“Lay me to rest in Shelt’ring Flame, Oh—Master of the Hidden Fire!”
And, lo! in a moment it was a consuming fire they were called upon to fight.
A fire—the realization swept these twenty chips of that grand old block called Woman, like a wind which made their teeth chatter—a fire which had unusual elements of horror in it.
“The Pasture! The Sidehill! The Horses!... Revel!” The last blanched cry came from Una.
“If—the grass catches, they’d have hard work to save them. And the farmer—the farmer is away—at Bennington. And his assistant was kicked by a horse, has a broken leg. Only his son, Sanbie—seventeen!... Long before help could come from the Fire Warden—anywhere.... Girls! Quick! Dress! ‘Up to us’!”
They were scrambling into their clothes again in a hurry, even as the Guardian spoke.
“Plen-ty of water! But the stream’s oh! a hundred feet from the shed,” panted Terry Ross, Assistant Guardian, helping Dorothy into her sweater—then tugging on Una’s, fine and soft as the figurative cotton wool in which this girl-heiress had been always wrapped. “Buckets, girls! Every bucket you can find!”
“Only—four!” Pemrose’s eyes in the emergency had the blue of the blind, or bottled gentian, cowering in the smoke without,—the heavy reek driving upon fickle gusts up the mountain or across it, now with the awful carmine on its wings.
Girls moaned softly at the sight. But there was no confusion. They were accustomed to fire drill.
“Our camp may go, if it spreads up the mountain. But—the horses!... Brooms, too, to beat out the fire; dip them, wet them, in the stream, as you run! Scrub—evergreen scrub—that’s good for beating out a brush fire; break it off as you pass.... Could it, possibly, have been that awful lightning?”
“The storm last night! Nonsense!” Thus Terry Ross, Assistant Guardian, answered the excited chorus, which had in it no disorder. “The fire seed couldn’t have smouldered so long. The barn we saw blazed right off. But the wood of the shed—that may have been damp, still, from the deluge—didn’t dry up like the scrub and grass ... caused the heavy smoke. But—now!”
Now the flames were rising red-mad—and gaining every moment.
Pine, spruce, hemlock-scrub, the girls tore it off, broke it off as they ran, those who, at the Guardian’s heels, were not armed with buckets or brooms—in six minutes from the alarm the vanguard had reached the corner of the Long Pasture, the eastern corner where the tool shed, a gray twenty by twenty structure, had withstood gales for forty years.