From certain heights Hester could see far down into the city of Centerport, with its countless twinkling lights. The forest fire must burn out long before it reached the edge of the city; but detached houses, here and there, were in peril—and many farmers got out their teams and ploughed fresh furrows around their stacks and buildings.
They rushed through Tentorville at a speed that made the dogs howl and the women run to the doors of their houses, leaving their suppers to burn. Beyond this straggling little settlement there were better farms. The village was not endangered by the flames, for there were open fields all around it.
At the next house the occupants had been warned by telephone; for news of the advancing fire had been wired from beyond the ridge, toward Keyport.
The better class of farmers were supplied with ’phones, and they were warned; but the man who had been burned out of his own place was interested in the other poor people—the tenant farmer and squatter class.
“Them fellers can’t stand the expense of telephones,” he told Hester. “And they work moughty hard and will go to bed airly. If they haven’t kalkerlated on the veering of the wind they won’t know anything about it till the fire’s upon ’em.”
Thirty-seven of such farmers and settlers did the rushing auto visit. Hester and her comrade must have startled some of these people dreadfully, for the auto dashed up to the little farmsteads with the noise of an express train, and the scorched man yelled his loudest to the inmates:
“Git up! Git up! The fire’s comin’. It’ll be over the ridge before midnight and this hull mountainside’ll crackle in flames. Git out!”
Then, at the first word in reply from the aroused inmates, the girl and her companion rushed on in their car, and sometimes before the people in the house realized what had passed, the car was out of sight.
For nearly two hours from the time Hester had helped the man into her car did she speed about the country. By that time both he, and the girl—and the gasoline—were about exhausted.
They pulled up at a country store where they sold gasoline, and Hester refilled her tank. There she telephoned home to her family, too. Joseph had come in on another auto and Hester’s father was about to send out a general alarm for his absent daughter.