“The wind changes, or else drops down to a lull,” Ralph explained. As he was reckoned a clever woodsman, Jack accepted the theory without a protest.
“Ralph is quite right there,” Hugh added. “If that miserable breeze would only die down, the fires might be gotten under control; but so long as it keeps going it is bound to whip a spark into a flame. If an army of men put the fire out in one place they’d hardly turn their backs before the wind would make it spring up again like magic.”
“Hang the wind, anyway!” said Billy energetically. “It blows billions of sparks ahead and starts new blazes by the dozen.”
“It’s only a good thing when you’re sailing a boat, flying a kite, or something like that,” asserted Harold Tremaine, the newest member of the Wolf Patrol, he having taken the place of a boy whose folks had moved away from town some months before.
The going was not so very smooth, even in the daytime, for matted bushes often caused them to make little detours, and there were other obstacles which had to be passed over.
“Gee! I’d hate to be trying to run through here at night-time,” said Billy, as he caught his foot in a wild grapevine and measured his length on the ground.
“With a fire racing after you, eh, Billy?” remarked Ralph Kenyon. “It strikes me you’d stand a pretty good chance of being roasted.”
“Don’t mention such a thing, Ralph, if you care for my feelings,” the stout boy begged him. “I was thinking of some ferocious wild animal rather than of a fire. Hugh, how about that little side road you spoke of; hope we haven’t been so unlucky as to miss it?”
“I expect to come on it in another minute or so, unless all my calculations are wrong, and I don’t believe they are,” was the confident reply which the scout master gave him.
“Seems to me I can see something that looks like a woods lane just ahead there by that silver birch, Hugh!” spoke up Monkey Stallings, who was with them.