How the devourer would relish the pitch and resin oozing from the juicy bark! How secure it must feel, on those slopes never climbed by man, with the autumn rains months away, and the fire fighters like so many ants trying with axe and shovel to mark off on the hot forest floor a boundary beyond which the fiery tongues must not lick.
Had the wind not been in the other direction, they would have been overwhelmed with the smoke that billowed darkly till it could have been seen 50 miles away, the red sun scarcely lightening the gloom. Even where they landed, an occasional hot breath scorched their faces and set their eyes to smarting, while their winged ship nosed frantically up and away again before she should meet Icarus’ fate.
“Some day,” Radcliffe had told them that day at the rodeo, “the Forest Service Air Patrol, which serves now to give warning of the tiniest smoke, and so saves men and millions where every minute counts, will fight with glass bombs of fire extinguisher, whose trajectory falling from a ’plane in rapid flight will have to be calculated to a nicety, but which, delivered while the fire is in its infancy, will do the work of many men.”
The worst difficulty would be at night, when though the fire shows plainer, the pilot would have to depend largely on his own sense of equilibrium to tell him at what angle his ship was inclined. True, acetylene gas lamps properly protected from the wind could be made to light up the ground below when alighting, but at an altitude of even a mile, little can be seen of the landscape to guide one on one’s course. The 2,000-foot firs of the Sierra slopes appear but as green-black billows.
As the great ship raced toward the flaming forest, their talk at the barbecue raced through the mind of the Senator’s son. “Some day,” Radcliffe had challenged them, “you want to see Glacier National Park, with its ice-capped peaks and its precipices thousands of feet deep, its glacier-fed lakes and Alpine scenery. And of course you must all see the geysers of the Yellowstone, its petrified forests and mud volcanoes.”
“And bears?” Ted had laughed with a glance at Pedro.
“Yes, all sorts of wild animals. And some time you want to explore the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and the 14,000 foot peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park. By that time you will be ready to go to Southern Alaska and try Mt. McKinley, which is worth while not so much because it is the highest mountain in North America, (Mt. Whitney is nearly as high), but because it stands the highest above the surrounding country of any mountain in the world. Mt. Whitney is just an easy climb above a sea of surrounding peaks; you don’t realize the height at all.
“Then you know we have a National Park in Hawaii?—But Roosevelt,—or Greater Sequoia Park,—is going to remain an unspoiled wilderness for a good many years to come, with three great canyons larger than that of Yosemite itself.”
“Kings’ River and the Kern,” Ace had agreed, “but what is the third?”
“Tehipite.”