“That’s the idea!” cried Amy and Nell, eagerly, and the boys paused for a moment to regard them admiringly.
“You girls are the real stuff, all right,” said Burd, and Fol added:
“Come along, and maybe they will have a gunny sack or two to spare.”
The girls did not understand this reference, but they were soon to have it explained to them. They battled their way through the increasingly heavy smoke and the scorching heat to the first line of the fire-fighters.
There men worked like fiends with the sweat streaming down their soot-stained faces, bloodshot eyes strained and set and determined. They worked with pick and shovel and hose and wet gunny sacks, chopping down ruthlessly branches of trees that were in the path of the fire, digging trenches in the earth to balk the darting flames, beating out with the sodden sacks little creeping hungry streams of fire that wriggled snakelike through the underbrush, the foreguard of fresh terror and destruction.
It was to this last task that the girls found themselves assigned. The forest rangers made no question of their presence there, merely taking time from their own fierce labors to motion to the gunny sacks.
The girls needed no further permission or instruction. Fired by the dauntless spirit of the men about them, stirred to fierce anger by the relentless onrush of the fire, they felt themselves suddenly incapable of fatigue or of fear.
Smoke burned their eyes, their throats were parched and dry. They tried to swallow and found their tongues swollen to twice the normal size.
Still they fought on, laying their dry and scorched sacks upon a pile of others and accepting new and sodden ones from the supply being constantly rushed to the spot by the rangers.
In spite of all they could do they were losing, were being pushed back slowly but steadily toward the water. The wind, gentle at first, was increasing in volume. It looked as though the entire water front was doomed to go.