“I’ll take one of those lad’s places,” said Dane.  “That fellow can’t hold the breaker straight, Courthorne.”

It was a minute or two later when he flung a breathless lad away from his plow, and the latter turned upon him hoarse with indignation.

“I raced Stapleton for it.  Loose your hold, confound you.  It’s mine,” he said.

Dane turned and laughed at him as he signed to one of the Ontario hired men to take the near horse’s head.

“You’re a plucky lad, and you’ve done what you could,” he said.  “Still, if you get in the way of a grown man now, I’ll break your head for you.”

He was off in another moment, crossed Winston, who had found fresh beasts, in his furrow, and had turned and doubled it before the fire that had passed the other barrier came close upon them.  Once more the smoke grew blinding, and one of Dane’s beasts went down.

“I’m out of action now,” he said.  “Try back.  That team will never face it, Courthorne.”

Winston’s face showed very grim under the tossing flame.  “They’ve got to.  I’m going through,” he said.  “If the others are to stop it behind there, they must have time.”

Then he and the husband of the woman who had spoken to Maud Barrington passed on with the frantic team into the smoke that was streaked with flame.

“Good Lord!” said Dane, and added more as sitting on the horse’s head he turned his tingling face from the fire.

It was some minutes before he and the hired man who came up loosed the fallen horse, and led it and its fellow back towards the last defenses the rest had been raising, while the first furrows checked but did not stay the conflagration.  There he presently came upon the man who had been with Winston.

“I don’t know where Courthorne is,” he said.  “The beasts bolted with us just after we’d gone through the worst of it, and I fancy they took the plow along.  Any way, I didn’t see what became of them, and don’t fancy anybody would have worried much about them after being trampled on by a horse in the lumbar region.”

Dane saw that the man was limping and white in face, and asked no more questions.  It was evident to him that Courthorne would be where he was most needed, and he did what he could with those who were adding furrow to furrow across the path of the fire.  It rolled up to them roaring, stopped, flung a shower of burning filaments before it, sank and swept aloft again, while the sparks rained down upon the grass before the draught it made.

Blackened men with smoldering clothes were, however, ready, and they fought each incipient blaze with soaked grain bags, and shovels, some of them also, careless of blistered arms, with their own wet jackets.  As fast as each fire was trampled out another sprang into life, but the parent blaze that fed them sank and died, and at last there was a hoarse cheer.  They had won, and the fire they had beaten passed on divided across the prairie, leaving the homestead unscathed between.