so that it would roll on to either side of their homes.

This was their business. There was little chance that they would
succeed. Probably they would have to drop shovels at the last moment
and run an unequal foot race for their lives. But this was the law,
that every man must stay and try to make his own little clearing the
point of an entering wedge to that advancing wall of fire. No man, no
ten thousand men could stop the fire. But, against all probabilities,
some one man might be able, by some chance of the lay of the ground,
or some freak of the wind, to split off a sector of it. That sector
might be fought and narrowed down by other men until it was beaten.
And so something would be gained. For this men stayed, stifled and
blinded, and fought on until the last possible moment, and then ran
past their already smoking homes and down the wind for life.

Jeffrey Whiting rode southward in the wake of four other men down a
long spiral course towards the base of the mountain. Yesterday he
would have ridden at their head. He would have taken the place of
leadership and command among them which he had for months been taking
in the fight against the railroad. Probably he could still have had
that place among them if he had tried to assert himself, for men had
come to have a habit of depending upon him. But he rode at the rear,
dispirited and miserable.

They were trying to get around the fire, so that they might hang upon
its flank and beat it in upon itself. There was no thought now of
getting ahead of it: no need to ride ahead giving alarm. That rolling
curtain of smoke would have already aroused every living thing ahead
of it. They could only hope to get to the end of the line of fire and
fight it inch by inch to narrow the path of destruction that it was
making for itself.

If the wind had held stiff and straight down the mountain it would
have driven the fire ahead in a line only a little wider than its
original front. But the shape of the mountain caught the light breeze
as it came down and twisted it away always to the side. So that the
end of the fire line was not a thin edge of scattered fire that could
be fought and stamped back but was a whirling inverted funnel of flame
that leaped and danced ever outward and onward.

Half way down the mountain they thought that they had outflanked it.
They slid from their horses and began to beat desperately at the brush
and grasses among the trees. They gained upon it. T