A number of birds were flying over their heads, chattering and squawking wildly.
"They fly as though they were frightened," said Fred, soberly. "Why, there are all kinds—quail, blue-jays, wood-cock, and even a couple of crows."
A deer burst from the thicket and came galloping past them, with eyes starting in terror and dilated nostrils. The woods seemed suddenly alive with rabbits and other small game, all fleeing as though for their lives.
"The woods," gasped Fred—"they are on fire!"
From their position of the moment they could get an extended view around. To their dismay the fire was already on three sides of them and rapidly closing in. They could not go back, the wind was driving the flames directly across the road behind them. The only chance was ahead, and it was full two miles to the open. In any event they would have to make a final dash through the flames.
It was little that Fred could afterwards recall of that wild ride. The smoke came in thick eddying, blinding, suffocating gusts, and cinders, first black and then redly alive, fell thick about them.
"Another half-mile," thought Fred, desperately, as the Happy Thought bounced along over the rough road, now lurching to one side and now to another, but keeping her feet like a circus acrobat.
A turn in the road and he could see the open, but it was a flaming curtain that hung between; the fire was across the road. And what was that that lay directly athwart their path, and in the very centre of the fiery furnace? It was a log some eight or ten inches in diameter.
It was a snap decision, but Fred recognized that it meant certain death to stop. To put the Happy Thought straight at the obstruction, like a steeple-chaser at a hurdle—it was a slim chance, but the only one. He could feel the hot breath of the fire on his cheeks, the pungent smoke was gripping his throat like a vise. "Hold hard!" and at thirty miles an hour Fred felt the Happy Thought strike the rounded surface of the log fair and square. The slightest possible shock, and they seemed to be sailing on, on, on, into endless space.