It seemed all aglare with fire and surging with men. The still itself was the centre of the conflagration. The wooden platform around the retort had already been burned away, and the flames were shooting high from the turpentine-soaked timbers; but that blaze was trifling compared to the roaring blast of fire that rose from the barrels of rosin. Three or four dozen of them were ablaze at once. The barrels had burst, and the molten rosin was running into a great lake of flame that spread and flowed like lava. A dozen negroes were throwing sand on it with shovels, but the flaming liquid splashed so dangerously that they had to give up the attempt.
Joe heard Burnam’s voice roaring commands. A gang under his direction was pulling down several of the cabins nearest the burning still. Another gang was carrying supplies out of the commissary—high combustibles, tins of kerosene, boxes of cartridges, buckets of lard. The black, excited faces of the negroes rushing about in the red glare made the wildest scene that Joe had ever beheld.
He rushed forward ready to lend a hand at anything, but the pool of burning rosin caught his eye first. It was overflowing into the little creek that crossed the camp-space; the rosin floated flaming on the water, so that a burning current was beginning to stream down toward the roadway.
No one seemed to have noticed that orange rivulet of fire, but Joe remembered the barrels of turpentine spirit on the platform by the road. The little creek flowed right under that platform.
Joe caught an excited negro by the collar as he rushed past.
“Go tell Burnam to send some men down to the road right away to look after that spirits!” he cried, and darted himself in the direction of the threatened barrels.
The platform was eighty yards from the edge of the camp, and pines screened it from the glare of the fire. Three of the heavy posts that supported it stood in the stream, which formed a sort of pool among them. To Joe’s relief, everything seemed blindly dark. The flood of fire had not yet come down, but he had scarcely reached the spot when a lump of blazing, unmelted rosin came drifting down, and lodged right against one of the pine posts. He thrust it under water and extinguished it; but within a minute several more lumps came flaming down, followed by a stream of burning fluid that hissed and smoked on the surface of the running water.
Joe had picked up a shovel as he ran down, and now he cautiously flung sand on the water. Fire spattered fiercely in all directions. The dry brush along the road ignited, but he was able to beat it out. Running up to the top of the bank, he yelled at the top of his voice.
“Here! This way! Help!”
No one answered; no one came. His voice was totally lost in that shouting and uproar. No doubt the scared negro had forgotten to give Burnam his message. He started to run for help himself, when a backward glance showed him a tongue of flame licking up one of the posts of the platform.