Kitabı oku: «Unexplored!», sayfa 4
CHAPTER IV
WITH THE AIR PATROL
“Signal them!” chorused the three boys, acting on Norris’s suggestion, (flashing their distress with their pocket mirrors), while Long Lester stood measuring the flight of the aeroplane.
His practiced eye also detected a faint bluish haze that rose behind the ridge at the North, – a haze altogether unlike that which foretells a storm. In fact, the sun glinting from the wings of the giant wings and from the glacial-polished slopes beneath forbade that explanation.
Like most backwoodsmen, the old prospector said the least when he felt the most. His lean body suddenly grew tense. “It’s a fire,” he told himself. “An everlastingly big one, too.”
“That’s a DeHaviland,” decided Ace, as the huge bombing-plane came nearer. “Must be the Fire Patrol!”
A moment more and the buzzing apparatus began sinking into a “pancake” landing, – fortunately, just above the wide sweep of the granite butte. Could it be engine trouble, Norris wondered, or had it seen their signals? Lucky they were on an elevation.
With the sound like a saw-mill in full blast, the great ship jolted to terra firma, within shouting distance, – and hardly had she come to a full stop than the boys had raced to her side.
“I say!” exclaimed a familiar voice, as the observer climbed out. It was Ranger Radcliffe! “Where did you folks drop from?”
Norris explained the marooned camping expedition.
Radcliffe’s face was lined with fatigue and anxiety. “Big fire off there!” he motioned. “Been directing a hundred men. Broke out in three places, all within twenty-four hours, and not even an electric storm to account for it. Want to help?” And as the little party voiced unanimous consent, he proceeded to draft them in, at the Government nine dollars per day.
He could have compelled their services, as he had that of a party of campers down towards Kings’ River. In a few words, his voice vibrating to his high nervous tension, the young forest officer had them all thrilling with patriotic fervor.
“Now get your things,” he directed. “May have to fight it for a week! You can turn your burros out to forage for themselves, and I guess you’ll find them again when this is over. If you don’t the Government will probably square it with you.”
The chums swiftly retraced their steps to where the animals waited patiently, removing the packs and sending the little donkeys down the trail to better pasturage. They might wander, but they would be safe. With their swift heels they could defend themselves from even a mountain lion. And they were apt to keep to the mountain meadows, where was food and water.
Their run at such an altitude had given Pedro a touch of mountain sickness, and he had to lie flat till his heart beat more normally and his nose stopped bleeding.
The big ’plane carried a relay of provisions for the fire fighters already established, whom it had brought for the purpose from the Zuni Mine. As corned beef and hardtack were distributed, the hungry campers thought they had never tasted anything so good in their lives. Not even the Thanksgiving turkeys of later years were ever spiced with such appetites.
This fire, – or rather, these three fires, so mysteriously concomitant, the Ranger explained when the boys returned, had broken so far from any ranch or work camp that they were hard pressed for men to fight it.
“You fellows will have a mighty important part to play for the next few days,” he assured them, “or I miss my guess.”
“Hurray!” shouted Ace. “Three cheers for the U. S. Airplane Patrol!” For he knew something of the work started at the close of the war. Following regular daily routes, this patrol not only detects fires and follows up campers or others who may have started them, (carelessly or otherwise), but in times of emergency carries the fire leader from one strategic point to another, – where as likely as not there are neither roads for him to go in his machine, nor even horse-back trails, – till he has shown the volunteer firemen how to trench and back-fire.
They needed some one, the Ranger said, to hold the top of the next ridge, – between which and the boys lay that inaccessible canyon it would have taken them days to have scaled afoot. By day they were merely to watch for flying brands. Their chief work would come at night, when the wind would turn and blow down canyon, and they might successfully back-fire.
The fire had started in two places on the opposite bank of the Kawa, and in one place this side of the river, and was eating its way along the slopes with the wind which swept them by day. It certainly looked like the work of incendiaries.
