Elmer Bunty nodded solemnly and they set to work. They already had a firebreak of sorts in that direction and now they widened it as fast as they could, plying hatchets and shovels. The fire came up the mountainside just as the doctor had said it did, as if sucked through a funnel, roaring, unbearably hot. The lone lion fled before it at last, loping forlornly and calling as it came; it passed between the two human beings heedlessly, engulfed in its private woe.

Their break held; the fire stopped when it came up to it, hissing and snarling; burning twigs snapped with a sharp, incisive sound. “We’ve got it,” said the Ranger, exulting. “It’s just like a football game, Scout!—” He chanted hoarsely a slogan of old gridiron days—“‘Hold that line! Hold that line! Hold that line—hard!’” But it appeared immediately that they would have to hold a great deal harder yet and in a great many more places, for a whirling dervish of a wind sprang up, whisked here, whisked there, twisted and turned unexpectedly, caught up a flaming leaf and carried it carefully to a distant patch of dried grass, ran impishly back and forth, whistling, whining, making hot havoc.

Again they went about their dogged routine; they chopped with their hatchets, they spaded, they beat upon the fire with their wet sacks—until there was no water left to make the sacks wet with. Dean Wolcott thought with worshipful longing of summer rains in the east; why did they never come to this parched land of summer? A downpour now ... the sound of rushing rain....

They worked, the young man and the thin Boy Scout, until it seemed certain that they could not work any longer, and then they worked on. They dug frantically into the sun-baked earth; they chopped frantically with their hatchets into the singeing chaparral; they slapped frantically at the flames with their dry sacks; and sometimes the sacks caught on fire. Then the witch-wind went away as suddenly as it had come, and up from the ocean—as if impelled by the Ranger’s rain-prayer—rose a dense gray fog, blessédly cool, blessédly wet, blessédly enveloping.

At the end of another hour they were able to stop; a charred world was smudging sullenly into a soft, gray curtain. They went a few yards back on the trail and dropped thankfully to the ground. They were utterly spent; their hair was singed, and their eyebrows, and they could hardly see out of their bleared and smarting eyes, and they had both burned their hands again and again. They were too weary to speak, but somewhere in the great gray space they heard the lone lion, calling ... calling....

CHAPTER XVI

AT first, when she set out on the trail for Marble Peak, Ginger hurried a little. She had a guilty fear that the doctor might have read her mutinous purpose in her face and ridden after her to make sure, but when ten minutes had passed she knew she was not being followed, and she ceased to urge her mount. The fire fighters had exhausted the camp’s supply of good horses and this was an old and spiritless beast, hardly more than adequate for the daily trip with supplies.

“Easy, now, Pedro,” she patted the lean neck. “We’ll take it easy, old boy.” She saw she would have to nurse him along very carefully to make the ride, but once they came up with Dean he could rest, and she felt rather ruthless. Her only real concern was getting to Dean, and she felt as she had felt that day in Boston, waiting in the hushed little hotel for an answer to her note. Yet there was a great and shining difference. That had been undertaken as a duty of decent reparation; beyond the fact that she was going to ask his pardon or at least to state her regret for her crude and callous behavior at Dos Pozos, she had not mentally set the stage.

This was no penitential pilgrimage but a glad and glorious journey, ending, as journeys should, in lovers’ meeting, and this time she had indeed set the stage; she had been doing it ever since she had felt the sudden tightening of his arms about her as they danced in the Lodge to the wheedling, coaxing music of the old slave tune. “Come out!” he had said, imperatively. “Come down to the creek; I must talk to you. Will you come, Ginger? You must come!” She remembered every commonplace syllable and invested it with poesy and ardor, and she planned rosily for the scene of their reunion and reconciliation. She wished a little that she might have worn her riding suit of deep cream linen with the scarlet tie and hat band instead of her seasoned corduroy, but corduroy was the only wear for work of this sort, and Dean Wolcott himself, the new Dean Wolcott, wore corduroy now; he had put on the official uniform of the outdoor working west. And besides, she told herself contentedly, she was bringing him other adornments; she took stock, with a proud humility which was new and strange to Ginger McVeagh, of her more careful speech, her gentler judgments, the clever choosing of her clothes, her honest appreciation of the things of his world. Her heart warmed at the memory of Dean Wolcott’s sympathy with Elmer Bunty’s great moment, the other night, riding madly up on the lady horse to bring the news of the forest fire, of the way in which he had kept his Scout in the limelight for an instant. Dr. Mayfield had told her that the child would never live to grow up; he gave him, in fact, hardly more than a year, but Ginger, riding the high wave of happiness, told herself that she would prove her friend wrong for once in his wise life. Elmer Bunty should go to Dos Pozos to be cuddled by old Manuela and fed by Ling, to drink golden milk and sleep out in the tonic air all through the calendar; death on a pale horse riding should be routed—she felt strong and victorious as she thought of it. Great surges of joy went over her as they had done when she sat in her perch at Carnegie Hall, hearing her first symphonies.

But no surges of joy of any size whatever were going over Pedro; the wretched animal was plodding miserably, his head hanging, and the girl drew rein, dismounted, and pulled off the saddle with guilty haste. She would give him a half hour of rest while she ate her supper, and then go on at a very moderate pace, walking where the grade was steepest.