Something had shot past them through the underbrush—a heavy body, hurtling along in mute terror. Almost immediately came other bodies, small and large—rabbits scurrying almost between their legs; deer, jumping past in a wild stampede; bear and moose, crashing their way forward in a cumbersome, heart-stirring panic, as they ran from the fire.
“If they’re afraid, it’s about time we were,” Sandy declared grimly, through set teeth. “If this smoke gets any worse we’ll be suffocated in another ten minutes. My throat feels as if I had been drinking liquid fire for a week.”
Twenty feet away a flying ember settled down on the dry grass and immediately burst into flames. With the ever increasing velocity of the wind, similar patches of fire sprang up around them on every side.
“I’m afraid,” said Dick, fighting bravely against mounting despair, “that we’ll never make it. I never saw such a wind.”
Sandy did not reply. With handkerchiefs pressed to their noses and mouths, the boys struggled forward for another quarter of a mile.
By this time the heat had become terrific. Dick’s face felt as if it had been washed in a bucket of lye. Sandy’s cheeks were streaked with tears, not tears of grief, but tears of misery from smoke-tortured, bloodshot eyes.
“No use,” choked Sandy, plunging down a short embankment with Dick at his heels. “I’m about ready to quit. You see,” he explained, struggling with the lump in his throat, “I’m getting dizzier and dizzier every minute. This heat and smoke is getting me.”
Dick put out his hand with an assurance he did not feel, and patted his chum on the shoulder.
“Buck up,” Dick encouraged, “we’ll get out of this somehow. I tell you, Sandy, we’ve got to do it. Maybe this——”
Dick never finished what he was about to say. His foot slipped, and with a startled exclamation, he pitched forward, completely upsetting Sandy. In a moment both boys had rolled and slid down a steep bank. It seemed there was no end to the fall, and Dick’s heart almost failed him as he thought of what fate might meet them below. Perhaps they were rolling toward the brink of a cliff hundreds of feet high, perhaps they would fall into some rock cluttered canyon, or again, they might be drowned in some deep lake at the bottom of the bank.