Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/352

344 than a hundred feet of fire front in this heat. Three hundred feet—She shook her head. She needed help!

Another patrolman brought his lathered horse to a stop.

"It's all in this block," Helen said, without stopping her work, "Take your apparatus straight ahead. You'll stay in this east-and-west line. The fire will be north of you and your job is to keep this flank from crossing the line. You'll have help as soon as I can spare men."

The man yelled at his horse. The frightened animal was trying to back and turn and had no terror of the whip. Helen seized the bridle and led him forward, then sprang aside as he lurched on. Her helper emerged. His eyebrows were gone, she saw. He peered close into her face, fright stamped on his features and stared so a moment before he gasped:

"They can't hold it. Soon's they get it knocked down—the wind—the wind throws her along again."

The crackle and pop of burning wood was louder, nearer, the heat more intense, smoke thicker—greenish, yellow smoke, coming in puffs that spread about her and swirled and clung to the ground and then shot upward—or rolled along among the trees.

Black Joe came on a run.

"It's hotter 'n th' hubs of hell! It'll go into the tops if we don't kill it—and up there once, she'll go clear to th' river!"

"I know, Joe. Listen!" From afar off a feeble, thin cry came through the confusion of heavier sounds: the wail of an automobile siren.

It rose and fell, approached and receded in the face of fire Bounds, but it was constant and seemed to be shrieking a warning in words: "Git outta the way!