"When did you have anything to eat?" Ida Mary asked, as he drank the hot coffee and devoured the food ravenously, moving his hands as though they hurt him unbearably.
"This mornin'. Been working with that fire since noon; I had started for the chuck-wagon when I smelt smoke...."
"Lone Star, why did you risk your life to save a reservation full of homesteaders?" I asked him.
He stood for a moment with a chagrined expression on his smoke-scarred face.
"Cattle needs the grass," he replied as he stalked out and rode slowly, wearily away into the flame-lighted night.
The fire had broken out on range and government land off toward the White River country—to the southeast, where Lone Star rode herd. As the country for the most part was uninhabited, the fire had swept the plains for miles before the fighters reached it. Sparks and flames had jumped the creek, but by now the grass was burned back far enough on both sides so that the danger for this region was past.
The amused natives told how a man had jolted up on a stiff horse, a painting outfit in his saddlebag, to watch the fire. "This is great," he exclaimed as he plied brush and color. Then, as a volley of wild sparks shot across the narrow stream and went into flame nearby, he threw down the brush, rushed in among the fire-fighters, worked madly until the flames were extinguished, then went back and finished the picture.
"Who is he?" someone in the gaping crowd asked.
"The cartoonist from Milwaukee," a Brulé settler answered.
For several days longer the fire raged, with the air smoky and a red and black pall over the earth. Then it faded as our other terrors had faded, and was gone.