They walked thus for a dozen steps or so, the officer leaning a little on Lafe's right shoulder. Then the wounded man stopped.
"I'd rather you went ahead," he called into the boy's ear. "The branches knock against my game side, this way. I'll keep behind you;" and so they went on again, Lafe pushing the saplings and boughs aside for the other.
The smoke had become almost blinding now, as it sifted through the motionless air of the thicket. The noises had risen now into a pandemonium of uproar—on the left the furious bellowing of the tempest and the flames, to the right a series of outbursts that shook the earth like mine explosions. It sometimes seemed to Lafe as if he distinguished the cheers and vague cries of men, off on the other side—and then back would come the chaotic din.
Awed and deafened, the two pushed doggedly on, Lafe stealing glances over his shoulder, to see if the officer was following. He came, holding to the branches with his right hand for support, and striving to pick soft places for his bare feet among the stones and prickly ground vines.
It had suddenly grown very hot. The heat began to sting Lafe's forehead and eyes. They were advancing into the temperature of a veritable furnace. The crackling noises to the left had swollen all at once to an angry tumult close at hand.
Looking up with smarting eyes through the pungent smoke, the boy beheld scattered flashes of flame dotting the murky shadows of the forest beyond, and even as he looked these tongues of fire ran forward under the wind with darting swiftness. An imperative outcry behind Lafe called a halt. He turned as his companion reeled, clutched wildly at an ash sapling, and fell against it, his head hanging helplessly forward on his breast.
"It's no use," he gasped, as the boy strode back. "I'm choking, and I'm played out. I can't go another step."
He falteringly lifted one of his torn and bleeding feet, and put it down again. His arm slipped from around the sapling, and he would have fallen if Lafe had not caught him.
"Why don't you be a man!" the boy screamed shrilly through the tumult.
A sort of angry desperation seized upon Lafe. He would drag this Ohio tenderfoot out of the fire in spite of himself. With rough energy he fitted his shoulder under the officer's armpit, and drew his right arm forward in the determined clutch of both his hands.