“Why, Tommy!” Nan choked. “It does seem as though there must be fire under this sawdust now.”
Tom brought his own gaze down from the empty tree-top with a jerk. “Hoo!” he shouted, and leaned forward suddenly to flick his off horse with the whiplash. Just then the rear wheel on that side slumped down into what seemed a veritable volcano.
Flame and smoke spurted out around the broad wheel. Nan screamed. The wind suddenly swooped down upon them, and a ball of fire, flaming sawdust was shot into the air and was tossed twenty feet by a puff of wind.
“We're over an oven!” gasped Tom, and laid the whip solidly across the backs of the frightened horses.
They plunged. Another geyser of fire and smoke spurted from the hole into which the rear wheel had slumped. Again and again the big horses flung themselves into the collars in an endeavor to get the wheel out.
“Oh, Tommy!” cried Nan. “We'll be burned up!”
“No you won't,” declared her cousin, leaping down. “Get off and run, Nan.”
“Where, where'll I run to?” gasped the girl, leaping off the tongue, too, and away from the horses' heels.
“To the road. Get toward home!” cried Tom, running around to the rear of the timber cart.
“And leave you here?” cried Nan. “I guess not, Mr. Tom!” she murmured.
But he did not hear that. He had seized his axe and was striding toward the edge of the forest. For a moment Nan feared that Tom was running away as he advised her to do. But that would not be like Tom Sherwood!
At the edge of the forest he laid the axe to the root of a sapling about four inches through at the butt. Three strokes, and the tree was down. In a minute he had lopped off the branches for twenty feet, then removed the top with a single blow.
As he turned, dragging the pole with him, up sprang the fire again from the hollow into which the wheel of the wagon had sunk. It was a smoking furnace down there, and soon the felloe and spokes would be injured by the flames and heat. Sparks flew on the wings of the wind from out of the mouth of the hole. Some of them scattered about the horses and they plunged again, squealing.
It seemed to Nan impossible after the recent cloudburst that the fire could find anything to feed upon. But underneath the packed surface of the sawdust, the heat of summer had been drying out the moisture for weeks. And the fire had been smouldering for a long time. Perhaps for yards and yards around, the interior of the sawdust heap was a glowing furnace.