Sanders rode up as close to the west edge of Bear Canon as he could endure.  In two or three places the flames had jumped the wall and were trying to make headway in the scant underbrush of the rocky slope that led to a hogback surmounted by a bare rimrock running to the summit.  This natural barrier would block the fire on the west, just as the burnt-over area would protect the north.  For the present at least the fire-fighters could confine their efforts to the south and east, where the spread of the blaze would involve the Jackpot.  A shift in the wind would change the situation, and if it came in time would probably save the oil property.

Dave put his horse to a lope and rode back to the trench and trail his men were building.  He found a shovel and joined them.

From out of Cattle Canon billows of smoke rolled across the hill and settled into a black blanket above the men.  This was acrid from the resinous pitch of the pines.  The wind caught the dark pall, drove it low, and held it there till the workers could hardly breathe.  The sun was under entire eclipse behind the smoke screen.

The heat of the flames tortured Dave’s face and hands, just as the smoke-filled air inflamed his nostrils and throat.  Coals of fire pelted him from the river of flame, carried by the strong breeze blowing down.  From the canons on either side of the workers came a steady roar of a world afire.  Occasionally, at some slight shift of the wind, the smoke lifted and they could see the moving wall of fire bearing down upon them, wedges of it far ahead of the main line.

The movements of the workers became automatic.  The teams had to be removed because the horses had become unmanageable under the torture of the heat.  When any one spoke it was in a hoarse whisper because of a swollen larynx.  Mechanically they dug, shoveled, grubbed, handkerchiefs over their faces to protect from the furnace glow.

A deer with two fawns emerged from the smoke and flew past on the way to safety.  Mice, snakes, rabbits, birds, and other desert denizens appeared in mad flight.  They paid no attention whatever to their natural foe, man.  The terror of the red monster at their heels wholly obsessed them.

The fire-break was from fifteen to twenty feet wide.  The men retreated back of it, driven by the heat, and fought with wet sacks to hold the enemy.  A flash of lightning was hurled against Dave.  It was a red-hot limb of a pine, tossed out of the gorge by the stiff wind.  He flung it from him and tore the burning shirt from his chest.  An agony of pain shot through his shoulder, seared for half a foot by the blazing branch.

He had no time to attend to the burn then.  The fire had leaped the check-trail at a dozen points.  With his men he tried to smother the flames in the grass by using saddle blankets and gunnysacks, as well as by shoveling sand upon it.  Sometimes they cut down the smouldering brush and flung it back across the break into the inferno on the other side.  Blinded and strangling from the smoke, the fire-fighters would make short rushes into the clearer air, swallow a breath or two of it, and plunge once more into the line to do battle with the foe.