an instant. Beauchamp and Joe tugging at the chemical tanks, running along the north-and-south fire line and then plunging into the forest to meet the advancing flames. A muffled shouting behind them; a thwacking of a stick on flesh, and a patrolman galloped up, bringing his apparatus.
"Get in there, Thatcher," Helen said shortly. "There are three others. Take two tanks."
A brass cylinder in either hand the man sped away, the girl behind him. The flames had started from the western boundary of the forest and on this fire line, a half mile in, they could feel their heat, could hear the snap and crackle. The smoke smarted the girl's eyes as she ran forward; it bit her throat and lungs and nostrils.
The forest was a weird company of indistinct tree trunks, the nearest swathed in flowing smoke, those a rod away barely distinguishable. A figure moved before Helen, crouched, going slowly toward the north: Black Joe his tank upended and nozzle playing on the angry tongues of red flame licking along the ground, feeding on dead needles and duff, going swiftly up the stems of small brush, leaping here and there for a hold on a tree trunk, falling back, trying again—the spit of the chemical blotted tongues out, the duff yielded dense smoke instead of flame, the fire sputtered angrily as it was torn loose from its hold on firm wood—
She moved beside Black Joe without speaking, straining her eyes, listening. She heard a shout from beyond and a voice lifted in quick answer. The tank sputtered and went dead. Joe ran back and came with the other fresh one he had brought from the car; but before it could go into play the flames that he had beaten down had found hold again. Their roots were deep in that pitchy duff and he was forced to fight a second time for ground he had already won.
The girl left him and went on. The fire was advancing from west to east, spreading north and south in a fan-shaped area as the wind drove it on. She passed Beauchamp, who coughed as he told her that he, too, had emptied a tank and was covering the same ground for a second time. She came on the patrolman who had reported the fire.
All along she could see those hungry, reaching tongues. One had found hold on a dead branch six feet up a tree and was waxing stalwart on the secreted pitch. She seized a stick and beat it out, shielding her face from the heat with the other arm—and ran on, to see flames crawling up other trees, like nimble devils.
She heard a horse snorting loudly as he came near with a cart of tanks and, a working idea of the size and progress of the fire in her mind, she stumbled back to join the fighters who gathered about.
"Joe, Thatcher, Beauchamp; you handle the chemicals. I'll refill. You," to the other patrolman, "bring in the empties and take out live ones. Make every pint count. It's hot and running fast."
As she tore the lid from the cask of soda and opened the water keg, she planned her battle; three men to fight, one man to carry. A tank was not good for more than a hundred feet of fire front in this heat. Three hundred feet—She shook her head. She needed help!
Another patrolman brought his lathered horse to a stop.
"It's all in this block," Helen said, without stopping her work, "Take your apparatus straight ahead. You'll stay in this east-and-west line. The fire will be north of you and your job is to keep this flank from crossing the line. You'll have help as soon as I can spare men."
The man yelled at his horse. The frightened animal was trying to back and turn and had no terror of the whip. Helen seized the bridle and led him forward, then sprang aside as he lurched on. Her helper emerged. His eyebrows were gone, she saw. He peered close into her face, fright stamped on his features and stared so a moment before he gasped:
"They can't hold it. Soon's they get it knocked down—the wind—the wind throws her along again."
The crackle and pop of burning wood was louder, nearer, the heat more intense, smoke thicker—greenish, yellow smoke, coming in puffs that spread about her and swirled and clung to the ground and then shot upward—or rolled along among the trees.
Black Joe came on a run.
"It's hotter 'n th' hubs of hell! It'll go into the tops if we don't kill it—and up there once, she'll go clear to th' river!"
"I know, Joe. Listen!" From afar off a feeble, thin cry came through the confusion of heavier sounds: the wail of an automobile siren.
It rose and fell, approached and receded in the face of fire Bounds, but it was constant and seemed to be shrieking a warning in words: "Git outta the way! We're a-comin'—we're a-comin'—we couldn't stop if we wanted to—we're a-comin'— a-comin'—now!"
"That's Raymer and help!" the girl cried and laughed excitedly.
They came clanking through the smoke, Raymer and Goddard, Thad Parker and four others from the mill. They clustered about the girl, but before they could question, she was giving orders. One by one she assigned them to their work, Goddard with a crew to backfire from the next fire line eastward, Black Joe to go on a horse and circle the entire burning area. Raymer to the northern flank. They scattered and Helen, relieved of actual labor, turned her car about and drove back a half mile to a vantage point.
