The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol / Or, The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol

by Lewis E. Theiss

Now the way was more open. They could see farther. But both were so preoccupied with what lay immediately around them that for a time neither gave heed to more distant views. Furthermore, the bottom was still obscured by a heavy night mist. The warm spring sun rapidly dissipated this, opening the valley to view as though some invisible hand had rolled back a giant cover. Presently Lew reached a little area that was swept absolutely bare of everything. Nothing remained but the nude rocks and soil. Lew, who was leading the way, paused to spy out the best path. Then he cried out in dismay. A moment later Charley stood by his side and both boys gazed in speechless horror at the scene before them.

The magnificent stand of pines that they had expected to see in the bottom was no more. For miles the valley before them was a blackened waste. Like giant jackstraws the huge pine sticks, that they had last seen as magnificent, towering trees, were heaped in inextricable confusion or still stood, broken, blasted, gaunt, limbless, spectral, awful remnants of their former selves. No words could convey the terrible desolation of the scene. Where formerly these giant pines had risen heavenward, higher and more stately than the most exquisite church spires or cathedral columns, there were now only scattered and blasted stumps, while the floor of the valley was strewn with the horrible débris. The scene was sickening, appalling.

For a moment neither lad spoke. The scene before them oppressed them, made them sick at heart. They knew no language that would convey what was in their minds. But even yet they did not fully understand the tragedy of a forest fire. They were soon to learn. Silently they went on; but they had gone no more than a hundred yards when they came upon a sight that fairly sickened them. In a little circle, as though the animals had crowded close together in their terror and helplessness, lay the remains of a number of deer. The flesh had either been burned or had rotted away; but the most of the bones and parts of the hides remained. There could be no mistake as to the identity of the dead animals. The very positions of the skeletons told a pitiful story. Blinded by smoke and flame, made frantic by the red death that was sweeping the forest, confused, terror-stricken, weakened by gas and fumes, the poor beasts had finally crowded together and perished under the onrushing wave of fire. For a moment the boys gazed at the scene in fascinated horror; then they turned away, to shut out the picture. They were oppressed, almost stunned.

They went on. Not a vestige of its former magnificent vegetation covered the slope. Nothing in the world could be more awful, more desolate, more disheartening to behold than the area the two chums were now crossing. Never had either seen anything that so oppressed him. For not only had the slope of Old Ironsides been laid waste, but the entire bottom had been swept by fire, and the opposite mountain slope devastated. Before them was nothing but desolation.

Soon they were near enough to see the sparkle of water in the bottom. In their horror at their immediate surroundings they had temporarily forgotten even their terrible thirst. The sight of water recalled their need.

"Thank God water can't burn!" cried Lew, as the sparkle of the brook caught his eye. "We'd be in a fine pickle if the brook had been consumed, too."

The prospect of a drink stirred them. They threw off the spell that so depressed them and hastened downward, reckless alike of menacing branches and loose stones and obstructing tree trunks. Headlong they pushed downward. But fortune was with them and neither a broken bone nor a strained ligament resulted, though more than once each lad slipped and fell. Presently they reached the bottom of the slope and came to the very brink of the run. Almost frantically they flung themselves on the ground and drank.

Long, copious draughts they drank; and it was not until they had quenched their thirst that they really noticed how shrunken the brook was. Instead of the deep, rushing mountain stream they had seen when last they visited the spot, they now found but a slender rivulet that flowed quietly along the middle of the stream bed, leaving bare, bordering ribbons of stony bottom along its margins. Nowhere did the water seem to reach from bank to bank, excepting where some obstruction in the stream bed dammed the current back. Like the forest, the brook was also a sorrowful picture. But there was this difference. The forest was dead, whereas the brook, though feeble, still lived.

The full significance of the shrunken stream did not strike the two boys until they had traveled for some distance up the bank of the run. Presently they came to a spot they recognized as a favorite trout-hole. A great boulder jutted out from one bank, while opposite it, on the other shore, stood or had stood, a mammoth hemlock. These obstructions had formed a little pool, and the current had eaten away much earth from beneath the roots of the great tree, forming an ideal lurking place for trout. And in this dark, deep, secure retreat great fish had lived since time immemorial. More than one huge trout had the two chums taken here. Never was the pool without its giant occupant, for when one big fellow was caught another moved in to take his place, the run being fully stocked from year to year by the smaller fishes from the spring brooks, like the vanished rivulet above. But now no trout hid under the hemlock's roots. They stood high and dry, while the puny stream that trickled beneath them would hardly have covered a minnow. The two boys looked at each other in dismay.

"You don't suppose the entire stream is like that, do you, Lew?" asked Charley. "There won't be a trout in it if it is." Then, after a pause, he added: "What in the world do you suppose has become of the trout, anyway?"