he
juicy dew from the grass. They looked to where the sun should be
coming over the mountain and instead they saw the sun coming down the
side of the mountain in a blanket of white smoke. They left their feed
and began to huddle together, mooing nervously to each other about
this thing and sniffing the air and pawing the earth.

Sleepy hired men coming out to drive the cattle in to milking looked
blinking up at the mountain, stood a moment before their numb minds
understood what their senses were telling them, then ran shouting back
to the farm houses, throwing open pasture gates and knocking down
lengths of fence as they ran. Some, with nothing but fear in their
hearts, ran straight to the barns and mounting the best horses fled
down the roads to the west. For the hireling flees because he is a
hireling.

Sleepy men and women and still sleeping children came tumbling out of
the houses, to look up at the death that was coming down to them. Some
cried in terror. Some raged and cursed and shook foolish fists at the
oncoming enemy. Some fell upon their knees and lifted hands to the God
of fire and flood. Then each ran back into the house for his or her
treasure; a little bag of money under a mattress, or a babe in its
crib, or a little rifle, or a dolly of rags.

Frantic horses were hastily hitched to farm wagons. The treasures were
quickly bundled in. Women pushed their broods up ahead of them into
the wagons, ran back to kiss the men standing at the heads of the
sweating horses, then climbed to their places in the wagons and took
the reins. For twenty miles, down break-neck roads, behind mad horses,
they would have to hold the lives of the children, the horses, and,
incidentally, of themselves in their hands. But they were capable
hands, brown, and strong and steady as the mother hearts that went
with them.

They would have preferred to stay with the men, these women. But it
was the law that they should take the brood and run to safety.

Men stood watching the wagons until they shot out of sight behind the
trees of the road. Then they turned back to the hopeless, probably
useless fight. They could do little or nothing. But it was the law
that men must stay and make the fight. They must go out with shovels
to the very edge of their own clearing and dig up a width of new earth
which the running fire could not cross. Thus they might divert the
fire a little. They might even divide it, if the wind died down a
little,