her sombrero she looked out across the
stretch of marsh, where from unseen pools the wild-duck were rising,
disturbed by the sound of their approach. And now the snipe began to
dart skyward from under their horses' feet, filling the noon silence
with their harsh "squak! squak!"

"It's along here somewhere," said Burleson, leaning forward in his
saddle to scan the swale-grass. A moment later he said, "Look there,
Miss Elliott!"

In the tall, blanched grasses a velvety black space marked the ashes of
a fire, which had burned in a semi-circle, then westward to the water's
edge.

"You see," he said, "it was started to sweep the vlaie to the pine
timber. The wind changed, and held it until the fire was quenched at the
shore."

"I see," she said.

He touched his horse, and they pressed forward along the bog's edge.

"Here," he pointed out, "they fired the grass again, you see, always
counting on the west wind; and here again, and yonder too, and beyond
that, Miss Elliott--in a dozen places they set the grass afire. If that
wet east wind had not come up, nothing on earth could have saved a
thousand acres of white pine--and I'm afraid to say how many deer and
partridges and woodcock.... It was a savage bit of business, was it not,
Miss Elliott?"

She sat her horse, silent, motionless, pretty head bent, studying the
course of the fire in the swale. There was no mistaking the signs; a
grass fire had been started, which, had the west wind held, must have
become a brush fire, and then the most dreaded scourge of the north, a
full-fledged forest-fire in tall timber. After a little while she raised
her head and looked full at Burleson, then, without comment, she wheeled
her mare eastward across the vlaie towards the pines.

"What do you make of it?" he asked, pushing his horse forward alongside
of her mare.

"The signs are perfectly plain," she said. "Whom do you suspect?"

He waited a moment, then shook his head.

"You suspect nobody?"

"I haven't been here long enough. I don't exactly know what to do about
this. It is comparatively easy to settle cases of simple trespass or
deer-shooting, but, to tell the truth, Miss Elliott, fire scares me. I
don't know how to meet this sort of thing."

She was silent.

"So," he added, "I sent for the fire-warden. I don't know just what the
warden's duties may be."

"I do," she said, quietly. Her mare struck solid ground; she sent her
forward at a gallop, which broke into a d