CHAPTER XIV
Prairie Fires
The second evening after leaving Battleford, the party camped inside a huge but distant arc of fire. All day the sun had been almost hidden by smoke, though the fire itself was not visible. A hot, dry wind from the south-west, which had licked up all moisture except sloughs and running creeks, rushed across their front like a gust from a furnace.
In the abstract they knew a little about prairie fires, as they did about horses, and organic chemistry, and Confucianism, and other popular topics. They knew, in a casual sort of way, that the long, dry grass was as inflammable as chips soaked in kerosene. Round their own campfires they had observed that tiny spots of burning grass had a queer getting-away quality. Somehow the knowledge had bitten into their unfamiliar intelligence that, on a perfectly calm day, a little patch of fire possessed the power of raising its own breeze.
"That's the surrounding air rushing in to fill the vacuum," Bert explained one day, as he watched Sam trying to beat out an embryonic prairie fire.
"That's wot you calls it, eh?" puffed Sam, who though entirely ignorant of physics, was energetically flapping at a widening ring of fire with the back of a shovel.
Bert picked up a bit of burning grass and calmly lighted a cigarette. "Yes," he said, "that's the theory of it."
Sam didn't seem to be particularly impressed. For a minute or two he leaned on his shovel like a professional road-mender, partly with the idea of catching his wind, but chiefly to permit him to utter something sarcastic. Meanwhile, the blaze was romping away like a train of gunpowder alight.
"An' wot's the proper way of explainin' a feller watchin' anuvver silly fool puttin' it aht?"
"Why, pure unadulterated ignorance, Sam, me lad," laughed Bert, who, taking the hint, at once commenced to singe a perfectly good pair of boots in an attempt to trample out some of the fire.