Ace begged permission to wireless for his little Spanish ’plane, in its hangar in Burlingame, that it might be employed in some volunteer capacity, and Radcliffe accepted his offer.
The huge DeHaviland required all of the flat surface afforded by the butte, for its preliminary run. They were off with a roar. As they glided across to the flat-topped ridge on the other side of the canyon, they could see the ravenous flames climbing tall pines and firs, racing from limb to limb, through the forest roof, devouring the steeps, doubtless richly coated with underbrush and downwood. The roar and crackle of it filled their ears sickeningly, as they thought of the naked mountainsides that would be left, – mere skeletons of barkless tree trunks, where they had camped on brown pine needles, – smooth, silent, inches deep, soft under their tired feet, dry as tinder and aromatic with Nature’s finest perfume.
How the devourer would relish the pitch and resin oozing from the juicy bark! How secure it must feel, on those slopes never climbed by man, with the autumn rains months away, and the fire fighters like so many ants trying with axe and shovel to mark off on the hot forest floor a boundary beyond which the fiery tongues must not lick.
Had the wind not been in the other direction, they would have been overwhelmed with the smoke that billowed darkly till it could have been seen 50 miles away, the red sun scarcely lightening the gloom. Even where they landed, an occasional hot breath scorched their faces and set their eyes to smarting, while their winged ship nosed frantically up and away again before she should meet Icarus’ fate.
“Some day,” Radcliffe had told them that day at the rodeo, “the Forest Service Air Patrol, which serves now to give warning of the tiniest smoke, and so saves men and millions where every minute counts, will fight with glass bombs of fire extinguisher, whose trajectory falling from a ’plane in rapid flight will have to be calculated to a nicety, but which, delivered while the fire is in its infancy, will do the work of many men.”
The worst difficulty would be at night, when though the fire shows plainer, the pilot would have to depend largely on his own sense of equilibrium to tell him at what angle his ship was inclined. True, acetylene gas lamps properly protected from the wind could be made to light up the ground below when alighting, but at an altitude of even a mile, little can be seen of the landscape to guide one on one’s course. The 2,000-foot firs of the Sierra slopes appear but as green-black billows.
As the great ship raced toward the flaming forest, their talk at the barbecue raced through the mind of the Senator’s son. “Some day,” Radcliffe had challenged them, “you want to see Glacier National Park, with its ice-capped peaks and its precipices thousands of feet deep, its glacier-fed lakes and Alpine scenery. And of course you must all see the geysers of the Yellowstone, its petrified forests and mud volcanoes.”
“And bears?” Ted had laughed with a glance at Pedro.
“Yes, all sorts of wild animals. And some time you want to explore the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and the 14,000 foot peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park. By that time you will be ready to go to Southern Alaska and try Mt. McKinley, which is worth while not so much because it is the highest mountain in North America, (Mt. Whitney is nearly as high), but because it stands the highest above the surrounding country of any mountain in the world. Mt. Whitney is just an easy climb above a sea of surrounding peaks; you don’t realize the height at all.
“Then you know we have a National Park in Hawaii? – But Roosevelt, – or Greater Sequoia Park, – is going to remain an unspoiled wilderness for a good many years to come, with three great canyons larger than that of Yosemite itself.”
“Kings’ River and the Kern,” Ace had agreed, “but what is the third?”
“Tehipite.”
“Oh, of course.”
“We wanted to go over the John Muir Trail right along the crest of the Sierras to Yosemite.”
“You’ve hundreds of miles of almost unexplored country! Enough vacation places to last a lifetime! Rivers alive with trout! Bears! Cougars!” the Ranger had commented.
“And rattlers,” Long Lester had added grimly.
“And rattlers. And they’re the only living thing we need fear.”
“Not excluding range cattle?” Pedro had wanted to be assured.
“Not when you’re all together. Of course if you were alone you might break a leg or something that would leave you helpless, and you’d sure be a long way from anything to eat unless you had it with you.
