t to fight that," the man said. "She
started in the mouth of the river last night. If we don't check it and
the wind turns right, it'll clean the whole valley. We sent a man to
pull your crew off the hill."

In the growing dawn, Hollister and the logger went down through woods
thick with smoke. They routed Lawanne out of his cabin, and he joined
them eagerly. He had never seen a forest fire. What bore upon the
woodsmen chiefly as a malignant, destructive force affected Lawanne as
something that promised adventure, as a spectacle which aroused his
wonder, his curious interest in vast, elemental forces unleashed. They
stopped at Bland's and pressed him into service.

In an hour they were deployed before the fire, marshalled to the
attack under men from Carr's, woodsmen experienced in battle against
the red enemy, this spoiler of the forest with his myriad tongues of
flame and breath of suffocating smoke.

In midsummer the night airs in those long inlets and deep valleys move
always toward the sea. But as day grows and the sun swings up to its
zenith, there comes a shift in the aerial currents. The wind follows
the course of the sun until it settles in the westward, and sometimes
rises to a gale. It was that rising of the west wind that the loggers
feared. It would send the fire sweeping up the valley. There would be
no stopping it. There would be nothing left in its wake but the
blackened earth, smoking roots, and a few charred trunks standing
gaunt and unlovely amid the ruin.

So now they strove to create a barrier which the fire should not pass.
It was not a task to be perfunctorily carried on, there was no time
for malingering. There was a very real incitement to great effort.
Their property was at stake; their homes and livelihood; even their
lives, if they made an error in the course and speed of the fire's
advance and were trapped.

They cut a lane through the woods straight across the valley floor
from the river to where the southern slope pitched sharply down. They
felled the great trees and dragged them aside with powerful donkey
engines to manipulate their gear. They cleared away the brush and the
dry windfalls until this lane was bare as a traveled road--so that
when the fire ate its way to this barrier there was a clear space in
which should fall harmless the sparks and embers flung ahead by the
wind.

There, at this labor, the element of the spectacular vanished. They
could not attack the enemy with e