stranger.

Every man of them took a certain stretch of furrow to watch, and ran
backward and forward with blackened, frayed sacks to beat out the
wayward flames that licked treacherously through the smallest break in
the line of fresh soil. They knew too well the danger of those little,
licking flame tongues; not one was left to live and grow and race
leaping away through the grass.

They worked--heavens, how they worked!--and they stopped the fire there
on the rim of Antelope Coulee. Florence Grace Hallman would have been
sick with fury, had she seen that dogged line of fighters, and the
ragged hem of charred black ashes against the yellow-brown, which showed
how well those men whom she hated had fought.

So the fire was stopped well outside the fence which marked the boundary
of the Happy Family's claims. All west of there and far to the north the
hills and the coulees lay black as far as one could see--which was to
the rim of the hills which bordered Dry Lake valley on the east. Here
and there a claim-shack stood forlorn amid the blackness. Here and there
a heap of embers still smoked and sent forth an occasional spitting of
sparks when a gust fanned the heap. Men, women and children stood about
blankly or wandered disconsolately here and there, coughing in the acrid
clouds of warm grass cinders kicked up by their own lagging feet.

No one missed the Kid. No one dreamed that he was lost again. Chip was
with the Happy Family and did not know that the Kid had left the ranch
that afternoon. The Little Doctor had taken it for granted that he had
gone with his daddy, as he so frequently did; and with his daddy and the
whole Happy Family to look after him, she never once doubted that he was
perfectly safe, even among the fire-fighters. She supposed he would be
up on the seat beside Patsy, probably, proudly riding on the wagon that
hauled the water barrels.

The Little Doctor had troubles of her own to occupy her mind She had
ridden hurriedly up the hill and straight to the shack of the sick
woman, when first she discovered that the prairie was afire. And she had
found the sick woman lying on a makeshift bed on the smoking, black area
that was pathetically safe now from fire because there was nothing more
to burn.

"Little black shack's all burnt up! Everything's black now. Black hills,
black hollows, black future, black world, black hearts--everything
matches--everything's black. Sky's black, I'm black--you're
black