“But unless we look alive the Big Interests are going to wrest away these beauty spots that we have set aside for our National playgrounds,” Radcliffe had declared.
“That’s just what Dad says!” Ace had remembered.
“And why? Not because they need the irrigation and water power of the big falls, for they can have it after the streams leave the parks, but because it would cost them a good deal less to secure these things of Uncle Sam than it would to build their projects outside Park limits. There isn’t a beauty spot in the West that some commercial interest hasn’t designs on.”
“That’s one thing I mean to fight!” Ace squared his chin as the DeHaviland whisked them to their particular ridge, a table mountain, or butte, where half a dozen recruits had already been landed with tools and grub.
“Sure seems as if these fires had been set,” mused Long Lester, as Radcliffe bade them good-by, – for he had to be in a dozen places at once, that day.
“But who did it?” demanded Ace fiercely.
“No savvy dat kind feller,” said a Canadian half breed, who was just starting off with a pick. “’E’s bad feller, dat!”
“Sure is!” agreed Ace. “I don’t savvy him either, – any one who would deliberately burn —that!” with a wave of his arm toward the forested gorge, up which already rose a noticeable heat. The red tongues, racing through the spruce and cedar tops, shone through the smoke gloom, whence issued a distant roaring which was the wind created by the super-heated stretch of territory.
To the left, a gleaming-eyed cougar crept through the shadows, himself a shadow. To the right, a huge, furry looking shadow ran clumsily, flat-footedly. A tiny shadow hopped from almost under their feet, and above their heads flapped a small covey of lighter shadows. Writhing above the dark tops of the doomed trees rose the yellow-gray smoke that was their departing shades.
The faces of the fire-fighters were grimly blackened with smoke and grime, their shirts clung wet with perspiration to their swelling muscles, and their dry throats clacked when they tried to swallow.
“I’d sure like to find the fellow that started that!” muttered Ace.
CHAPTER V
A DARING FEAT
As sun-set turned the wind down canyon, all hands made a sally down the mountain side in the hope of establishing a line of back-fire, but the ground soon became too hot for them, while the air was filled chokingly with ash and char-dust. They had to retreat to the ridge. It was a night never to be forgotten.
When the wind turned at dawn, – with their line still intact, – the exhausted party took turn and turn about, snatching a few hours’ sleep, wrapped in their blankets on the rocks, or making coffee.
Ace had forgotten all about his wireless message when, shortly after noon, his own ship arrived. It had had a search for him, and had landed, apparently, on the very ledge of basalt where the DeHaviland had picked them up.
The beauty of the Spanish ship was that it was built to land on a space no bigger than a house roof. It carried two propellers at the top. The pilot had only to start these and it sucked itself straight up into the air. Then he twirled the propeller on the front and sailed away, as easily as you please.
He landed by reversing these operations. He could alight on a shed roof if he had to, (provided, of course, that the roof was flat). The only danger would be if the propellers should go on strike.
“I’ve been getting a wireless message,” said the pilot. “There! Better take it, Mr. King,” to Ace.
Ace’s eyes grew dark as he interpreted the frantic ticking that his apparatus gave him. “Why —Rosa’s sending this! – She’s marooned – there at the Red Top fire-outlook! – ‘Fire on three sides, on fourth, rapids of Kawa River Gorge. Send help – if you can,’” he translated, while the boys waited, breathless. “Three men where first-fire started – silver buttons – shining in the sun.”
“That sounds like Mexicans!” said Pedro.
“Now what?” asked Norris. “Where’s the Ranger, do you suppose?” But just then he saw a flaming branch blown across their line. Like tinder the dried firs burst into a shower of sparks, and with a call to the men, he darted after it. Ace remained behind to wireless, and Ted to quench their cook-fire, while Ace’s pilot flung off his coat and ran after the fire fighters.
Ace King did one thing supremely well. He knew his ship. He was born to fly.
