"
In the growing dawn, Hollister and the logger went down through woods
thick with smoke. They routed Lawanne out of his cabin, and he joined
them eagerly. He had never seen a forest fire. What bore upon the
woodsmen chiefly as a malignant, destructive force affected Lawanne as
something that promised adventure, as a spectacle which aroused his
wonder, his curious interest in vast, elemental forces unleashed. They
stopped at Bland's and pressed him into service.
In an hour they were deployed before the fire, marshalled to the
attack under men from Carr's, woodsmen experienced in battle against
the red enemy, this spoiler of the forest with his myriad tongues of
flame and breath of suffocating smoke.
In midsummer the night airs in those long inlets and deep valleys move
always toward the sea. But as day grows and the sun swings up to its
zenith, there comes a shift in the aerial currents. The wind follows
the course of the sun until it settles in the westward, and sometimes
rises to a gale. It was that rising of the west wind that the loggers
feared.
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