“No. And nobody else,” grumbled Mr. Stagg. “But it has come—and it’s moving mighty quick now. How came you down here, Mandy—you and Hannah’s Car’lyn?”
“We were really badly frightened, Joe,” she replied, smiling up at him. “I’m afraid I became panic-stricken when I saw a tall tree on fire not far from the camp, and we ran down here where there was water, leaving everything at the cabin.”
“But there isn’t water enough,” declared the man fretfully. “That’s the trouble with this place. We can’t stay here.”
“You know best, Joe,” said Amanda Parlow, with a loving woman’s logic.
“What you’ve left at the cabin will have to stay there,” he said. “We can’t go back. I tell you, the fire was coming into the camp when I left.”
“Oh, Joe, we must hurry, then!” she murmured simply.
“We aren’t going to be burned up now, when Uncle Joe is here, Miss Mandy,” Carolyn May declared with confidence. “See how nice he and Prince found us? Why, they are reg’lar heroes, aren’t they?”
“They are, indeed, child,” agreed the woman. She turned to Joseph Stagg, happiness shining in her eyes, and looking prettier than ever before in her life, he thought.
The hollow was rapidly becoming filled with smoke. The man did not understand this, but it foreboded trouble. He turned Cherry and the buckboard around, and then he helped Amanda into the seat.
“Up you go, too, Car’lyn May,” he said, lifting the little girl into the rear of the buckboard. “Hang on, there! Don’t dare fall off!”