The snapping became sharp reports, like pistol shots. A freakish wind, set up by the rising heat, eddied about, slapping downward and up, this way and that, scattering brands as it went. For a moment a strange silence, then the popping again. Along the line of advancing fire the men worked, shirts smoking as they played their chemicals. Their hair singed, their cheeks blistered; lungs became raw and eyes streamed water. They retreated slowly, always retreated. They could not advance, could not even make a stand. Checked here, the fire found an opening there and worked into fresh fuel; subdued in this place, it gathered strength elsewhere, and all the time it became more aspiring, leaping higher on trunks, clinging longer to dead branches, running up the lichen-covered bark, licking for the green needles, falling back, waiting, gathering strength and trying again. On the flanks the advance of flame was slower, the heat not so great, the smoke not so dense. They could hold the fire from progress there— But that center kept on relentlessly!
From the tool cache Goddard brought his equipment and men ran along the first fire line to the eastward of the blaze, igniting the duff and brush until forty rods of fire worked backward against the wind slowly to meet the fire which came on toward it. Men paced the fire line, holding their tortured eyes open to watch for brands that might cross the strip and fall into the timber on the far side to start new fires. To combat this menace they carried wet sacks.
Another car arrived, driven by the clerk of Lincoln township, bringing more aid; men ran to the work on Helen's orders and the car drove off to summon others.
Black Joe came up on a panting horse. He slid to the ground and lifted his red, red eyes to the girl who stood in her car and gasped:
"It's a 'bug' fire! Somebody's set this on us!"
"Set it?"
"It didn't come in from outside, Helen. Somebody drug a lot of dry bresh in offen that hardwood clearin'. One man, by his tracks—must've worked all night. He tetched it off twenty rod from th' outside fire line—That's what made her hot from th' start!"
The girl fought down her rising rage. To yield to such emotion now would play into the hands of this incendiary. She must think of no yesterday, no tomorrow; she must think of one thing: this fire; on time, this hour!—
"Forget that, Joe! We'll get him later. Side lines going to hold? Back fire all right? Milt there? Where's the front of it now?"
He answered her briefly and mounted again but swung his horse back beside the car.
"If it crosses here," indicating the line where the back fire had started—"you've got Burned Dog swale to fight!"
"I know that, Joe—and we can't let it cross!"
"I wasn't tryin' to learn you nothin'," he said apologetically, searching her set face.
Centuries ago when glaciers gouged out this Blueberry country the ridges were laid in strange patterns. Burned Dog Creek, a very small stream, drained a thin ribbon of swamp in the depth of the pine. It ran nearly due east until, meeting the abutment of a ridge that lay between it and the river, it swung sharply to the northward. But from the face of bluff springs seeped and for two-thirds of the way to its pine-crested top the balsam, which lined the creek, grew—If fire should go down that swale, igniting the balsams it would run rapidly, it would shoot up the inflammable cover of that bluff and mount the ridge with a hold in the pine tops that could not be denied; and then it could sweep on to the river, perhaps even across the Blueberry itself, destroying utterly as it went.
If Goddard's back-fire should fail! They could make one more stand, true, but that next line of defense dipped through the first of the balsam itself and if living flame got that far their fighting this morning would have been in vain!
The draft of the conflagration sucked at the back-fire. It moved faster, burning clean as it went, its flame tendrils and smoke banners drawn against the wind by the increasing draft. The crackling had grown to a heavy mutter. The two ragged lines of flame drew nearer. At a hundred yards apart each moved as fast as a man would saunter; at half that distance they reached for one another, fluttering, sweeping across the intervening space, gathering both speed and height. A dull, increasing roar of ascending air sounded beneath the pistol-like reports of burning wood; the yellowish, thick smoke rose as it might through a heated flue—Flame touched flame at the extreme point and that contact seemed to give the strength which swept the laggard portions of the lines forward even faster. A tongue of flame found hold in a pitch deposit on the side of a tree; the draft swept it upward, giving it hold, made it secure there. A long creeper of live fire whipped into the branches dragging heavier flame with it—There was a sound like a great, savage sigh of triumph and a sheet of fire rose from earth to tree crowns and with a ripping, tearing, wailing fury of sound the tops burst into flame—
Trees rocked and twisted in the force of the draft. A mighty column of smoke spouted into the heavens, rising straight up, seeming uninfluenced by the wind and from it rained needles and twigs and small branches, all blazing, and from it came sounds of terror, sounds that went straight through the reason of strong men and touched raw emotions that had been buried for generations. Fire, man's first friend, had turned into his raging enemy, mighty in its wrath, terrible in its manifestation of power.
