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.

“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.”