by John Benteen
His caulk-shod soles gave him sure purchase on the steep hillside. He went full tilt into that cauldron of smoke, dodging trees, the shotgun in one hand, the Winchester in the other. On the other side, Lasher’s men were firing blindly, and Fargo heard the old, familiar, deadly whisper of lead passing by. At least one of the enemy’s shots connected; in the bottom of the ravine, a man cried out. But on either flank Fargo’s forces were with him; he could hear them cursing, grunting, and firing as they hurtled down the hill.
Then they had reached the flames. In such dry duff it was amazing how fast a fire could build, and the blazes kindled by Fargo and his men to build the smokescreen tongued higher than he had expected. Even he balked momentarily at the orange barrier, nearly waist-high, licking hungrily at the layers of fir needles on the floor of the ravine, gobbling saplings and fallen limbs. Instinctively, he recoiled from the searing blast of heat. But there was nothing for it. He bellowed, “Come on!” and plunged into the fire.
Though long and extended down the valley, the band of flames was not yet wide. Fire licked at Fargo’s canvas pants, scorched and singed them, and, in places, the skin beneath them. The heavy boots protected his feet and ankles. Holding his breath, eyes closed, shotgun and rifle high, he dove through the barrier, emerged, slapping at the smoldering spots on his clothes. Then, under cover of the roiling smoke, he charged up the hill. And his men came with him, firing as they went.
It was Kettle Hill in Cuba all over again, he thought crazily, only there had been no smokescreen at Kettle Hill and the Spanish riflemen had had a clear field of fire for their Mausers. But it was an infantry charge to take the high ground against a dug-in force, and for an instant he wished The Colonel could be here; he would have enjoyed it. Then, scrambling up the slope, Fargo quit thinking and concentrated on fighting.
Suddenly, they burst from the smoke, a straggling line of gasping men with blackened faces and streaming eyes. Now they were in the big timber almost at the top, and in close combat.
Lasher’s men had drawn back, upwards, to keep above the smoke. Now, at nearly point-blank range, they unleashed a hail of fire.
Lead made a sleet-storm around Fargo as he sucked in breath, blinked his watery eyes to clear them. He saw the white blur of faces, the bright tongues of muzzle-flames above him. He let out a yell of sheer excitement, half Apache war-whoop, half wolf-howl, threw the rifle aside and began to use the shotgun.
This was the work for which it had been designed. Fargo raked the slope, one-handed, his other jerking shells from the bandolier. He broke and loaded and closed and fired the gun so fast that its thundering reports seemed to merge together in one long roll. And, pivoting his body, he laid down a barrage of buckshot from left to right and back again, as, up there, dead ahead, men were flushed out of cover like startled rabbits ... or died where they lay, riddled by those chopping slugs known with good reason as ‘blue whistlers’.
He saw one beanpole figure rise from a clump of saplings, leveling a rifle, saw it go down like a cut tree; another body plunged from underbrush head-first, went somersaulting absurdly down the slope to vanish in the smoke, wind up sprawled in the flames below. A man leaped out from behind the bole of a mighty fir just in front of him as Fargo, twisted, off-balance, fired rounds to the right. He had guts; taking advantage of the split-second when Fargo could not bring the gun to bear, he aimed carefully, at a range of no more than five yards. Fargo saw him from the corner of his eye and there was an instant when time seemed to stop. In that eye-wink, he was as close to death as he would ever come. He twisted, slung the shotgun at the man as hard as he could, blindly, and was already falling before the fellow’s Colt went off, his own hand digging for his holstered pistol. A bullet ripped his ear, notching it and spraying blood, burning across his neck.
Then he had fired, instinctively, across his own torso; and the thrown shotgun had bought him his life and cost that of his attacker. Hurtling through the air, it had caused the man to flinch; otherwise, his bullet would have torn Fargo’s skull apart. He never fired a second one because the .38 hollow-point drove into his solar plexus and blew apart there and he toppled backward, dead before he hit the ground.
