"Beat that down!" called Dick Holiday's voice. "Never mind about that other. Leave that shed! It's done."
We came up, panting, to find the dear, familiar farmyard in a pandemonium such as it had never known before. It was full of people, and the sound of their feet and voices mingling with that deep, ominous roar of the fire.
Something was fiercely ablaze. Was—oh! was it? No, thank heaven, it was not the big barn after all!
A harvest so good had overflowed the great tithe-barn for which I had feared. Part of today's wheat had been stacked into a smaller shed, but a few feet off from the great barn. It was this shed that blazed and blazed, sending up clouds of blue-grey smoke, fountains of sparks, and that smell which was something between that of an autumn bonfire and of malt and bread.
Yes, it was England's bread that was being destroyed there before our eyes. But only a part of that afternoon's harvesting of it. For the other part a fight was being put up; the big barn, perilously near, must not be allowed to catch.
People had formed themselves into a chain to hand down buckets full of water from the canal that meandered by at the top-end of the farmyard to where the fire went flashing up, licking up even to the branches of the elms. Dick Holiday in his shirtsleeves, close to the taller figure of Mr. Price, was dashing water, bucket after bucket of it, not on to the flames at all, but on to the walls and woodwork of the great barn.
"Sand," I heard him call. "Sand in that pit over there. Mix it with the water!"
I scarcely know how it was that I found myself with one of my best milking-pails full of wet sand, racing down the yard beside Colonel Fielding. All together we were working presently, as we had worked before in the field. Even as I toiled strenuously with my pails I noticed such odd little details in the midst of the turmoil; I noticed the way Ivor and Colonel Fielding turned their faces, as they threw the water, away from the burning walls of the shed, now hot as a furnace; I noticed Mrs. Price's little flying feet under her grey overall; I noticed the frightened twitter of the birds who had been scared out of their usual roosting places in the hedge near by, and the angry calling of the rooks whose nests were in those elms. And on Dick Holiday's forehead, under a hank of his short, brown hair, I even noticed a great smudge of black from the charred wood.
I was standing near enough to him to see this when he, who had been looking up at the roof of the shed, grasped my arm and pulled me back a step suddenly. I thought he had not noticed who it was. But he exclaimed, "Joan, look out! It's going to fall in now."
And at the word the roof of that shed collapsed. It fell in like a house of cards, or like (alas!) one of the many French homes of which black ruin marks the trace. Up went a great spurt of flames, crackling and roaring to the skies again.