call the roll and see who was missing among the settlers. No one
dreamed that this mysterious fire that had crept up out of a coulee
and spread a black, smoking blanket over the hills where it passed, was
nothing more nor lees than a diversion while a greater crime was being
committed behind their backs.

In spite of them the fire, beaten out of existence at one point, gained
unexpected fury elsewhere and raced on. In spite of them women and
children were in actual danger of being burned to death, and rushed
weeping from flimsy shelter to find safety in the nearest barren coulee.
The sick lady whom the Little Doctor had been tending was carried out on
her bed and laid upon the blackened prairie, hysterical from the fright
she had received. The shack she had lately occupied smoked while
the tarred paper on the roof crisped and curled; and then the whole
structure burst into flames and sent blazing bits of paper and boards to
spread the fire faster.

Fire guards which the inexperienced settlers thought safe were jumped
without any perceptible check upon the flames. The wind was just right
for the fanning of the fire. It shifted now and then erratically and
sent the yellow line leaping in new directions. Florence Grace Hallman
was in Dry Lake that day, and she did not hear until after dark how
completely her little diversion had been a success; how more than
half of her colony had been left homeless and hungry upon the charred
prairie. Florence Grace Hallman would not have relished her supper, I
fear, had the news reached her earlier in the evening.

At Antelope Coulee the Happy Family and such of the settlers as they
could muster hastily for the fight, made a desperate stand against
the common enemy. Flying U Coulee was safe, thanks to the permanent
fire-guards which the Old Man maintained year after year as a matter
of course. But there were the claims of the Happy Family and all the
grassland east of there which must be saved.

Men drove their work horses at a gallop after plows, and when they
had brought them they lashed the horses into a trot while they plowed
crooked furrows in the sun-baked prairie sod, just over the eastern
rim of Antelope Coulee. The Happy Family knelt here and there along the
fresh-turned sod, and started a line of fire that must beat up against
the wind until it met the flames, rushing before it. Backfiring is
always a more or less, ticklish proceeding, and they would not trust the
work to