CHAPTER XIX.
STRANDS IN THE COIL.
Stripped to the waist, in the reek and grime of smoke and sweat, the men who rushed to the burning store fought with the flames till the dawn.
The country was parched with the drought, and the grass was as dry as hay; the fences would blaze in long lines of flame if once they were alight; the standing trees with their drooping leaves were full of oily sap, and if once the fire reached the open bush, it would sweep for a hundred miles. And each man knew what that would mean; each man knew how the flames would roar as they leapt from tree to tree; each man knew how the fire would glare as it caught the sun-dried grass; how overhead, and a mile in front, the whirling columns of smoke would roll, choking, smothering, blinding, till the blood-red glare showed fierce behind, and everything with life had fled, or stayed and swelled the ashes, on the desolate, blackened track.
The store was burned to a heap of cinders with all its contents, for the men let it burn, having no water to throw on it, and no time to use the water even if the tanks had all been full. It was not to save the store that they fought; it was not to put the fire out that they toiled and battled through the night. It was to keep the fire from spreading; to stamp it out as it ran, in long snake-like lines, licking up the withered grass; to beat it out as it flamed along the fences; or to hold it as it blazed out in a raging fury where a spark fell upon the inflammable foliage of the gums. Boughs stripped from saplings; sacks tied to long, thin sticks; even the coats off their backs,—were the weapons used in the fight; for unless the enemy were defeated at the outset, a smoking waste of charred desolation would be all that there was of Birralong and the district when again the sun came up.
But the fight was won, and when dawn came it only showed the heap of wood ash and twisted sheets of galvanized iron—which was all that remained of Marmot's store—and streaks of black running out into the paddock beyond and along the fences, with now and again a tree either leafless and charred, or with the leaves brown and scorched, showing where the fire had for a moment obtained a footing and striven to gain a hold, from whence it could spread in every direction, to reap, with its sickles of flame, the rich harvest in a wild, unrestrained orgy and blast, not only Nature's, but man's, handiwork into a dreary sadness of blackened desolation. The men, having won, went back to the Rest, with their throats parched and aching, their eyes smarting from the smoke and the dust, and their skins grimed and clammy.
"It's a bad job for me," Marmot exclaimed, when, with the trouble in their throats removed, the men reassembled at the Rest, where Peters and Tony and Morton had already returned; "it's a bad job for me, but it's nothing to what would have been if the blaze had got away. A bush fire in the district now would be ruin, black, staring ruin, to every one, and death to many."