Lonesome Land (13 page)

“They say it’s a good ten mile away yet,” another woman volunteered encouragingly. “They’ll git it stopped, all right. There’s lots of men here to fight it,
thank goodness!”

Arline moved on to where a plow was being hurriedly unloaded from a wagon, the horses hitched to it, and a man already grasping the handles in an aggressive manner. As she came up he went off,
yelling his opinions and turning a shallow, uneven furrow for a back fire. Within five minutes another plow was tearing up the sod in an opposite direction.

“If it jumps here, or they can’t turn it, the creek’ll help a lot,” someone was yelling.

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 God, that’s awful!” He
did not shout the last sentence. He spoke so that only the nearest man heard him—heard, and nodded dumb assent.

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 grass 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 fit 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 glass, 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 NINE

K
ENT TO THE
R
ESCUE

T
HE FIRE HAD BEEN BURNING A POSSIBLE HALF-HOUR WHEN
K
ENT
, jogging aimlessly toward a long 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 grass 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 rockbound 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, passed 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 hell 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 passing, 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 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 grass. 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 stop 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, grass, 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 grass 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 grass, setting fire to
the tangled, brown mat which covered the coulee bottom.