Men dropped their tools and ran. Goddard raised his hoarse voice in command to call them back, but he could not be heard—they fled, scattering as the fire leaped the break and fastened itself in the tops of the trees they had sought to safeguard! Thad Parker ran down the line and would have gone on into the forest, heedless of all else except the impulse to escape this fiend, but Helen Foraker caught him by the wrist and swung him about to face her.
"Stay here!" she cried, and shook him. "I need you. There's no danger to you and we've got to try again!—Won't you stay?" to another man, "And you? I need you!"
Others came up, singed, shaken men and assembled about the car as Helen started her motor. They recovered some of their balance when they saw that she was not afraid.
"Get aboard, all of you!" she cried and they scrambled up eagerly, for she was headed away from the monster that raged eighty rods from them—
She drove through the smoke, stopping at another tool cache, swinging into the next fire line, half a mile to the eastward. The men ran forward after Goddard, axes and saws and shovels ready for the new attempt. The fire which had leaped upward and swept onward with such initial savagery, hesitated when it entered the trees that stood above cool ground. No draft held it aloft there and a mighty draft dragged from behind. A puff of cooler air slapped downward, driving a point of the fire from the top in which it burned to the ground. It found hold in the duff about the trunk—The crowns about it burned out, the fire dribbled to the dead needles again. Once more men had their chance. The fire was again a ground fire, no longer breaking through the canopy of tops!
Along the new line of defense trees fell, tops into the forest. Axe and saw slashed and bit, leveling the outer rows to make the break from canopy to canopy wider—And to the windward of these axemen others again started fire to burn out and meet and check fire.
Burned Dog tumbled through the pine here and just before it reached the fire line its current slowed as it settled into the head of the swale, and the pine gave up to balsam and spruce.
Men worked like mad. Goddard drove them, tense and ruthless. Once a man hesitated and Milt struck him heavily, knocking him down, kicking him toward the work he had indicated. None noticed. The man got to his feet and went at the task, the frightful sound of advancing fire neutralizing his resentment. Black Joe was there, barking the oaths of rivermen as he drove the others into the work. The hot wind, rushing down the creek, bobbed the stiff balsams, lifted their branches up to expose the pitch blisters—The nodding, the beckoning of those trees, seemed to invite the visitation which would be their death.
Back in the face of the advancing flame where the chemicals had again been tried, men gave up. Human flesh and will could not stand before that blast. Unhampered, the flames leaped higher, ran faster before the wind, spread their front wider and their growing draft again picked up brands and flung them out over the heads of those who worked feverishly. Islands of fire appeared ahead of the main front. Smoke ascended from a dozen fresh points and men ran from place to place beating them out, but their strategy was disorganized, their forces scattered, efficiency lost.
"All hell can't stop it!" shouted Black Joe as he came up to Helen Foraker, who was dispatching fresh arrivals to relieve worn men. "It'll hit that balsam and go down the creek to the bluff. It'll go up that like an explosion!"
He started away. His last words echoed in the girl's consciousness, hammering at some hidden idea—
Explosion!—"Black Joe!" her voice was shrill and he wheeled. "If it goes up like an explosion, can't an explosion stop it?"
"Huh? What's—"
"Dynamite, Joe! Dynamite!"
"Oh, God help you, Miss Helen! God help you," he cried, with a new excitement, the stimulus of a fresh hope in his voice.
A car was there, its owner begging for an errand. He had brought men from Pancake, men who had scorned and scoffed at Foraker's Folly, but fire closes breaches, belittles differences and those he brought were now at work; this man awaited the girl's word.
"Take Joe!" she said to him. "Push him, Joe!"
The man sprang into his seat, glad to obey her orders.
Across the pole bridge they tore, past the big house, on to a dugout in the river bank. Boxes of dynamite were tossed into the car, a coil of fine wire thrown in and, holding a box of percussion caps high, Joe swore as he ordered the other to drive back.
