The hungry flames gnawed vainly about his broad fireguard, then wavered back and forth along the south prairie, while he watched them under the fascination the mastery of the elements can exert. He turned at last from the fire and storm to see Juno and her rider swinging down the northwest prairie, keeping close to the river line before the chill north wind.
“Oh, Virgie, Virgie,” he cried, as she slipped from the saddle and he caught her in his arms. “I’ve lived a hundred years since I left you this afternoon. What made you run away?”
In the joy of her safe return, he forgot the fire.
“Why, don’t you see the wind is from the north? And it is blowing everything south now? I saw it begin away up the river. Did that guard really keep off that thing I saw from the high bluff up yonder?”
“I put it there to do it, and I’d take the chances. Awful as it is, it can’t do anything but burn, and there’s nothing here to burn. If it hadn’t been there, everything would have been gone and you would have come back to a pile of ashes if the wind had left a pile.”
“And you put your puny hands to the plow handles and say to that awful fury, ‘So far, and no farther. This is my home.’ You, one little human being!” Virginia’s eyes were glowing with wonder at the miracle. 44
“Yes, with my puny hands. Me—a little man,” Asher smiled quizzically, as he spread his broad brown hands before his face and drew himself up to his full six feet of height. “Only I say, ’our home.’ But I was so scared about you, I forgot to notice the change in the wind. The fire is chasing to the south, and the hailstorm has veered off down that stream this side of those three headlands over there. The wind gives and the wind takes away. You can’t plow a guard around it.”
They sat down by the cabin door to watch the storm and flame blown far away in whirls of glaring light and surging cloud, until the rain at last drowned all the fury and washed it over the edge of the south horizon out of the world.
“Sometime we’ll plant hedges and forest trees and checker the country with windbreaks until days like this will belong only to an old pioneer’s memory,” Asher said, as the storm swept wide away.
“Then, I’m glad I came early enough to see this. I’m getting ’plains-broke’ along with Juno. Isn’t it wonderful to be a real pioneer? Back in Virginia we were two centuries of generations away from the first settlers,” Virginia exclaimed.