nston's face showed very grim under the tossing flame. "They've got
to. I'm going through," he said. "If the others are to stop it behind
there, they must have time."

Then he and the husband of the woman who had spoken to Maud Barrington
passed on with the frantic team into the smoke that was streaked with
flame.

"Good Lord!" said Dane, and added more as sitting on the horse's head
he turned his tingling face from the fire.

It was some minutes before he and the hired man who came up loosed the
fallen horse, and led it and its fellow back towards the last defenses
the rest had been raising, while the first furrows checked but did not
stay the conflagration. There he presently came upon the man who had
been with Winston.

"I don't know where Courthorne is," he said. "The beasts bolted with
us just after we'd gone through the worst of it, and I fancy they took
the plow along. Any way, I didn't see what became of them, and don't
fancy anybody would have worried much about them after being trampled
on by a horse in the lumbar region."

Dane saw that the man was limping and white in face, and asked no more
questions. It was evident to him that Courthorne would be where he was
most needed, and he did what he could with those who were adding furrow
to furrow across the path of the fire. It rolled up to them roaring,
stopped, flung a shower of burning filaments before it, sank and swept
aloft again, while the sparks rained down upon the grass before the
draught it made.

Blackened men with smoldering clothes were, however, ready, and they
fought each incipient blaze with soaked grain bags, and shovels, some
of them also, careless of blistered arms, with their own wet jackets.
As fast as each fire was trampled out another sprang into life, but the
parent blaze that fed them sank and died, and at last there was a
hoarse cheer. They had won, and the fire they had beaten passed on
divided across the prairie, leaving the homestead unscathed between.

Then they turned to look for their leader, and did not find him until a
lad came up to Dane.

"Courthorne's back by the second furrows, and I fancy he's badly hurt,"
he said. "He didn't appear to know me, and his head seems all kicked
in."

It was not apparent how the news went round, but in a few more minutes
Dane was kneeling beside a limp, blackened object stretched amid the
grass, and while his comrades clustered behind her, Maud Barrington
bent over him. He