off and completely surrounded. Here the fire did not keep any
steady edge that they could follow and attack. The wind eddied and
whirled about among the broken peaks of the hills in every direction
and with it the fire ran apparently at will.

When they tried to hold it to one side of a hill and were just
beginning to think that they had won, a sudden sweep of the wind would
send a ring of fire around to the other side so that they saw
themselves again and again surrounded and almost cut off.

Ahead of them now there was one hope: to hold the fire to the north
side of the Chain. The Chain is a string of small lakes running nearly
east and west. It divides the hill country into fairly even portions.
If they could keep the fire north of the lakes they would save the
southern half of the country. Their own homes all lay to the north of
the lakes and they were now doomed. But that was a matter that did not
enter here. What was gone was gone. Their loved ones would have had
plenty of warning and would be out of the way by now. The men were
fighting the enemy merely to save what could be saved. And as is the
way of men in fight they began to make it a personal quarrel with the
fire.

They began to grow blindly angry at their opponent. It was no longer
an impersonal, natural creature of the elements, that fire. It was a
cunning, a vicious, a mocking enemy. It hated them. They hated it. Its
eyes were red with gloating over them. Their eyes were red and
bloodshot with the fury of their battle. Its voice was hoarse with the
roar of its laughing at them. Their voices were thick and their lips
were cracking with the hot curses they hurled back at it.

They had forgotten the beginning of the quarrel. All but one of them
had forgotten the men whom they had tracked into the hills last night
and who had started the fire. All but one of them had forgotten those
other men, far away and safe and cowardly, who had sent those men into
the hills to do this thing.

Jeffrey Whiting had not forgotten. But as the day wore on and the
fight waxed more bitter and more hopeless, even he began to lose sight
of the beginning and to make it his own single feud with the fire. He
fought and was beaten back and ran and went back to fight again, until
there was but one thought, if it could be called a thought, in his
brain: to fight on, bitterly, doggedly, without mercy, without quarter
given or asked with the demon of the fire.

Now other men came