From the tower Hart descended swiftly.  He gathered together all the carpenters, drillers, enginemen, and tool dressers in the vicinity and equipped them with shovels, picks, brush-hooks, saws, and axes.  To each one he gave also a gunnysack.

The foot party followed Crawford into the chaparral, making for the hills that led to Bear Canon.  A wind was stirring, and as they topped a rise it struck hot on their cheeks.  A flake of ash fell on Bob’s hand.

Crawford met them at the mouth of the canon.

“She’s rip-r’arin’, Bob!  Got too big a start to beat out.  We’ll clear a fire-break where the gulch narrows just above here and do our fightin’ there.”

The sparks of a thousand rockets, flung high by the wind, were swept down the gulch toward them.  Behind these came a curtain of black smoke.

The cattleman set his crew to work clearing a wide trail across the gorge from wall to wall.  The undergrowth was heavy, and the men attacked with brush-hooks, shovels, and axes.  One man, with a wet gunnysack, was detailed to see that no flying sparks started a new blaze below the safety zone.  The shovelers and grubbers cleared the grass and roots off to the dirt for a belt of twenty feet.  They banked the loose dirt at the lower edge to catch flying firebrands.  Meanwhile the breath of the furnace grew to a steady heat on their faces.  Flame spurts had leaped forward to a grove of small alders and almost in a minute the branches were crackling like fireworks.

“I’ll scout round over the hill and have a look above,” Bob said.  “We’ve got to keep it from spreading out of the gulch.”

“Take the horse,” Crawford called to him.

One good thing was that the fire was coming down the canon.  A downhill blaze moves less rapidly than one running up.

Runners of flame, crawling like snakes among the brush, struck out at the fighters venomously and tried to leap the trench.  The defenders flailed at these with the wet gunnysacks.

The wind was stiffer now and the fury of the fire closer.  The flames roared down the canon like a blast furnace.  Driven back by the intense heat, the men retreated across the break and clung to their line.  Already their lungs were sore from inhaling smoke and their throats were inflamed.  A pine, its pitchy trunk ablaze, crashed down across the fire-trail and caught in the fork of a tree beyond.  Instantly the foliage leaped to red flame.

Crawford, axe in hand, began to chop the trunk and a big Swede swung an axe powerfully on the opposite side.  The rest of the crew continued to beat down the fires that started below the break.  The chips flew at each rhythmic stroke of the keen blades.  Presently the tree crashed down into the trail that had been hewn.  It served as a conductor, and along it tongues of fire leaped into the brush beyond.  Glowing branches, flung by the wind and hurled from falling timber, buried themselves in the dry undergrowth.  Before one blaze was crushed half a dozen others started in its place.  Flails and gunnysacks beat these down and smothered them.