r bathing suits and went into
the river immediately afterward so as not to take cold. Nyoda
was the last customer, and helped take down the ponchos, and as
Sahwah and Hinpoha had their beds to make up she sent Migwan to
put out the fire. Instead of putting it out immediately Migwan
sat down to dream fire dreams, until Nyoda called her to come to
bed. Hastily scattering the fire brands with her feet she ran in
obedience to Nyoda's call, and the camp was soon wrapped in
slumber.

In the place where the fire had been a tiny spark lay on a dry
leaf. Soon there was only a little curl of smoke where the leaf
had been, and the spark looked around for another leaf to eat up.
He found it and then put his teeth into a pine cone. From a tiny
spark he had grown to a hungry flame. The pine cone crackled and
snapped and jumped into a dry pine tree that lay nearby. In a
few minutes the twigs were burning merrily and the flame was
twice as big as when Sahwah was heating stones. Then the wind
came along and carried a flock of sparks into another dry tree,
and that one outdid the other and made a still bigger blaze! The
ground was covered with dry sticks and pine cones and the fire
leaped along with giant strides. Then it did a cruel thing. It
caught hold of a living pine tree and thrust its fiery tongues
deep into its bark. After that it took no heed whether a tree
was living or dead. Whole families of tender green needles
blazed up together, and when they fled into the arms of their
relatives for shelter started them blazing too.

Nyoda, waking suddenly from a dream, sat up and saw the glare in
the woods, and blew the alarm call on the bugle. In an instant
the girls were awake and saw what was the matter. Getting
quickly into their bloomers and sweaters instead of white middies
they dipped into the river to get wet all over and then ran for
the blazing woods. The fire was spreading alarmingly through the
underbrush, and Nyoda set half the girls to clearing away the dry
wood in the path of the flames while the others threw water into
the blazing trees and beat the fire with wet ponchos. Sahwah
worked like a Trojan with her hatchet, cutting down young trees
bodily and hurling them out of the way. Every now and then a
shower of blazing pine needles would envelop the workers and if
it had not been for their wet clothes and hair they would have
been in constant peril of blazing up themselves. It took several
hours of