At last at one o’clock they were allowed to rest and they fell asleep by the campfire like one man. At three o’clock Sturgis called them again.
They had to be shaken individually, some even required repeated applications, to bring them to their senses. Slowly they scrambled to their feet, still half asleep, groaning with the aches and pains which shot through their wracked bodies. They saw the men up and going silently about the morning preparations, realized that they had been favored with all the extra time there was for sleep, and choked down their troubles in silence. No one seemed to have anything to say, not even Bill Price, but it was the dogged silence of determination, not sullenness. The meager breakfast was soon over for they were running short of provisions, and they were ready to work once more.
“Are we working again or yet?” Bill asked musingly.
“Sorry I could not let you sleep longer, fellows,” Sturgis apologized, “but we can cover rods now to the feet we can make when the sun gets up. Dan will keep the men here to make breaks between the lakes and backfire as soon as it’s dry enough. The rest of us will go down to the south end of Josephine and see what we can do there. It’s a race for the north end of Niowa and we must win.”
The wind was already on the rise. On the rise and from the east, the worst possible direction. Sturgis placed his scattered line of workers, urging them to greater efforts, and took the trail he had come down that morning to rob Dan of two of his small force. They had already completed their short breaks across the narrow necks and were waiting for an opportunity to start the backfires.
“Can you do it with one man, Dan?” he panted. “It’s a race down to Nimashi Lake, and every man counts there.”
“I can try it,” Dan answered simply.
With his two recruits Sturgis hurried south once more, harried the poor weary workers to frenzied efforts and took up his own position at the south end of the line. Already the wind had fanned the fire to a heat that made close work impossible and they had to resort to the slow work of trenching and backfiring. There were still two hundred yards to go. Slowly the men began to come around from the rear to take up the new positions in front, and the gap was narrowed. Even at that it looked as though it would be impossible to head it at the lake, but at the last minute five men came up from the rear, Scott among them, and under Franklin’s lead fought the fire face to face. Clothes were burned and eyebrows singed, but they fought desperately. They beat the fire out of the last grass strip between the hill and the lake in one grand triumphal rush.
For the time that fire was safe. The reaction on the overworked boys was almost immediate. With one accord they lay down wherever they happened to be and went to sleep. Sturgis looked at them enviously. He had worked harder than they, and on considerably less sleep, but he knew that their apparent victory over the fire could be turned to a complete defeat by the passage of a single unwatched spark across that narrow fireguard. Only a weary patrol of the entire fireline for the rest of the day would make it safe.
He turned away with a weary sigh. “I guess it’s up to you and me and Dan, Franklin, to patrol this thing. I never saw a better working bunch of boys, but they are not used to it, and they are all in.”