It was really difficult to talk while all these noises were going on. Rob had to place his lips quite close to the ear of Ralph when he spoke.
“The wind is carrying things before it, you see, Ralph!” he called out. “Unless I miss my guess, it’s heading straight toward the mills.”
“Just what it is,” admitted the other, looking completely unnerved. “If there comes a sudden and lucky shift to that breeze it’s good-bye to all of Wyoming—mills, dwelling houses and everything. You see, it’s got something to feed on right along, from the cottages where it’s working now, to the factories. It’s eating its way just like a train of wet powder will do when you touch a match to the same, sizzling along until it reaches the end. And the worst of it is nothing can be done to halt its triumphant march, nothing that I can see.”
It was plain that Ralph was disheartened by the prospect confronting the enterprising little town. He took a great interest in Wyoming, and the impending catastrophe appalled him.
“Isn’t there something we could do to help these poor people get their stuff out of reach of the flames, even if we can’t stop the fire raging?” asked Tubby, whose tender heart was always ready to bleed for any sufferer, no matter what his race, color or condition.
There were wagons backing up to the pavements, and people hurriedly making trips back and forth between the houses and the curb, carrying what they treasured most in their limited possessions. It was a most pitiable sight, and one those boys were not likely to forget for a long time.
The idea took hold of them, and they started to work, lending a helping hand to a number of the panic-stricken families along the street. Meanwhile the fire was eating its way gradually along. Rob tried to figure how long at this rate of progress it would take for it to jump across to the other side of the town, and start devouring those splendid mills, and the machine shops, where scores and hundreds of people were accustomed to earn their daily wage.
“An hour at the most, and it will be good-night to the place, perhaps in a whole not less time than that,” he told himself; and there was something akin to awe in the thought that man appeared to be so utterly helpless to engage in a combat with the allied elements of wind and fire, once they took the bits in their teeth, and started to destroy all in their path.
Even where the boys were working so like beavers they could hear the angry snap and crackle of the leaping flames. To Rob it seemed as though they were actually laughing in derision at the futility of the crafty brain of man to stay their onward progress.
If he could only devise some way to beat them at their own game—how Rob cudgeled his wits to try and think of some such scheme, but somehow the things that appealed to him seemed so silly and foolish when pitted against such a roaring windswept mass of raging fire.