Helen left her post for she could do no good there. Men were wearing out, they were deserting sneaking away under cover of the smoke and she kept among those who remained, a soaked handkerchief over her mouth. The roar of the oncoming fire increased; it commenced to mutter again and the back-fire, feeling the pull of that hot draft, leaped and ate toward its kind—
A sucking sound, a flapping, like an immense flag in a heavy puff of wind, a long-drawn wo-o-o-sh, and a great eddy of fire and smoke was sucked upward and scattered. It left the tops through which it had passed only singed but the brands it had lifted were snatched by the gale and swept along, falling, a thousand of them, into the balsam thicket!
A crackling followed, like a growing, harsh laugh. A million matches scratching; a thousand bull whips popping—A ripping, a tearing—The swale was afire and the flame, bursting from great puffs of thick, greenish smoke, exploding, leaping, swept on down the creek, melting all that stood in its path!
"Get Raymer!" Helen shouted, mouth close to Goddard's ear. "Send him to the top of the bluff—and come yourself—"
Again she sped with her car through the smoke, reckless of others who might be in her path. She went up a rising road, hot ashes falling about her and stopped, leaping out, calling aloud to Black Joe.
As well have whispered! From the crest of the ridge she looked down through the smoke-screened balsams sixty feet below to see the inferno beyond, sending up its torrent of triumphant sounds: the rip and tear of flame banners frazzled out by their own heat, the popping, the snapping, now and again a sound like a gun-shot; a mighty, breathy wailing—and all against the background of savage roar!
Joe was on his knees, driving his crow bar into the brink of the bluff. A half-dozen others were doing likewise, making parallel rows of holes among the roots of those pines that grew above the ladder of balsam tips on which that fire would mount.
Others took up the work and Joe, relieved, ran back to tear open the boxes of powder. His hands trembled and he had no ear for Helen. Now and then he glanced into that furnace blast from below and his lips moved soundlessly—Goddard joined him.
Thad Parker ran up, gibbering, an axe in his hands.
"It'll burn us all!" he screamed. "We can't get out!"
Some one grasped and shook him, but Thad would not listen. His eyes were those of a mad man and the cries that came from his throat grew inarticulate. He bit at the man who held him, tried to lift the axe and swing it at his captor. The other staggered away and Thad turned and fled into the smoke—
Joe and Milt fitted caps to the dynamite and Raymer came up on a gasping horse. He caught the idea at a word from Helen and began setting wires. It was delicate work, painful work under those conditions. Time sped!
The cars were backed out and down the grade, but Helen gave no heed. She followed closely the men who were making this, her last big play. The greasy sticks went into the ground, one by one, tamped carefully in their holes along the brink. For two hundred yards they were planted and when the last cap was being adjusted the furnace blast from below tore at the crowns of the pine trees above them with the strength of a tornado.
The girl was atremble as she settled herself beside Joe and the coil box behind a tree trunk, prostrate on the ground, screening her face with her hands from the heat. She could not speak, could not think, could hear nothing but that crescendoing roar from below. Black Joe crouched on his knees, skin blistering through his shirt, peered over the brink. He saw a streamer of flame leap upward through the broiling heat waves, wrenching at balsams as it seared them, saw another fork stab out, saw a solid wall of fire flutter and hesitate and then wrap about the topmost balsams, clinging there a split instant before it made its last leap—its leap into the pine above.
Through that bedlam of terror, Helen's voice cut like a knife: "Now Joe!"
She was thrown from her knees to her face because as that sheet of flame gathered itself for its jump into the pine tops, the whole bluff belched out to meet it! A thousand tons of loose sand were flung into the face of the fire. Outward and up and down, it struck, more vicious than the heat in its path, more powerful than the flame Trees on the brink rocked as the root holds that had endured throughout their life gave way. They swayed and twisted and three, one after the other, toppled over into that smoking maw!—
Smoking maw! The flame was gone. As a puff of breath will extinguish a candle, so that blast had blown life from the fire. For yards, the balsam that had blazed was smothered with dry sand. For rods, the fire was stripped clean from wood where it had found hold. The point of the fire was broken, gone. It was no longer in the balsam tops, no longer a menace to the pine above. It had consumed as it went; there was nothing left in the path of that which had escaped the full force of the explosion to feed upon. It would burn for days, perhaps, but it was down there, disorganized, where men could seize upon and fight it!
"Oh, God A'mighty!" cried Black Joe. "If Paul Bunion could 'a' saw that!"
"Herd back that crew!" choked Helen. "We can hold it, now!"