surface afforded by the
butte, for its preliminary run. They were off with a roar. As they glided
across to the flat-topped ridge on the other side of the canyon, they
could see the ravenous flames climbing tall pines and firs, racing from
limb to limb, through the forest roof, devouring the steeps, doubtless
richly coated with underbrush and down-wood. The roar and crackle of it
filled their ears sickeningly, as they thought of the naked mountainsides
that would be left,--mere skeletons of barkless tree trunks, where they
had camped on brown pine needles,--smooth, silent, inches deep, soft
under their tired feet, dry as tinder and aromatic with Nature's finest
perfume.

How the devourer would relish the pitch and resin oozing from the juicy
bark! How secure it must feel, on those slopes never climbed by man, with
the autumn rains months away, and the fire fighters like so many ants
trying with axe and shovel to mark off on the hot forest floor a boundary
beyond which the fiery tongues must not lick.

Had the wind not been in the other direction, they would have been
overwhelmed with the smoke that billowed darkly till it could have been
seen 50 miles away, the red sun scarcely lightening the gloom. Even where
they landed, an occasional hot breath scorched their faces and set their
eyes to smarting, while their winged ship nosed frantically up and away
again before she should meet Icarus' fate.

"Some day," Radcliffe had told them that day at the rodeo, "the Forest
Service Air Patrol, which serves now to give warning of the tiniest
smoke, and so saves men and millions where every minute counts, will
fight with glass bombs of fire extinguisher, whose trajectory falling
from a 'plane in rapid flight will have to be calculated to a nicety, but
which, delivered while the fire is in its infancy, will do the work of
many men."

The worst difficulty would be at night, when though the fire shows
plainer, the pilot would have to depend largely on his own sense of
equilibrium to tell him at what angle his ship was inclined. True,
acetylene gas lamps properly protected from the wind could be made to
light up the ground below when alighting, but at an altitude of even a
mile, little can be seen of the landscape to guide one on one's course.
The 2,000-foot firs of the Sierra slopes appear but as green-black
billows.

As the great ship raced toward the flaming forest, their talk at the
barbecue raced through the mind of the Sen