“Yep, that’s the trouble. Looks to me as if it might just be starting. Here, I tell you what you do,” he added, in a kind of hurried uncertainty; “no, just let me think a second—here—give us that pail. The best thing for you to do, old man, is to beat it down through the valley and pull up all the brush you can—David and Goliath.”
“David got the decision, you know,” said Brent.
“Yere, well it’s all you can do. Hustle down that way and yank up all the brush you can—yank it up in a kind of channel right across the path of the fire—see? Here, take a knife—and take this other pail. Thank goodness, the brook runs through down here. After you get a channel cleared, souse it with water all the way across—you won’t get far, I’m afraid. Half an hour ago we could have stopped it—blame it all. Here—here’s your spectacles—hurry up—and go like a fireman, not like a philosopher!”
“It shall not pass,” said Brent.
“I wish I could believe it,” Tom said. “Anyway, hurry up, for the love of goodness! I’m going to send a signal from the hill. So long, I’ve got the money all right.”
Brent hurried along through the dry brush of the valley while Tom with frantic haste crowded some dried brush down into the pail and hurriedly grabbed old Buck’s threadbare corduroy jacket which still hung on a peg in the cabin. This he soaked in water at the spring and wrung it out. Then he started pell-mell for the nearest flanking hill.
It was a terrible climb, especially with one arm embarrassed by the pail; in places he had to lift himself from one rock or projecting tree to another, like a monkey. He might have made an easier ascent to a lower eminence, but every inch of altitude he could gain was needed now. From the hilltop he saw, to his comparative relief, that the flames had not spread over a very large area. It might be that the country beyond the narrow valley was not in great danger. The fire, so it seemed to Tom, had its beginning in the widening mouth of the big gulch and was being carried in by the rising wind.
Looking north from where he stood, he could see a few scattered specks of light. He believed that these were at the camps about Kanawauke Lakes. He knew he could not see the lights (if any there were) at Scout Headquarters because of the intervening eminence known as Pine Hill. But he could see the western end of the larger lake; that is, he could see little flickers of light which he thought were on or about the lake. It was now quite dark.
He set the pail upon a high rock and set fire to the contents. As soon as it was blazing prosperously, he poked it so as to get the whole mass of fuel to burning. Then he squeezed the old corduroy jacket into it as one wrings out a washed garment, and quickly spread the damp jacket over the pail. It is pretty skilful work getting just the right amount of water into a confined fire. You may make a smudge too voluminous to handle, or on the other hand, you may put the fire out. Tom knew the proportions for his signal fuel. When he pulled the jacket suddenly from over the pail a straight column of black mounted into the air. If a solid shaft had been raised it could hardly have been more readily discernible at a distance.
He watched the column piercing the sky, then looked into the pail as a chemist might do, pleased with an experiment. He let the column rise for perhaps a quarter of a minute, then spread the jacket over the pail. Just then the moon edged out from behind a wind cloud and lit up the hilltop. For perhaps a quarter of a minute Tom waited, long enough for the column to dissolve completely, then shot another dense pillar of blackness into the moonlit sky. Again, and still again he pierced the starry depths of heaven with this ghostly arm, rising out of a tin pail of smothered fire. So it was that water, the enemy of fire, was allied with the monster here to print a single word upon the open pages of the sky—H-E-L-P.