Dick Fellows sat up promptly the instant Sandy’s hand touched his shoulder. “Trouble?” he asked grimly. He was at the window focusing the binoculars before Sandy had finished explaining. After a brief look, he put down the binoculars and studied the trouble spot through the haze glasses.
Then he announced matter-of-factly: “Smoke, all right. Well, we’ve got ourselves a fire.”
His voice sounded almost relieved. The waiting and the anxiety were over now, at least. The enemy was out in the open—something tangible you could see and fight.
Immediately, the ranger made a compass reading. Then he took a fix on the smoking tree with an Osborne fire finder, an instrument roughly resembling a sextant.
“The fire finder measures both horizontal and vertical angles,” he explained to Sandy. “If we know the height of the fire tower and the angle of the fire with respect to the top of the tower, it’s a relatively easy matter to locate the site on a good topographical map.”
“What’s a topographical map?” Sandy asked.
“A map that charts the surface features of the terrain,” Dick said. He went back to the table and made some rapid calculations on a pad, stopping occasionally to measure off distances and angles on the big map spread out before him. At last he stuck a red pin at an X that marked the intersection of two lines. “That’s where she is,” he said with finality. “Now I’ll radio the news in to headquarters. They’ll try and get a sighting from another tower and double-check my fix on the fire.”
“What do we do in the meantime?” Russ Steele asked anxiously. Sandy could see that, underneath the heavy tan, his uncle was pale. He had a flitting mental image of the missing A-bomb lying in some desolate part of the forest with flames licking in all around it, and he felt the short hairs at the base of his skull bristle.
“I’ll go straight to the fire and see what I can do until a crew shows up,” the ranger said.
“You’ve got yourself a crew,” Russ volunteered. “What can we do to help?”