Since June there had been no rain. The tumbling hill streams were
reduced to a trickle among the rocks of their beds. The uplands were
covered with a mat of baked, dead grass. The second growth of stunted
timber, showing everywhere the scars of the wasting rapacity of man,
stood stark and wilted to the roots. All roving life, from the cattle
to the woodchucks and even the field mice, had moved down to hide
itself in the thicker growths near the water courses or had stolen
away into the depths of the thick woods.

Ruth Lansing reined Brom Bones in under a scarred pine on the French
Village road and sat looking soberly at the slopes that stretched up
away from the road on either side. Every child of the hills knew the
menace that a hot dry summer brought to us in those days. The first,
ruthless cutting of the timber had followed the water courses. Men had
cut and slashed their way up through the hills without thought of what
they were leaving behind. They had taken only the prime, sound trees
that stood handiest to the roll-ways. They had left dead and dying
trees standing. Everywhere they had strewn loose heaps of brush and
trimmings. The farmers had come pushing into the hills in the wake of
the lumbermen and had cleared their pieces for corn and potatoes and
hay land. But around every piece of cleared land there was an
ever-encroaching ring of brush and undergrowth and fallen timber that
held a constant threat for the little home within the ring.

A summer without rain meant a season of grim and unrelenting
watchfulness. Men armed themselves and tramped through the woods on
unbidden sentry duty, to see that no campfires were made. Strangers
and outsiders who were likely to be careless were watched from the
moment they came into the hills until they were seen safely out of
them again. Where other children scouted for and fought imaginary
Indians, the children of our hills hunted and fought imaginary fires.
The forest fire was to them not a tradition or a bugaboo. It was an
enemy that lurked just outside the little clearing of the farm, out
there in the underbrush and fallen timber.

Ruth was waiting for Jeffrey Whiting. He had ridden up to French
Village for mail. For some weeks they had known that the railroad
would try to have its bill for eminent domain passed at the special
session of the Legislature. And they knew that the session would
probably come to a close this week.

If that bill became a law, then the