or the camp.

The wise animals let her come close, did not plunge, knew that she meant
help, allowed her trembling hands to loose one end of the hobble straps,
but no more. As soon as each mule got its feet it whirled and was away.
No chance to hold one of them now, and if she had mounted a hobbled
animal it had meant nothing. But she saw them go toward the stream,
toward the camp. She must run that way herself.

It was so far! There was a faint smell of smoke and a mysterious low
humming in the air. Was it too late?

A swift, absurd, wholly useless memory came to her from the preceding
day. Yes, it would be no more than a prayer, but she would send it out
blindly into the air.... Some instinct--yes, quite likely.

Molly ran to her abandoned wagonette, pushed in under the white tilt
where her pallet bed lay rolled, her little personal plunder stored
about. Fumbling, she found her sulphur matches. She would build her
signal fire. It was, at least, all that she could do. It might at least
alarm the camp.

Trembling, she looked about her, tore her hands breaking off little
faggots of tall dry weed stems, a very few bits of wild thorn and
fragments of a plum thicket in the nearest shallow coulee. She ran to
her hillock, stooped and broke a dozen matches, knowing too little of
fire-making in the wind. But at last she caught a wisp of dry grass, a
few dry stems--others, the bits of wild plum branches. She shielded her
tiny blaze with her frock, looking back over her shoulder, where the
black curtain was rising taller. Now and then, even in the blaze of full
day, a red, dull gleam rose and passed swiftly. The entire country was
afire. Fuel? Yes; and a wind.

The humming in the air grew, the scent of fire came plainly. The plover
rose around their nests and circled, crying piteously. The scattered
hares became a great body of moving gray, like camouflage blots on the
still undulating waves of green and silver, passing but not yet
past--soon now to pass.

The girl, her hands arrested, her arms out, in her terror, stood trying
to remember. Yes, it was three short puffs and a long pillar. She caught
her shawl from her shoulder, stooped, spread it with both hands, drove
in her stiffest bough for a partial support, cast in under the edge,
timidly, green grass enough to make smoke, she hoped.

An instant and she sprang up, drawing the shawl swiftly aside, the next
moment jealously cutting through the smoke with a side sweep