“It surely will get into the cave,” Liu said. “You see, the summit scoops down here quite a lot, and the timber line is almost to the top. The gulch below is quite high up on this elevation, still it is not so very high as compared with some of the summits to the north and south. So, you see, the timber line here is capable of getting up a good deal of a blaze, especially where the cañons are full of trees. The fire will come up here, all right.”
Ned darted away, was gone a minute or so, and returned with hands full of folded papers.
“What you got?” demanded Jimmie.
Ned laughed but made no satisfactory reply. After stowing the papers away in the numerous pockets of his borrowed suit, he led the way down the ledge, away from the cave he had first seen in his fall down the cañon, and which had proved so profitable to his search.
The air was now filled with smoke. The cañon below was not yet in full flame, but a column of destruction was creeping upon it from the south. It seemed to Ned that there were numerous small fires, though how this could be true he could not understand.
The boys made their way along the ledge without coming upon any of the men who had occupied the cavern. It was evident that the few left after the departure of the men with the Chinamen had fled before the clouds of smoke. The ledge wound up on the plateau from which Ned had dropped the night before, and here they paused to decide on some course of action.
The light breeze was from the west, so the fires below were in a measure protected from it by the bulk of the summit, but Ned knew that the heat would in time bring the air into the burning spaces with a rush, merging the little blazes into one gigantic one which might repeat the disasters of August, 1910.
Now and then, from far to the east, there came a signal in the shape of a gunshot. The faithful foresters were at work there, trying to head off the advancing flames before they passed beyond control. The place to combat a forest fire, of course, is ahead of it, and not where the red line is running through the sputtering timber.
“If I could get the aeroplane,” Ned said, as he looked over the country from the plateau, “I might get to the fighting line and do some good.”
“Where is it?” asked Liu.