Scott Burton, Forester

by Edward G. Cheyney

There was a murmur of disgust from the crowd and Bill voiced the general sentiment. “Humph, I thought we came down here to put out a fire, not to build one.”

The three men moved off into the woods, the lanterns bobbing weirdly over the uneven ground. The boys watched them dolefully out of sight.

“They say Diogenes hunted for an honest man with a lantern,” Bill mused, “but that’s nothing to those three guys going out to look for a fire. It must be a whale of a fire.”

The forest was full of strange noises which would have spoken volumes to an old woodsman. Every few minutes a sharp rending sound followed after a pause by a dull boom told of some old dead stub, the lonely silent sentinel of two or three centuries, undermined by the fire and hurled crashing to the earth by the wind, triumphant at last after so many defeats. The roar of the wind through the waving needles told of the violent struggle which the growing pines waged continuously with that same wind which would in the end hurl them down as it had just hurled down the deadened stub. A hissing roar like great skyrockets occasionally painted a vivid picture of a noble spruce turned into a torch for the sport of the flames. Violent snapping of the twigs and brush told of some woods creature driven from its home, and in its confusion making short terrified dashes broken by long intervals of shivering, startled listening. All in between these strange noises the absence of the insects silenced by the wind and smoke, seemed to produce a weird, unnatural stillness.

The boys had shivered around the fire for more than an hour when Sturgis appeared suddenly. “Well, I guess we’ve found her. Jones reports that she has already jumped him to the east of here and we’ll have to hustle to head her off. She’s in the park by now.”

They tumbled into the wagon again, and the big farm horses, whipped into a lively trot now, jangled back up the road the way they had come. Even yet no great amount of fire was visible.

At a sharp turn in the road where there was a considerable clearing, a scene was revealed that stunned them with a realization of the true state of affairs. The clearing was bounded on the east by a wall of flame, a bloody red, streaked here and there by the black resinous smoke. The brush was burning violently with a dull roar, and every few minutes the flames rushed with a hiss to the tops of the scrubby jack pines. At the north end the smoke streamed out under pressure of the wind almost parallel with the ground, a sooty black slashed here and there with disconnected tongues of red flame which leaped far ahead of the main body of the fire and licked eagerly at the resinous tops of the pines. It was a sight to send cold shivers up the back of the bravest man, and the boys gazed at it in awestruck silence.

On the left side of the road and within the park another fire crackled and snapped across a half-mile of front. It was seemingly entirely separated from the other fire a quarter-mile to the eastward, but a careful observation revealed a narrow trail of blackened stubble where an offshoot of the original fire had skimmed a corn row, jumped the road and started another conflagration in the dense brush within the park. Already it was beyond any hope of immediate control.

Sturgis drove into the brush beside the road and stopped. He waited for the crew to assemble before giving his simple directions.

“Here’s where you have to do it, boys. That fire has to be stopped today or this whole park will be wiped out clean. We cannot do much with it in the daytime without backfiring and we can’t backfire till we get a fireline to work from. I figure that we have enough lead on it now to make a break across the front of it before it gets here. It will be due here before very long. Every man must do exactly as he is told or he will run the chance of being burnt up. We’ll start in here at this road and run a trench to those lakes. Franklin has already gone across to see how far west it reaches. From the other end of the lakes we’ll have to trench on around it. It means many hours of hard work and it’s up to you fellows to show what you’re made of. We’ll eat a little lunch and start in.”