“Hey, Ted,” he brought a certain line of reasoning to a head, “the Ranger can’t land with that DeHaviland, if he does go after Rosa. You know the lay-out on Red Top.” (The boys had passed that way.)
“Yeh, – Cæsar! – That’s right. No place there half large enough for the bombing-plane! – That poor kid!” He shuddered. “What’s the answer?” for he saw that Ace had some plan. “I’m with you!”
“Just this. We can’t leave her there to be burned alive. Radcliffe can’t do any more than we can about it. Besides, he’s got his hands full, wherever he is. But a forest guard was killed last year directing fire fighters from a plane. Went into a tail spin and fell into the flames.”
“I know. It’s mighty dangerous flying over a fire. Isn’t there anything Rosa can do?”
“That’s just what–” Ace hesitated, deep in thought.
“I’ve heard of people taking refuge in caves, but where would she find the cave? – ’N’ I’ve heard of ’em going to a rock-slide and piling up a barricade of stone and lying behind it while the fire swept that way. It cuts off some of the heat and flying sparks–”
“Look here!” Ace vociferated with the suddenness of a machine gun. “I’m going for her.”
“What–!”
“Yes, sir! I can land there, anyway. Then if it queers the machine, I’ll take Rosa down to the rapids. I know a fellow that was in a big fire in Montana. When it cut them off, each man soaked his blanket and got under it in midstream while the fire jumped to the other bank. They made a sort of tepee around their heads, got clear under water, and just came up for an occasional breath. Gee! He says it roared like a thousand trains as it swept over them. So that’s what we’ll do – that is, unless we can get back in the ship.”
Unconsciously he patted his machine, and Ted knew what it would mean to him to lose it.
“Perhaps – perhaps you can bring it back,” he ventured.
“Sure thing!” Ace gave his spirits a toss. “Anyway, here goes! – Good-by.”
“What’s the idea?” yelled Ted aggrievedly. “Going to leave your side-kick behind?” and he climbed into the observer’s place.
“Coming!” Ace wirelessed the girl. “Be on meadow – we’ll pick you up.”
“If our propellers don’t go on strike,” he added to himself. Still he knew he could slow to 80 miles an hour and pancake down. He would first circle well away from the fire, with its super-heated air column, till they came to the gorge of the Kawa. There would be a narrow zone, he figured, of less destructive atmosphere, the air channel over the 2,000 foot canyon.
With a peek at castor oil and gasoline, they started, looping and curving straight to 15,000 feet, then Westward, away from the fire zone. Though the day was fair, the spiral of hot air rising above the flaming forest kept them pitching and lurching in a short chop that made Ted look green, and gave even Ace a cold feeling at the pit of his stomach.
The sea of snow-clad peaks slid by beneath them, the sun flashing from the granite slopes. Rising and falling, rising and falling in the rough, upper air, they felt as if they were in a swift elevator. A cloud to the West looked like a fleecy carpet beneath them. The West wind kept swinging the machine till Ace had continually to bring it back in line with the rapids of the Kawa which was his objective point.
It took but instants, though it seemed ages to both boys. Now it was time to race quivering down the gorge of canyon-cooled air. Would they make it against the devastating breath of the flames! – Now they were looking straight down into that picture of red and – black. Rosa, watching frantically from the wee patch of green which was her mountain meadow, looked like a dot with waving arms. The air became a stretch of dizzy rapids. The combined roar of the flames and the river beneath nearly drowned the nearer sound of the descending ’plane.
With heart that fluttered near to bursting, Ace accomplished the quick swoop, Ted snatched the girl aboard, and they were up again.
The miracle had been accomplished! – The mountains lay like a relief map beneath them, greenest down the canyons that branches Westward from the gleaming crest of the main divide, the snow-capped peaks gleaming silver in the sunlight. The fire zone lay like a small inferno behind them.
Back at fire-fighting headquarters, Ace’s nerves took toll of him in trembling knees. He had been all steel. Now he literally dropped in his tracks, and in ten minutes was fast asleep.
