“The storm last night! Nonsense!” Thus Terry Ross, Assistant Guardian, answered the excited chorus, which had in it no disorder. “The fire seed couldn’t have smouldered so long. The barn we saw blazed right off. But the wood of the shed—that may have been damp, still, from the deluge—didn’t dry up like the scrub and grass ... caused the heavy smoke. But—now!”
Now the flames were rising red-mad—and gaining every moment.
Pine, spruce, hemlock-scrub, the girls tore it off, broke it off as they ran, those who, at the Guardian’s heels, were not armed with buckets or brooms—in six minutes from the alarm the vanguard had reached the corner of the Long Pasture, the eastern corner where the tool shed, a gray twenty by twenty structure, had withstood gales for forty years.
But they were not the earliest fire fighters.
“There—there’s old ‘Burn-the-Wind’,” said Pemrose. “‘Burn-the-Wind’—and Sanbie. They—they’re getting the stuff out—stuff out of the shed!”
Mowing machine, tractor, harrow, plows, the two male figures were hurling them out, the latter a long-legged high school boy—the former a gray-haired, bare-armed blacksmith—the “wind” was now having its turn at “burning” him. Both had galloped, barebacked, up from the farm. “Burn-the-wind”—the nickname sounded cheering, in a fight frivolity has its uses—who could, at seventy-odd, shoe a horse with his eyes shut, was not in other respects very spry.
It was Sanbie of the shankums, the long ungainly limbs, who had a “leg-on” in the red fight.
He had played the one can of chemical, with the little hose attached, upon the flames—and still they gained—red-mad.
The grass around the shed was catching—had caught.
“Water!” They heard him shriek, Guardian and girls, as they reached the scene. “Water! Buckets! Oh! fill ’em first and think about it afterwards.”