The Scouts found Brent in the upper end of the valley pulling up brush and throwing water across the path of the advancing flames. But the fire would have given its horrible, soulless, crackling laugh at his poor efforts. It was like a sharpshooter attacking an army.
“The—the brook is—over there,” Brent panted.
“Use your hats, Scouts,” their camp manager said. “Some of you pull up brush.”
Hatful after hatful of water was thrown upon the ground across the narrow, precipitous way. Working was hard, for the heat was terrific. Stones were rolled into the path of the flames. Brush was pulled up with a rapidity that set Brent’s poor striving at naught. And the land for a width of ten feet or more was soaked.
“Keep busy, we’ll make it,” the camp manager panted.
From the cabin a couple of Scouts came running with the barrel which was Tom’s and Brent’s dining table. As they approached the scene of action they were as clear as figures seen by day. The cabin stood in an area of red light, and the old elm near Conner’s well stood out with strange clearness in the surrounding brightness. That end of the valley where the little gulch was seemed like an inferno, bathed, as it was, in vivid red.
But between that spot and the consuming flames the Scouts had drawn their dead-line. Here the careering flames hissed and paused. Here they tried to get across and failed. And they sent volleys of sparks across the dead-line, and these were stamped out by ready feet, and the little patches of fire which they started here and there were drowned out with water from the barrel. And so the fight in the big gulch was fought and won, and the flames diminished and died, hissing as they abandoned their triumphal march.
Against the half-filled barrel leaned Spiffy Henshaw, panting and resting. And as sure as you live he had a big black smear upon his freckled countenance. They were still too busy to bother with him, and it was Tom Slade who first approached him.
“You’re all right, Spiff,” he said sociably. “You got my message?”
“I wouldn’t have got it if I hadn’t been breaking a crazy rule,” Spiffy announced, with a look of challenge at his camp manager.