A domestic group, exercising rights of squatter sovereignty on the slope of the lawn in a tent, emerged therefrom and swarmed about us. Of parents there was but the customary pair, but of offspring there were seven or eight and although plainly of the same brood, a family resemblance marking each as brother or sister to the rest, these latter seemed miraculously all to be of substantially the same age or thereabouts. The father told a neighbor fifty yards away of their narrow escape; the mother joined in and was shrill in her lamentations for a threatened homestead over the hills across the water; the overalled little ones got underfoot and scuffled around and by their loud childish clamor still further interfered with our ruminations.
Then one of the big red busses hooted and drove up and disgorged upon us a locust plague of arriving tourists. The responsible strangers went within to claim reservations but the juveniles inundated the porches and the lawn, giving hearty indorsement to the scenery and taking snap-shots of it, and inquiring where souvenir postcards might be had and whether the fishing was any good here; and so on and so forth, according to their tribal habits. Hillocks of hand-baggage accumulated about us and trunks descended from a panting auto-truck in a thunderous cascade. A bobbed-haired camera bandit in search of picturesque local types came within easy shooting distance and aimed her weapon at us, asking no leave of her victims but shooting repeatedly at will; and she wore riding breeches and boots. Presumably she had been wearing them aboard the train. An oversized youth stumbled with his large undisciplined feet against an outlying suitcase and struck the wall and caromed off and almost upset us from our tilted chairs. Here plainly was an undergraduate—a perfect characteristic specimen. He was in the immature summer plumage.
“I always feel sorry for one of those college boys this season of the year in this climate,” said my friend as the gigantic fledgling lunged away toward the boat dock. “It’s too late for his coon-skin ulster and too early yet for him to tie a handkerchief around his scalp and go bareheaded.”
He arose, tagging me on the arm.
“Let’s ramble down the line a piece,” he suggested, “and maybe find us a hollow snag to hide in. After what I went through last night my nerves ain’t what they used to be, if they ever were.”
Below the creek we quit the paved highway and took the lower trail. Through the brush we could see where the vast blue eye of the lake had quit winking and was beginning to scowl. The wind must have changed quarters; it no longer brought us smells of ashes and char, but a fresher, sweeter smell as of rain gathering; and puffed clouds were forming over the range to the westward. The sunshine shut itself off with the quickness of a stage effect. Along the shore toward us limped a blackened smudge of a man, like a ranger turned chimney-sweep. For a fact, that precisely was what he was—Melber, assistant chief of the park forestry service. From tiredness he was crippled. He could shamble and that was about all.
“Well, we’ve got her whipped,” he told us, and leaned against a tree. He left smears like burnt cork on the bark where his shoulders rubbed. “This breeze hauling around ought to finish the job. She’ll burn herself out before dark, with or without showers. I’m on my way now to long-distance to notify the chief that we won’t need any reinforcements.”
“Much damage?”
“The colony is saved. By backfiring we held the flames on the upper edge of the road leading in from the station. But Ordman’s ranch is gone up in smoke, and the Colfax & Webster sawmill and eighteen thousand acres of the handsomest virgin pine on this side of the Divide. Man, you’d weep to see those raped woodlands—and all because some dam’-fool hiker didn’t have sense enough to put out his cigarette! Or hers, as the case may be!” He grinned through his mask and we were reminded of nigger minstrels.