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.
The fire had been burning a possible half-hour when Kent, jogging aimlessly toward a log 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.