Fargo’s body did not halt its whirling motion; he dived forward, scooped up the Fox from where it had fallen near the dead man, straightened and began to rake the woods again.
And now Lasher’s men were falling back, their fire diminished. Fargo’s little army had taken casualties, but it came on, mercilessly, inexorably, and now the fighting was hand to hand. A bearded man in a beaver-hide Stetson materialized suddenly from behind a huge log as Fargo scrambled over it. There was no room for gunplay; he seized Fargo, jerked him around, got one hand on Fargo’s throat, closed it savagely. Fargo brought up the shotgun butt with all his strength. It caught the bearded man under the chin, snapped his mouth shut with a crunch that meant a broken jaw. The man howled thickly, sagged; his hand slid loose from Fargo’s throat as he dropped. Fargo drove the shotgun butt between his eyes. Then he ran on, not even pausing to administer a killing shot. It would have been superfluous, he had felt bone give under the second blow.
He whirled, though, as someone else came at him from the flank, and just in time he held his fire. It was Davis, white teeth shining in a soot-blackened face. “They’re breakin’!” Davis yelled. “They’re on the run! We’ve won!”
“Wipe ’em out!” Fargo yelled in reply. “Clean ’em up! No quarter, no survivors! And do it in a hurry! We’ve got to fight that fire!”
He ran on through the woods, looking for a target. Around him men struggled, wrestled; he saw a knife blade rise and fall. A gun went off, then another; and then all shooting died. Suddenly the woods were still save for the distant crackling of the fire, a frightened mule braying somewhere across the ravine. The fight was over. Bodies lay among the trees like fallen fruit from an overripe orchard, scattered everywhere. One wounded man tried to rise; Fargo saw Davis line a pistol, pull the trigger, the man fell back. Davis turned to Fargo, half sick, half defiant. “Damn it,” he rasped, “he had it coming! Any man that’d try to burn the woods—”
Only men who lived in the big timber and who had fought forest fires and seen their fellows burned alive and whole settlements wiped out and wild game turned to charred obscenities could understand the hatred of the arsonists that glittered in Davis’ eyes.
Fargo nodded. “Right,” he snapped. “Now, let’s see to our own wounded and tackle that damn fire before it crowns!”
~*~
Lasher’s firebugs had started flames along a front of nearly a hundred yards hours before, and then had battled the MacKenzie crew to keep them from dealing with it. Now, across and beyond the ravine, the fire had spread greedily, hungrily, for a mile or more, gathering intensity with every wasted minute. The fir needles, accumulated over ages in deep, pitch-filled layers, burned like wax; flames roared between the tree trunks higher than a man’s head, and beneath the pressure of the wind which, fortunately, had not risen, leaped westward, roughly in the direction of the lumber camp miles away. The fight had taken place upwind, behind the fire, and the smokescreen blazes Fargo set had spread only until they reached the area already burned; then, for lack of fuel, they went out. But the original conflagration surged onward, remorselessly, though by a miracle it had not crowned, and there was still a chance of checking it.
The battle had cost Fargo three men killed and two badly wounded of his original dozen. He loaded the wounded men on mules, and sent a man with a lesser wound to oversee them as they started for the lumber camp in a roundabout way that should keep them clear of flames unless the wind changed. That left, counting himself, only seven, but reinforcements were now drifting in as the remainder of his patrols, in pairs or quartets, left their posts and rode for the smoke. By the time—leading their fractious mules—they had circled the fire and come out downwind, ahead of it, in a ghastly blast of heat and sparks, his crew had swollen to fifteen.
Fargo took a moment
to appraise the situation. Two hundred yards away the flames were a bright orange wall amidst the vast old trees, and coming closer at the gait of a walking man. To the uninitiated eye it was already a fearsome sight but he and every man with him knew how much worse it could be.
