From the tower Hart descended swiftly. He gathered together all the carpenters, drillers, enginemen, and tool dressers in the vicinity and equipped them with shovels, picks, brush-hooks, saws, and axes. To each one he gave also a gunnysack.
The foot party followed Crawford into the chaparral, making for the hills that led to Bear Cañon. A wind was stirring, and as they topped a rise it struck hot on their cheeks. A flake of ash fell on Bob's hand.
Crawford met them at the mouth of the cañon.
"She's rip-r'arin', Bob! Got too big a start to beat out. We'll clear a fire-break where the gulch narrows just above here and do our fightin' there."
The sparks of a thousand rockets, flung high by the wind, were swept down the gulch toward them. Behind these came a curtain of black smoke.
The cattleman set his crew to work clearing a wide trail across the gorge from wall to wall. The undergrowth was heavy, and the men attacked with brush-hooks, shovels, and axes. One man, with a wet gunnysack, was detailed to see that no flying sparks started a new blaze below the safety zone. The shovelers and grubbers cleared the grass and roots off to the dirt for a belt of twenty feet. They banked the loose dirt at the lower edge to catch flying firebrands. Meanwhile the breath of the furnace grew to a steady heat on their faces. Flame spurts had leaped forward to a grove of small alders and almost in a minute the branches were crackling like fireworks.
"I'll scout round over the hill and have a look above," Bob said. "We've got to keep it from spreading out of the gulch."
"Take the horse," Crawford called to him.
One good thing was that the fire was coming down the cañon. A downhill blaze moves less rapidly than one running up.
Runners of flame, crawling like snakes among the brush, struck out at the fighters venomously and tried to leap the trench. The defenders flailed at these with the wet gunnysacks.