Trailey regarded the circumstance with his usual detached air of innocent unconcern. He apparently thought that some new-fangled, pyrotechnic display was being put on for his special amusement.
"Fancy it burning!" he ejaculated wonderingly. "I never knew grass would burn like that. It doesn't in England."
Trailey's constant journeyings through his own private wonderland were a source of much pleasure to him. His delightfully naive remarks amused everyone—except his wife, Martha, who flung showers of scorn at him, only to see it splash off his incorrigible dreaminess and drain away uselessly. He appeared to be everlastingly surprised that the country wasn't filled with buildings, and 'buses, and other products of a comfortable civilization.
Westwards from Battleford, the prairie resembled a vast virgin park. Judged as a whole, it was flat; but, upon closer examination, it turned out to be quite rolling. Ridges alternated with dips. Occasionally hogbacks grew into real hills, seamed with valleys and ravines. Nature's works were all well rounded and smooth. There were no jagged outcroppings, no splintered rocks, nor anything at all that suggested abruptness or impetuosity. Even the angles and corners of gullies had been planed off by Time and coated with grass. Obviously, much patience had gone into the making of this part of the earth; which is the reason, perhaps, why a good deal of the same attribute is needed in getting anything out of it. A few Barr Colonists comprehended this the first month—but not many did.
Patches of poplar and willow, bare of leaves, smudged the tawny landscape in every direction. Shallow swamps, filled with tangled yellow grass, which when alive had been three and four feet high, were in some areas almost as numerous as the bluffs. Pea vines, vetches, rose and wild fruit trees, native grasses of many kinds—all encircled the clumps of timber in masses of luxuriant vegetation, at this time of the year dead and dry as a cinder.
Within the bluffs, the trees were thickly interspersed with old undergrowth, some of it half-consumed relics of previous conflagrations. The whole land was one vast tinder box, with a wind, like an ever-ready bellows, waiting to fan into fury any little blaze started by some idiot with a match. There were no graded roads, nor railways; no ploughed land, no mowing machines, no grazing cattle, nor anything at all to contribute one jot of prevention to the spreading of black desolation when once a fire was whisked out of man's control. Two or three years' growth of grass covered the earth. It actually made walking difficult, so thick was the matted mass. Into this potential fire-trap went hundreds of innocent people, all of whom were utterly unused to a climate whose drying, parching wind was twin brother to the fire fiend itself.
Prior to the air becoming smoke-logged, the Trailey party had observed, rolling up into the sky in the distance, great columns of smoke, which stretched out and spread to the horizon with startling rapidity. At night, the scene had been one of grandeur. With the wind in such a direction as to carry the smoke away from them, they saw, twenty and thirty miles off, the fringe of fire leaping and licking its way along. Devouring tongues of yellow flame shot up like miniature volcanic eruptions as the masses of fuel-laden brush timber were consumed.
By the first week in May, the whole tremendous, V-shaped territory, situated between the two rivers westwards, was ablaze for hundreds of miles. Even in the open spaces, where the growth was relatively thin and short, the flames, fanned by powerful air currents, were three to six feet high. But in the ravines, and bluffs, and hollows, the enormous amount of combustible material sent them shooting up to a height of thirty and forty feet.
Though awe-inspiring, the sight was grand. The members of the Trailey party, from a sightseeing standpoint at first, afterwards as possible sufferers—were extremely interested in the spectacle.
"My word," Trailey commented to his wife, "it beats the fireworks at the Crystal Palace. What a remarkable country this is!"