with ax and shovel, widened. The old hunter never seemed
to stop once, but, however curving and twisting his course might be, the
boy noted that the furrow invariably occurred at the end of a stretch
where few needles had fallen on the ground and the debris was very
scant.

After about a mile of this, the hunter curved his furrow sharply in
toward the burned-out portion, ending his line behind the line of fire.
He then sent Wilbur back along the line he had just traversed to insure
that none of the fire had crossed the guard thus made. Then, starting
about twenty feet from the curve on the fire-guard, he took another wide
curve in front of the floor-fire, favoring the place where the needles
lay thinnest, until he came to a ridge. Following him, Wilbur noted that
the old woodsman had made no attempt to stop the fire on the upward
grade, but had apparently left it to the mercy of the fire, whereas, on
the further side of the ridge, where the fire would have to burn down,
the old hunter had made but a very scanty fire-guard. Then Wilbur
remembered that he had been told it was easy to stop a fire when it was
running down a hill, and he realized that if, in the beginning, instead
of actually endeavoring to put out the fire, he had made a wide circuit
around it, and by utilizing those ridges, he could have held the fire to
the spot where it began. For a moment this nearly broke him all up,
until he remembered that he had seen another fire, and that Rifle-Eye
had told him of a third one yet.

Wilbur was working doggedly, yet in a spiritless, tired fashion, beating
out the fire with a wet gunnysack as it reached the fire-guard of the
old hunter's making, and very carefully putting out any spark that the
wind drove across it, working almost without thought. But as he topped
the ridge and came within full view of the fire that had started among
the tops, his listlessness fell from him. Against the glow he could see
the outline of the figure of the hunter, and he ran up to him.

"It's all out, back there," he panted. "What shall we do here?"

For the first time the Ranger seemed to have no answer ready. Then he
said slowly:

"I reckon we can hold this bit of it, up yonder on the mountain, but
there's a line of fire runnin' around by the gully, and the wind's
beginnin' a-howlin' through there. I don't reckon we can stop that. We
may have to fall back beyond the river. We'll need axmen, now. You've
got a good mare; ride down t