“Nary a one.”
“Phew!” whistled Jack. “Now we are in a fix for certain. What can we do?”
“Keep your shirt—or what’s left of it—on, son, you’ll need it,” said Pete slowly, a smile overspreading his sun-bronzed features, “thar’s more ways of killing cats than choking ’em ter death with superfine cream. Likewise thar’s more ways of lighting a fire than by using parlor matches.”
Jack watched Pete wonderingly as he took out his knife in silence and strode off to the tree. He found a dead branch and whittling off the wet outside bark soon reached the dry interior. This done, he cut the wood down to a stick about two feet long and a little thicker than a stout lead pencil. Then he hacked away at some more of the dry wood till he had a small flat bit of thoroughly dry timber. In this he excavated a small hole to fit the point of the pencil-like stick.
“Now git me some dry twigs from that brush yonder,” he directed Jack, who had been gazing on these preparations with much interest and a dawning perception of what the old plainsman was going to do.
By the time Jack was back with the twigs,—the dryest he could find,—Pete had scraped off a lot of sawdust-like whittlings and piled them about the hole he had dug out. Then taking the pencil-like stick between his palms, he inserted its lower end in the hole, carefully heaped the sawdust stuff about it, and began rotating it slowly at first and then fast.
All at once a smell of burning wood permeated the air. From the sawdust a tiny puff of blue smoke rolled up. Suddenly it broke into flame.
“Now the twigs! Quick!” cried Pete, and as Jack gave him the dry bits of stick he piled them on the blazing punk-wood, blowing cautiously at the flame. In ten minutes he had a roaring fire. But the old plainsman’s work wasn’t finished yet. He began hacking green branches from the tree and piling them on top of his blaze.
Instantly a pillar of dun-colored, smoke, thick and greasy, rolled upward into the still air.
Pete took off his leather coat and threw it over the smoking pyre, smothering the column of vapor.