“I wish this wind would go down,” Greer said, presently. “As I said before, I’m always afraid of fire on nights like this. See! The wind blows straight off the distant ocean strong and steady, and a fire started out there to the west would run over this plateau and over the mountain like a wash of tide.”
“There’s nothing to burn on the plateau,” Jack said, glad of an opportunity to contradict the stranger.
“Nothing to burn!” Greer repeated. “I reckon you don’t know much about forest fires, young man! Why, it would burn the soil down to bed rock, even evaporate the water in the rock itself and crumble it down to ashes. A forest fire is no joking matter.”
The boys remained silent, looking cautiously into each other’s faces and both wondering how a forester, a man marooned in a great wilderness should be so exact in his speech, should wear such a shirt—actually a dress shirt—as they saw under his rough coat when the wind blew it aside.
“I rather think there’s more company coming,” Greer continued, seeing that the boys were not inclined to comment on his warnings. “A moment ago I saw a flash of light at the foot of the rise to the west.”
The wind was still blowing fiercely, but both boys turned and looked down the incline. There was a faint light there now, glimmering among the trees.
“It looks like a lantern,” Greer said. “And the fellow seems about to climb the hill. Good luck to him, in this gale.”
“It seems to me,” Pat said, “that the light we see is running along on the ground. If that should be a forest fire, there would be the dickens to pay to-night—and nothing to pay with!”
“That is not the way forest fires start,” Greer said, turning indolently in the direction of the divide. “That is a man with a lantern.”
The boys watched the glimmer below with interest. The man with the lantern, if there was a man and a lantern, seemed to be moving with the wind. Then, again, he seemed to divide himself, as the lower orders of life at the bottom of the seas divide themselves, appearing on both sides of a dark space at the same moment.