It was easy enough to tell what the trouble was. We ponies had smelt it out a few seconds before the children did.
The kitchen was on fire and any backwoods animal knows what that means. Guardie and Girlie had been with the men of the settlement when they fought fires that wished to leap over the wide belt of cleared land that protected the properties on the lake.
Now they were trying to stamp out the flames that were spreading from the Widow's ironing table to the clean clothes hung about the room. They beat the blazing clothes with their paws and rolled on the sparks that fell on the floor.
My young master, who was bursting with a new-found courage to-day, seized one of the rag mats on the floor and sprang to assist the dogs.
Big Chief, with a second heavy mat, was right at his heels, and Cassowary ran in, and turning on the water in the sink threw dish-pans of it on the flames.
The fire was soon out and the two dogs and the children rushed from the smoky room. Their eyes were smarting and they were coughing violently.
Just as they got out in the yard the Widow and Joe Gentles, whom Mr. Devering had got her to take for a hired man, rushed down from the barn, where it seems they had been admiring a Tamworth shoat that Mr. Devering had given to Joe, on condition that he let the Widow feed it.
The Widow screamed like a gull. Her nice clean kitchen! and how had it happened? "My stars and garters!" she exclaimed, "I believe it's that miserable tool, Joe. Didn't you lay your pipe on my ironing table just now?" she shrieked at him.
With hanging head he confessed that he had.
"And might have burnt my house down," she said, "but for these sainted children!" and she went on holding poor Joe up to the scorn of the Deverings, the ponies and the pigs, who by this time had come along sociably to see what had happened.