Rosa, now that the danger was all over, broke down and wept hysterically, to Ted’s infinite embarrassment.
Norris was just returning with the triumphant fire-fighters. They had actually not missed them. When, four hours later, Ace awoke and responded to Pedro’s “Come and get it!” as he ladled out the ham and beans, he found himself a hero, and Ted his press agent.
“This country would do well to emulate France,” Norris was explaining. “France offers a government subsidy to encourage commercial aviation. Our Congress has thus far refused to realize the need of appropriations. For it is by trade that aviation will develop.
“We need above all things more airplane fire patrols. We have the men, trained aviators left from the war, – we have the equipment, and the men could protect not only our National Forests, but at the same time keep a watchful eye on the millions of acres of state lands and timber privately owned, which lie adjacent to Government holdings.
“Do you fellows realize that in five years, areas have been burned that would more than fill the state of Utah! At that rate how long will our forests last? And think what a paper famine alone would mean!” He paused for lack of breath to express the intensity of his feeling.
“Hundreds of men have given up their lives in the service, – fighting fire.”
“Yes,” said Ace, “but Dad says there’s a bigger fight to put up in Congress for forestry appropriations.”
“Your father is doing good work,” stated Norris.
“He’s trying to, you bet!”
“These fire-fighting ’planes can sail over the highest peaks in the United States. They can travel 14 hours without a landing. They can communicate with those below by radio. And they don’t have to have smooth landing places, merely ground that is free from stumps. We have over twenty million acres of National Forests alone, (not counting those in Alaska), and they are worth $220,000,000.”
“Gee! And there’s just as much risk as in dodging enemy ’planes,” Ted enthused, “flying over fires, and finding landing places when your motor goes on strike.” His eyes glowed across at Ace.
“Huh, you’re safe enough above a thousand feet,” minimized Ace, modestly. “These accidents practically all happen below a thousand feet.”
But by now supper was eaten, and it was time to get back to work. Norris, acting on Radcliffe’s suggestion, had been stationing the men at intervals to back-fire as far down the ridge as they could stand the heat. If anything, the fire seemed bigger than it had the night before, – a maelstrom of the inferno.
They worked in pairs, Ace being his, Norris’s, right hand man. He now assorted the six miners along the slope, planning himself to take the extreme Western post, where the ridge ran lowest and where the rocky crest dwindled to a dangerous line of mountain pines.
Ted and Pedro he directed to the opposite end of the ridge, where, like the tooth of a comb, it joined the main crest of the Sierra, – another strategic point.
“If worst comes to worst,” his final words were, “take refuge in some cave. This is a limestone region, – as you may have noticed, – and it’s likely riddled with caves. Keep an eye out for indications of cave mouths. I saw one yesterday, somewhere down there, when I didn’t have time to investigate.”
“All right,” acquiesced the boys, though inwardly scorning the possibility.
Rosa remained at camp to have food ready for the men on their return.
She began by taking stock. There was flour and lard, but no bread. She would have to bake for eleven hungry men. There were rice, beans, onions and tomatoes, dried fruits and coffee, and fresh meat for one meal, and for the next, erbwurst and pickles, macaroni to be baked with cheese, and tea. She hoped – for more reasons than one – that the Ranger would bring more supplies. She got out the Dutch oven and the gallon coffee pot, and with the hatchet provided with the outfit, started getting in a supply of down-wood.
As on the day of the rodeo, she was attired in trim khaki riding breeches and high-heeled moccasin boots, – good on horse-back but mighty hard to walk in, where the ground was rough. Her bobbed curly hair, red silk blouse and fringed sash added a touch of the Rosa that underlay her gritty side. She would surprise Radcliffe with her ability to cook for a fire crew.
