“Will it burn the store?” asked Trouble.
“I think not,” his mother replied. “And see, the men are pulling the sawdust pile apart to get the burning side away from that which hasn’t yet started to burn.”
The lumbermen saw that this was the only way to stop the fire from spreading. As yet only one side of the sawdust pile was on fire. Working on the side that was not yet blazing, with shovels and long sticks, the men were pulling the mass of fine, wooden dust into two parts.
It was just as if you had set fire to one side of a big pile of leaves, and then found that you didn’t want to burn them all. If you had no water to throw on the fire you could, with a rake, pull off to one side in the street those leaves that had not already caught fire. Then you could let those that had caught burn out.
That is what the lumbermen did. They separated the sawdust pile in two parts, with a space between them. There was a little water to squirt on the blaze, but not much. The small hose came from the water tank with which the boiler of the sawmill engine was filled, and this stream, with no pump behind to force it out, only dribbled a little way.
“Don’t waste that water on the fire!” cried Tod Everett.
“Why not?” asked one of the men.
“Because we haven’t enough. Use the hose to wet the ground between the two piles, and then the fire won’t travel over.”
This was good advice, for the fire in the blazing part of the sawdust was now so strong that it would have taken a large stream of water to put it out. But a little water would answer to wet the space between the two piles of dust, and this the foreman wanted done.
His men heeded what he said, and soon most of the danger was over. The larger pile of clean sawdust had been pulled far to one side so it would not catch, and the remainder was allowed to burn itself out.