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.  It would send the fire sweeping up the valley.  There would be no stopping it.  There would be nothing left in its wake but the blackened earth, smoking roots, and a few charred trunks standing gaunt and unlovely amid the ruin.

So now they strove to create a barrier which the fire should not pass.  It was not a task to be perfunctorily carried on, there was no time for malingering.  There was a very real incitement to great effort.  Their property was at stake; their homes and livelihood; even their lives, if they made an error in the course and speed of the fire’s advance and were trapped.

They cut a lane through the woods straight across the valley floor from the river to where the southern slope pitched sharply down.  They felled the great trees and dragged them aside with powerful donkey engines to manipulate their gear.  They cleared away the brush and the dry windfalls until this lane was bare as a traveled road—­so that when the fire ate its way to this barrier there was a clear space in which should fall harmless the sparks and embers flung ahead by the wind.

There, at this labor, the element of the spectacular vanished.  They could not attack the enemy with excited cries, with brandished weapons.  They could not even see the enemy.  They could hear him, they could smell the resinous odor of his breath.  That was all.  They laid their defenses against him with methodical haste, chopping, heaving, hauling the steel cables here and there from the donkeys, sweating in the blanket of heat that overlaid the woods, choking in the smoke that rolled like fog above them and about them.  And always in each man’s mind ran the uneasy thought of the west wind rising.

But throughout the day the west wind held its breath.  The flames crawled, ate their way instead of leaping hungrily.  The smoke rose in dun clouds above the burning area and settled in gray vagueness all through the woods, drifting in wisps, in streamers, in fantastic curlings, pungent, acrid, choking the men.  The heat of the fire and the heat of the summer sun in a windless sky made the valley floor a sweat-bath in which the loggers worked stripped to undershirts and overalls, blackened with soot and grime.

Night fell.  The fire had eaten the heart out of a block half a mile square.  It was growing.  A redness brightened the sky.  Lurid colors fluttered above the hottest blaze.  A flame would run with incredible agility up the trunk of a hundred-foot cedar to fling a yellow banner from the topmost boughs, to color the billowing smoke, the green of nearby trees, to wave and gleam and shed coruscating spark-showers and die down again to a dull glow.