etimes grouped, like the camp-fires of an
immense army. These were the stubs, stumps, down logs and the like left
still blazing after all the more readily inflammable material had been
burned away. As the little cavalcade laboured upward, stopping every few
minutes to breathe the horses, these flickering lights defined
themselves. In particular one tall dead yellow pine standing boldly
prominent, afire to the top, alternately glowed and paled as the wind
breathed or died. A smell of stale burning drifted down the damp night
air. Pretty soon Jack Pollock halted for a moment to call back:

"Here's their fire line!"

Bob spurred forward. Just beyond Jack's horse the country lay blackened.
The pine needles had burned down to the soil; the seedlings and younger
trees had been withered away; the larger trees scorched; the fuel with
which every forest is littered consumed in the fierceness of the
conflagration. Here and there some stub or trunk still blazed and
crackled, outposts of the army whose camp-fires seemed to dot the hills.

The line of demarcation between the burned and the unburned areas seemed
extraordinarily well defined. Bob looked closer and saw that this
definition was due to a peculiar path, perhaps two yards wide. It looked
as though some one had gone along there with a huge broom, sweeping as
one would sweep a path in deep dust. Only in this case the broom must
have been a powerful implement as well as one of wide reach. The brushed
marks went not only through the carpet of pine needles, but through the
tarweed, the snow brush, the manzanita. This was technically the fire
line. At the sight of the positiveness with which it had checked the
spread of the flames, Bob's spirits rose.

"They seem to have stopped it here easy enough, already," he cried.

"Being as how this is the windward side of the fire, and on a down
slope, I should think they might," remarked Jack Pollock drily.

Bob chuckled and glanced at the girl.

"I'm finding out every day how little I know," said he; "at my age,
too!"

"The hard work is down wind," said Amy.

"Of course."

They entered the burned area, and climbed on up the hill. Though
evidently here the ferocity of the conflagration had passed, it had left
its rear guard behind. Fallen trees still blazed; standing trees flamed
like torches--but all harmlessly within the magic circle drawn by the
desperate quick work of the rangers. They threaded their way cautiously
among