This ended migratory speculations abruptly. Each man started to his feet. Hamilton left the room to secure a horse and order out his retainers, Wilfred to try and make out whether the heavy spreading cloud on the horizon was across his boundary.
‘I and my man will go with Hamilton,’ quoth O’Desmond. ‘Effingham had better make for home, and see how it is likely to affect him.’
Hamilton was dashing down the paddock on a bare-backed horse by this time, to run up the hacks, and also one for the spring-cart, to be loaded with spare hands for the scene of action, besides that invaluable adjunct in a bush fire, a cask of water.
‘I hardly like leaving,’ said Wilfred; ‘it looks selfish.’
‘Don’t mind about the sentiment,’ said O’Desmond. ‘If your run is afire you will need to help Dick Evans and his party. I’ll be bound the old fellow is half-way there already. He is not often caught napping.’
Then Wilfred mounted too, and sped away, galloping madly towards the great masses of ever-increasing smoke-cloud. It proved to be farther off than he expected. He had ridden far and fast, when he reached the border where he could hear the crackling of the tender leaflets, and watched the red line which licked up so cleanly all dry sticks and bush, with every stalk and plant and modest tuft of grass. He then found that the chief duty, not so much of meeting the enemy, as of guiding and persuading him to turn his fiery footsteps in a different direction, was being satisfactorily performed by Richard Evans and his assistants. Guy, in wild delight at being made lieutenant of the party, was dashing ever and anon into the centre of the smoke and flame, and dealing blows with his bough like a Berserker.
‘Head it off, lads,’ Dick was saying when Wilfred rode up. ‘It’s no use trying to stop it in the long grass; edge it off towards the ranges. There it may burn till all’s blue.’
‘Why, Dick,’ said he to his trustworthy veteran, ‘how did you manage to get here so quickly? They’ve only just seen it at Benmohr.’
‘They’ll find it out pretty quick, sir, if there’s a shift of wind to-night. It don’t need much coaxing our way, but it means Benmohr, with a southerly puff or two. If it gets into that grassy bit by the old stock-yard, it will burn at the rate of fifty mile an hour.’
Hour after hour did they work by the line of fire, ere Dick’s vigilance could permit any kind of halt or relaxation. It was exciting, not unpleasant work, Wilfred thought, walking up and down the red-gleaming line of tongues of fire which licked up so remorselessly the tangled herbage, the lower shrubs, the dead flower-stalks, and all scattered branches of the fallen trees.