Unexplored! Part 7

marveled the old prospector.

"Out of the earth," smiled Norris. "Up through hot springs, geysers and volcanoes. The water vapor was always here, you know,--mixed with the molten rock and gases."

"I swan!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the old guide. "I thought I knew something about rocks, but--this beats anything in my kid's fairy books."

"You bet!" Ace agreed. "You just wait till you hear----"

"I expect we'd better start on now," Norris rose. "Do you chaps realize what a predicament we are in?" and shading his eyes with a lowered hat brim, he peered off across the hummocky granite slopes, which shone mirror-like in places under the noon-day sun.

A moving speck in the sky to the North drew an exclamation from him. In another moment a sound that increased to a hum like that of a giant motor-boat descended from the skies, and the speck disclosed itself as a mammoth aeroplane.

"Signal them!" cried Norris. "What can we signal them with? Get out your pocket mirrors, quick!"

CHAPTER IV

WITH THE AIR PATROL

"Signal them!" chorused the three boys, acting on Norris's suggestion, (flas.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.t.te.

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 s.h.i.+p 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 alt.i.tude 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 appet.i.tes.

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 a.s.sured 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 horseback 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 b.u.t.te, 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 down-wood. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p 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 alt.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sured.