“Good Lord!” said Dane, and added more as, sitting on the horse’s head, he turned his tingling face from the fire.
It was some minutes before he and the hired man who came up loosed the fallen horse, and led it and its fellow back towards the last defences the rest had been raising, while the first furrows checked but did not stay the conflagration. There he presently came upon the man who had been with Witham.
“I don’t know where Courthorne is,” he said. “The beasts bolted with us just after we’d gone through the worst of it, and I fancy they took the plough along. Anyway, I didn’t see what became of them, and don’t fancy anybody would have worried much about them after being trampled on by a horse in the lumbar region.”
Dane saw that the man was limping and white in face, and asked no more questions. It was evident to him that Courthorne would be where he was most needed, and he did what he could with those who were adding furrow to furrow across the path of the fire. It rolled up to them roaring, stopped, flung a shower of burning filaments before it, sank and swept aloft again, while the sparks rained down upon the grass before the draught it made.
Blackened men with smouldering clothes were, however, ready, and they fought each incipient blaze with soaked grain bags, and shovels, some of them also, careless of blistered arms, with their own wet jackets. As fast as each fire was trampled out another sprang into life, but the parent blaze that fed them sank and died, and at last there was a hoarse cheer. They had won, and the fire they had beaten passed on divided across the prairie, leaving the homestead unscathed between.
Then they turned to look for their leader, and did not find him until a lad came up to Dane.
“Courthorne’s back by the second furrows, and I fancy he’s badly hurt,” he said. “He didn’t appear to know me, and his head seems all kicked in.”
It was not apparent how the news went round, but in a few more minutes Dane was kneeling beside a limp, blackened object stretched amidst the grass, and while his comrades clustered behind her, Maud Barrington bent over him. Her voice was breathless as she asked, “You don’t believe him dead?”
Somebody had brought a lantern, and Dane felt inclined to gasp when he saw the girl’s white face, but what she felt was not his business then.
“He’s of a kind that is very hard to kill. Hold that lantern so I can see him,” he said.