tted enough to keep in
the shade and turn his face away from the camera.

They were such bores of tourists! The woman was sunburned and frowsy,
and her khaki outing suit was tight where it should be loose, and hung
in unsightly wrinkles where it should fit snugly. Her high-laced
mountain boots were heavy and shapeless, and she climbed here and
there, and stood dumpily and stared down at Jack's beloved woods
through her amber glasses until she nearly drove him frantic. She kept
saying: "Oh, papa, don't you wish you could get a snap of that?" and
"Oh, papa, come and see if you can't snap this!"

Papa was not much better. Papa's khaki suit had come off a pile on the
counter of some department store--the wrong pile. Papa kept taking off
his hat and wiping his bald spot, and hitching his camera case into a
different position, so that it made a new set of wrinkles in the
middle of his back. The coat belt strained against its buttons over
papa's prosperous paunch, and he wheezed when he talked.

And down there on the manzanita slope, little flashes of light kept
calling, calling, and Jack dared not answer. One, two--one, two,
three--could anything in the world be more maddening?

Then all at once a puff of smoke came ballooning up through the trees,
down beyond the girl and well to the right of the balsam thicket. Jack
whirled and dove into the station, his angry eyes flashing at the
tourists.

"There's a forest fire started, down the mountain," he told them
harshly. "You better beat it for Keddie while you can get there!" He
slammed the door in their startled faces and laid the pointer on its
pivot and swung it toward the smoke.

The smoke was curling up already in an ugly yellowish brown cloud,
spreading in long leaps before the wind. Jack's hand shook when he
reached for the telephone to report the fire. The chart and his own
first-hand knowledge of the mountainside told him that the fire was
sweeping down north of Toll-Gate Creek toward the heavily timbered
ridge beyond.

Heedless of the presence or absence of the tourists, he snatched the
telescope and climbed the rock where he could view the slope where the
girl had been. The smoke was rolling now over the manzanita slope,
and he could not pierce its murkiness. He knew that the slope was not
yet afire, but the wind was bearing the flames that way, and the
manzanita would burn with a zipping rush once it started. He knew. He
had stood up there and watched the fla