Lonesome Land by B. M. Bower (reading strategies book .TXT) 📖

helplessness, and cursed aloud the man who had drawn all the fighting force from the prairie that day. They might at least have been able to harry it and hamper it and turn the savage sweep of it into barren ground upon some rock-bound coulee's rim. If they could have caught it at the start, or even in the first mile of its burning—or, even now, if Blumenthall's outfit were on the spot—or if Manley Fleetwood's fire guards held it back—He hoped some of them had stayed at home, so that they could help fight it.

In that brief glimpse before he rode down into a hollow and so lost sight of it, he knew that the fire they had fought and vanquished before had been a puny blaze compared with this one. The ground it had burned was not broad enough to do more than check this fire temporarily. It would simply burn around the blackened area and rush on and on, until the bend of the river turned it back to the north, where the river's first tributary stream would stop it for good and all. But before that happened it would have done its worst—and its worst was enough to pale the face of every prairie dweller.

Once more he caught sight of the fire as he was riding swiftly across the level land to the east of Cold Spring Coulee. He was going to see if Manley's fire guards were any good, and if anyone was there ready to fight it when it came up; they could set a back fire from the guards, he thought, even if the guards themselves were not wide enough to hold the main fire.

He pounded heavily down the long trail into the coulee, passed close by the house with a glance sidelong to see if anybody was in sight there, rounded the corral to follow the trail which wound zigzag up the farther coulee wall, and overtook Val, running bareheaded up the hill, dragging a wet sack after her. She was panting already from the climb, and she had on thin slippers with high heels, he noticed, that impeded her progress and promised a sprained ankle before she reached the top. Kent laughed grimly when he overtook her; he thought it was like a five-year-old child running with a cup of water to put out a burning house.

“Where do you think you're going with that sack?” he called out, by way of greeting.

She turned a pale, terrified face toward him, and reached up a hand mechanically to push her fair hair out of her eyes. “So much smoke was rolling into the coulee,” she panted, “and I knew there must be a fire. And I've never felt quite easy about our guards since Polycarp Jenks said—Do you know where it is—the fire?”

“It's between here and the railroad. Give me that sack, and you go on back to the house. You can't do any good.” And when she handed the sack up to him and then kept on up the hill, he became autocratic in his tone. “Go on back to the house, I tell you!”

“I shall not do anything of the kind,” she retorted indignantly, and Kent gave a snort of disapproval, kicked his horse into a lunging gallop, and left her.

“You'll spoil your complexion,” he cried over his shoulder, “and that's about all you will do. You better go back and get a parasol.”

Val did not attempt to reply, but she refused to let his taunts turn her back, and kept stubbornly climbing, though tears of pure rage filled her eyes and even slipped over the lids to her cheeks. Before she had reached the top, he was charging down upon her again, and the pallor of his face told her much.

“All hell couldn't stop that fire!” he cried, before he was near her, and the words were barely distinguishable in the roar which was growing louder and more terrifying. “Get back! You want to stand there till it comes down on you?” Then, just as he was passing, he saw how white and trembling she was, and he pulled up, with Michael sliding his front feet in the loose soil that he might stop on that steep slope.

“You don't want to go and faint,” he remonstrated in a more kindly tone, vaguely conscious that he had perhaps seemed brutal. “Here, give me your hand, and stick your toe in the stirrup. Ah, don't waste time trying to make up your mind—up you come! Don't you want to save the house and corrals—and the haystacks? We've got our work cut out, let me tell you, if we do it.”

He had leaned and lifted her up bodily, helped her to put her foot in the stirrup from which he had drawn his own, and he held her beside him while he sent Michael down the trail as fast as he dared. It was a good deal of a nuisance, having to look after her when seconds were so precious, but he couldn't go on and leave her, though she might easily have reached the bottom as soon as he if she had not been so frightened. He was afraid to trust her; she looked, to him, as if she were going to faint in his arms.

“You don't want to get scared,” he said, as calmly as he could. “It's back two or three miles on the bench yet, and I guess we can easy stop it from burning anything but the grass. It's this wind, you see. Manley went to town, I suppose?”

“Yes,” she answered weakly. “He went yesterday, and stayed over. I'm all alone, and I didn't know what to do, only to go up and try—”

“No use, up there.”

They were at the corral gate then, and he set her down carefully, then dismounted and turned Michael into the corral and shut the gate.

“If we can't step it, and I ain't close by, I wish you'd let Michael out,” he said hurriedly, his eyes taking in the immediate surroundings and measuring the danger which lurked in weeds, grass, and scattered hay. “A horse don't have much show when he's shut up, and—Out there where that dry ditch runs, we'll back-fire. You take this sack and come and watch out my fire don't jump the ditch. We'll carry it around the house, just the other side the trail.” He was pulling a handful of grass for a torch, and while he was twisting it and feeling in his pocket for a match, he looked at her keenly. “You aren't going to get hysterics and leave me to fight it alone, are you?” he challenged.

“I hope I'm not quite such a silly,” she answered stiffly, and he smiled to himself as he ran along the far side of the ditch with his blazing tuft of grass, setting fire to the tangled, brown mat which covered the coulee bottom.

Val followed slowly behind him, watching that the blaze did not blow back across the ditch, and beating it out when it seemed likely to do so. Now that she could actually do something, she was no more excited than he, if one could judge by her manner. She did look sulky, however, at his way of treating her.

To back-fire on short notice, with no fresh-turned furrow of moist earth, but only a shallow little dry ditch with the grass almost meeting over its top in places, is ticklish business at best. Kent went slowly, stamping out incipient blazes that seemed likely to turn unruly, and not trusting Val any more than he was compelled to do. She was a woman, and Kent's experience with women of her