The huge loaf safely ensconced in a Dutch oven buried in red coals, she sallied forth on a little exploring expedition. She wished she might find some fir sugar to cap the feast. She had, once, when camping in the Thompson River Valley. She had found the delectable sweet on a Douglas fir. Some of the dry white masses had been all of two inches long, though most of it had been in the form of mere white drops at the tips of the needles. There had also been a quantity of it in a semi-liquid condition on the ground underneath the tree, where some rain had dissolved it from the branches.
Just where should she search? The Indians had told her that time to look on the dry Eastern slopes of the range, in open areas where the trees got lots of sunlight, but where the ground has not dried out too quickly after the spring rains, as moisture is necessary as well as sunlight, – (so long as it does not rain and melt off this excess of the tree’s digested starch). She had a hunch that she could find some on the desert side of the Sierras, that being, of course, unattainable – unless Ace could take her over in his ’plane. It would do no harm to look on this side.
Neither did it do any good. She returned to camp empty-handed save for some cones of the sugar pine, which she proceeded to roast that the nuts might fall out of the spiny masses.
She found the deserted camp over-run with chipmunks. The little striped rascals had ravaged all the food supplies they could nibble into. She watched a couple of them actually shoving on the tin lid that she had left insecurely loose on the syrup can. Finally sending it clattering to the stony ground, – as she watched from behind two trees that grew close together, – the wee things sat up there on the edge of the can, dipping out its contents with their hand-like paws and licking them. Then one tried to reach down and drink it outright, at which he fell in, and Rosa felt impelled to fish him out and launder him, – to his terror, – before turning him loose, then put the syrup on the fire to sterilize.
Meantime what of the fire fighters? Ted and Pedro, with their pick and shovel, had descended rapidly into that deathly silence of the doomed forest slopes, deserted alike by song birds and chipmunks, the hum of insects and sound of any living thing, save alone the never-ceasing roar of the ravenous flames.
The fire had been eating slowly through a stretch of manzanita chaparral, whose hard stems resisted them as the evergreens could not. Though the wind still blew up-canyon, they approached the river gorge at right angles, and were able to make their way to the lower levels in the shelter of the East side of a dry creek bed, where the hot blast could not reach them.
They were stooping to drink at a spring when the terrified neigh of a horse sounded from a clump of saplings almost behind them. In the same instant the stretch of seedling firs that clothed the creek bank, showering into sparks at the far end, shot toward them sky rockets of leaping flame. Turning in a panic to race out at right angles from this unexpected peril, they thought to make time on horse-back. The animal was tied and hobbled with a rawhide lariat!
Frantically the hobbled horse jerked at the rawhide.
Pedro plucked Ted by the arm and tried to drag him on, for the fire was snapping through the under-brush at the speed of an express train. Its sound was that of many trains, and its wind hot as the breath of a blast furnace.
But as Ted had stooped to cut the thongs, his parched nostrils had caught a cooler breath. It seemed to issue from a cranny in the rocks behind the clump of saplings. Then it was too late: The shooting tongues of red were upon them. Dragging Pedro down beside him, – for the roar drowned his voice, – he waited, reasoning that the two- or three-foot seedlings would go like tinder, leaving a strip of ground hot, to be sure, but no longer flaming.
If they could but endure its passing! He turned to press his scorched face against the rock wall.
To his amazement, he fell into a cave mouth, tripping Pedro, who stumbled after him. Quick as thought they dragged the horse in after them and held him, trembling and snorting, his eyes rolling wildly, during that blistering moment until the line of fire had passed them.
“We’re safer now than before,” declared Ted. “This made a fine back-fire, didn’t it? – Let’s rest awhile.” His nerves were taking toll of him. “Ground’s too hot yet anyway.”
For perhaps an hour they rested, flat on the floor of the cave, – after having tied the horse to a bowlder just outside. He was a fine animal, black as jet and as high-spirited as Spitfire himself. Ted appraised him with longing eyes, for he loved horses as Ace loved his ship. But who could he belong to, and how did he come to be there?
His bridle was embellished with silver. “Mexican handiwork, that!” Pedro thought. But the mystery was no nearer solution.
The answer came sooner than they expected.
