This was hot work, for Sunday or any day. The smoke choked and blinded, and the air fairly scorched. Pine makes a bad blaze. What I had to do was to run back and forth along the fire line, crushing the dragon's claws. My shoes felt burned through and my face felt blistered, and jiminy, how I sweat! But that dragon never got across my part of the fire line.
The space inside my part was burnt out and smoldering, and I could join with Jed. There were two of us to lick the fire, here; but the dragon was raging worse and the two of us were needed. He kept us busy. I suppose that there was more brush. And when we would follow him down, and help Kit, he was worse than ever. How he roared!
He was determined to get across and go around that willow bog. Once he did get across, and we chased him and fought him back with feet and hands and even rolled on him. A bad wind had sprung up, and we didn't know but that we were to have a crown fire. The heat would have baked bread; the cinders were flying and we must watch those, to catch them when they landed. We had to be everywhere at once—in the smoke and the cinders and the flames, and if I hadn't been a Scout, stationed with orders, I for one would have been willing to sit and rest, just for a minute, and let the blamed fire go. But I didn't, and Kit and Jed didn't; all of a sudden the dragon quit, and with roar and crackle went plunging on, along the ridge inside the willow bog. We had held the fire line—and we didn't know that Jim Bridger and the Red Fox Scouts were in those willows which we had saved because we had been ordered to!
Then, when just a few little blazes remained to be trampled and beaten out, but while the timber further in was still aflame, Jed cried: "Look!" and we saw a man coming, staggering and coughing, down through a rocky little canyon which cut the black, smoking slope.
He fell, and we rushed to get him.
Blazing branches were falling, all about; the air was two hundred in the shade; and in that little canyon the rocks seemed red-hot. But the fire hadn't got into the canyon, much, because it was narrow and bare; and the man must have been following it and have made it save his life. He was in bad shape, though. Before we reached him he had stood up and tumbled several times, trying to feel his way along.
"Wait! We're coming," I called. He heard, and tried to see.
"All right," he answered hoarsely. "Come ahead."
We reached him. Kit Carson and I held him up by putting his arms over our shoulders, and with Jed walking behind we helped him through the canyon and out to the fire line. He groaned and grunted. His eyebrows were crisped and his hair was singed and his shoes were cinders and his hands and face were scarred, and his eyes were all bloodshot, and he had holes through his clothes.
"Fire out?" he asked. "I can't see."