The sky had brightened as if a great, golden moon were rising.
Sinth ran back into her tent and woke the children. With swift and eager hands the young man helped her while she put on their clothes. She said not a word until they were dressed. Then, half blinded by thickening smoke and groping on her way to the other tent, she said, despairingly, "I wonder where Silas is?"
A great, feathery cinder fell through the tree-tops.
"Come quick, we must get out of here," Master called, as he lifted the crying children. "We've no time to lose."
She flung some things in a satchel and tried to follow. In the smoke it was difficult to breathe and almost impossible to find their way. Master put down the children and tore some rope from a tent-side and tied it to the dog's collar. Then he shouted, "Go home, Zeb!" They clung to one another while the dog led them into the trail. Master had Socky and Sue in his arms. He hurried up the long slope of Rainbow Ridge, the woman following.
They could now hear the charge and raven of the flames that were tearing into a resinous swamp-roof not far away.
"Comin' fast!" Sinth exclaimed. "Can't see or breathe hardly."
"Drop your satchel and cling to my coat-tails," Master answered, stopping to give her a hold.
A burning rag of rotten timber, flying with the wind, caught in a green top above them. It broke and fell in flakes of fire. Master flung one off his coat-sleeve, and, seizing a stalk of witch-hopple, whipped the glow out of them. On they pressed, mounting slowly into better air. Just ahead of them they could see the wavering firelight on their trail. On a bare ledge near the summit they stopped to rest their lungs a moment.
They were now above the swift army of flame and a little off the west flank of it. They could see into a red, smoky, luminous gulf, leagues long and wide, beneath the night-shadow. Ten thousand torches of balsam and spruce and pine and hemlock sent aloft their reeling towers of flame and flung their light through the long valley. It illumined a black, wind-driven cloud of smoke waving over the woodland like a dismal flag of destruction. A great wedge of flame was rending its way northward. Sparks leaped along the sides of it like fiery dust beneath the feet of the conqueror. They rose high and drifted over the lake chasm and fell in a sleet of fire on the lighted waves. The loose and tattered jacket of many an old stub was tom into glowing rags and scattered by the wind. Some hurtled off a mile or more from their source, and isolated fountains of flame were spreading here and there on balsam flats near the lake margin. Some of the tall firs, when first touched by the cinder-shower, were like great Christmas-trees hung with tinsel and lighted by many candles. New-caught flames, bending in the wind, had the look of horses at full gallop. Ropes and arrows and spears and lances of fire were flying and curveting over the doomed woods.