Fire moved in two ways: on the ground and in the treetops. As long as it was only on the ground it could be checked; there was at least a chance. Fire lanes could be cleared and backfires set, carefully controlled, to burn ahead and toward it and rob it of its fuel. But once it ceased to walk and started to climb and fly, that was a very different matter.
So far the fact that this was virgin timber had kept the fire grounded. The trees here had shaded out all smaller growth, their own trunks soaring sixty, seventy, a hundred feet upward before the first branches began. The flames gnawed around their bases, climbed their trunks, but could not as yet reach their branches; even the sparks went out before they had swirled high enough to set fire to the treetops. But that was all by grace of wind. Let the breeze from the mountains rise a few more knots to fan the flames and then the fire would crown. Windblown embers lodging in the branches would burst the treetops into flame and the blaze would travel overhead, out of reach, in a vast inferno, like an army of demonic apes swinging from limb to limb. When that happened, its speed would exceed that of the fastest horse, its heat create a storm, and it could leap behind the firefighters in a flash, encircle them, trap them and incinerate them. A crown fire was deadly, swift, merciless, the worst enemy of the woodsman and the logger.
Calmly contemplating this, Fargo lit a cigarette, although his throat and lungs were already seared with wood smoke. He stood there with his men around him for a full minute, quietly, watching the flames come on. What he was doing was, within his head, reconstructing the maps of this territory, of the Wolf’s Head Tract that he had studied every day since putting out his patrols. Then he made his decision.
He turned to his men. “Get your mules and pack animals and mount up and follow me.”
Much as it galled him, he had to yield square miles to the flames, sacrifice irreplaceable acreage of virgin timber to save the rest. But with the few men he had, he could not stop the fire here, that was hopeless. He had to fall back to a stronger position.
In his mind, as he swung into the saddle, he saw the country as if he were a circling hawk looking down at it from high in the air. He saw its streams and mountain meadows, and he pieced them together in a line of defense, with a route for retreat if necessary. To the north, the Wolf’s Head River poured down out of the hills, and it would form a sort of barrier that might check the fire in that direction. He had to worry about the west, toward which the east wind was driving the flames.
Ten miles away in that quarter of the compass another stream called Snow Fork ran from south to north to join the Wolf’s Head. It was not nearly wide enough to suit him but it was a natural fire lane of sorts, a barrier to the flames. That was where they would begin the battle. If they rode fast enough they might buy time enough to get a band of forest cleared to form a gap that the flames could not leap. It would put them closer, too, to the reinforcements from the lumber camp which, ultimately, they had to have to win. And, most important, the wind would come from a different angle there, driving eastward toward the flames, allowing them to set a backfire. He had fed all those factors through the machinery of his mind in the length of time it took to smoke the cigarette and grind its butt out thoroughly and hit the saddle. Then they rode, hard and fast.
Chapter Nine
There was nothing glamorous about fighting a forest fire. It was damned hard, grinding, dangerous work with ax and shovel and crosscut saw. They reached the stream, Snow Fork, and Fargo’s heart sank as he saw how narrow it was in actuality and how close the woods grew on either bank. He had hoped for open, rocky country around the Fork, but that was not to be.
He wasted no time in recrimination or disappointment. Instead, he had the mules taken to the far bank, tethered there, and he and his crew fell to work like madmen. What they had to do was cut timber and gouge out duff, clear as wide and long a fire lane as they could before the flames got here. It was, of course, impossible for so small a crew to build a complete barrier to the fire, but more men from the camp would be here soon and any progress they made meanwhile might swing the balance in the long run. if they could stop the fire here it would have consumed many acres, but still far from the crucial quarter of the Wolf’s Head that would get MacKenzie’s lease cancelled overnight.
So, tired, sooty and bullet-marked as they were, they pitched in. Experienced woodsmen all, they wasted not a stroke of ax nor swing of saw. Huge trees that had stood for centuries, toppled before their onslaught in a time incredibly short. After all, they had not need to fell them in any particular direction. Like termites they ate a hole in the woods up and down the river, dropping timber, shoveling duff. They put the mules to work, too, with improvised drags that scraped away the inflammable mound of the forest floor to bare earth.
Best of all, Fargo thought, the wind was right. As soon as they had a safety notch cleared, they could set a backfire. The wind, hurtling down from the mountains in a different quarter, would drive it like an attacking army to meet the oncoming blaze Lasher’s men had set. It would gobble up all fuel in its path as it charged; when the two fires met, they’d die.
If the east wind that blew Lasher’s fire didn’t rise ... If Lasher’s fire didn’t crown …
More than once, wielding ax and saw and shovel like the rest, Fargo straightened, panting, looked toward the east. There, now, an immense pall of smoke hung low over the rim of the forest, a pale, gigantic cloud. But not as yet had any orange flicker appeared on its underside; the fire was still walking, had not crowned, had not begun to fly. Nearby, somebody yelled, “Timberrrr!” Fargo looked up automatically, stepped clear of a giant fir that crashed to earth two dozen yards away, then swung his own ax again.
The sun dropped, turned red as blood through the climbing veil of smoke. Damn it, Fargo wondered, where were the men from the lumber camp? His shoulders ached, his arms were leaden; still he kept on working in a dull haze of fatigue. But they could not go on like this much longer, not without help and not without food and rest. He snapped an order; somebody built a fire on rocks beside the creek, began to cook meat and brew hot coffee. In shifts, the men ate and drank and rested briefly; but only briefly, for always that pall of smoke drew nearer. In an hour, maybe less, the fire would be upon them.
With a tin cup of double-strength black brew in his hand, Fargo studied that haze, so much closer now. Then suddenly, he tensed and cursed. Suddenly the bottom of that cloud flamed brightly, turned orange. At the same moment, he was aware of a change and shift in wind.
Out there, miles away, the fire had crowned. Now it would come through the treetops at express-train speed.
They’d run out of time; if he were to set a backfire, it was now or never.
He threw down the cup and gave his orders. Men fanned out along the river and the clearing they had made. They thrust lighted torches into the needles on the ground, watched blazes spring to life under the blast of the rising wind. They spread quickly. Wildfire. The flickering orange tongue blew back toward the approaching crown fire. Smoke and sparks swirled upward.
Fargo lit a cigarette. All right. This was showdown. If the backfire worked, if it could eat alive all the fuel between here and Lasher’s fire, if the wind held … He watched the flames grow, rush onward. It was going to be a battle of the giants …
Now the animals began to come. Fleeing ahead of Lasher’s fire, they dashed through the flames that Fargo had set. Some of them made it; others, he knew, would be trapped and burned alive. Blacktail deer, elk, black bear, rabbits, squirrels, even a pair of moose—the presence of which he’d not suspected in the Wolf’s Head—dashed through the smoke, plunged into Snow Fork, oblivious to the humans all around. With them loped the predators; he caught a glimpse of tan cougars moving fluidly through the
fir; bobcats, with eyes wide and lambent, scuttled down the river bank. Once, he saw two full-grown wolves, followed by pups not quite yearling, fade through the timber. Wolves mated for life; this was a family fleeing together.
Some of the animals, when they came through, were on fire, fur flickering with bright, orange flames. One black bear almost made the river, then bawled horribly, fell, snapping and clawing at its own flaming body, not forty yards from Fargo. He watched it for a split second, then drew his Colt and fired. It twitched once and, mercifully, died. Fargo’s face was grim. Men could die like that in forest fires, too.
The wind rose. Fargo clamped his hat on tighter, smiling thinly. This was to his advantage, this change and increase in intensity. It would drive his fire more strongly against Lasher’s, it would win the battle for him … He had saved the Wolf’s Head … Now the wind increased to almost gale intensity … Then Davis, coming up to get a cup of coffee, stared across the river and let out a curse.
“Fargo!”
Fargo whirled. Mutely, Davis pointed.
Fargo stared, blinking.
It was impossible; it was absolutely impossible. That was the direction from which help should come—not another fire!