The Boy Scout Fire Fighters; Or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed

A pall of smoke, dark, ugly, threatening, hung over a wood in which the Thirty-ninth Troop of the Boy Scouts had been spending a Saturday afternoon in camp. They had been hard at work at signal practice, semaphoring, and acquiring speed in Morse signaling with flags, which makes wireless unnecessary when there are enough signalers, covering enough ground.

The Scout camp was near the edge of the woods. Beyond its site stretched level fields, sloping gradually upward from them toward a wooded mountain. The smoke came from the mountain, and in the growing blackness over the mountain a circular ring proclaimed the spreading fire.

"Gee, that looks like some fire, Jack," said Pete Stubbs, a Tenderfoot Scout, to his chum, Jack Danby, head office-boy in the place where he and Pete both worked.

"I'm afraid it is," said Jack, looking anxiously toward it.

"I never saw one as big as that before," said Pete. "I've heard about them, but we never had one like that anywhere around here."

"We used to have pretty bad ones up at Woodleigh," returned Jack. "I don't like the looks of that fire a bit. It's burning slowly enough now, but if they don't look out, it'll get away from them and come sweeping down over the fields here."

"Say, Jack, that's right, too! I should think they'd want to be more careful there in the farmhouses. There's some of them pretty close to the edge of the woods over there."

Scout-Master Thomas Durland, who was in charge of the Troop, came up to them just then.

"Danby," he said, "take your signaling flags, and go over toward that fire. I want you to examine the situation and report if there seems to be any danger of the fire spreading to the lowlands and endangering anything there."

"Yes, sir," said Jack at once, raising his hand in the Scout salute and standing at attention as the Scout-Master, the highest officer of the Troop of Scouts, spoke to him. His hand was at his forehead, three middle fingers raised, and thumb bent over little finger.

"Take Scout Stubbs with you," said the Scout-Master. "You may need help in examining the country over there. I don't know much about it. What we want to find out is whether the ground is bare, and so likely to resist the fire, or if it is covered with stubble and short, dry growth that will burn quickly."

"Yes, sir!"

"Look out for water, too. There may be some brooks so small that we can't see them from here. But I'm afraid not. Every brook around here seems to be dried up. The drought has been so bad that there is almost no water left. A great many springs, even, that have never failed in the memory of the oldest inhabitants, have run dry in the last month or so. The wind is blowing this way, and the fire seems to be running over from the other side of Bald Mountain there. From the looks of the smoke, there must be a lot of fire on the other side."

No more orders were needed. The two Scouts, hurrying off, went across the clear space at the Scout pace, fifty steps running, then fifty steps walking. That is a better pace for fast travelling, except very short distances, than a steady run, for it can be kept up much longer without tiring, and Boy Scouts everywhere have learned to use it.

"Why do they call that Bald Mountain, I wonder?" said Pete, as they went along. "It isn't bald any more'n I am. There are trees all over the top."

"I don't know, Pete. Places get funny names, sometimes, just the same way that people do. It doesn't make much difference, though, in the case of a mountain."

"Nor people, either, Jack," said Pete Stubbs, stoutly. He had noticed a queer look on his chum's face, and he remembered something that he always had to be reminded of-the strange mystery of Jack's name.

He was called Jack Danby, but he himself, and a few of his best friends, knew, that he had no real right to that name. What his own real name was was something that was known to only one man, as far as his knowledge went, and that one a man who was his bitter enemy, and far more bent on harming him than doing him the favor of clearing up the mystery of his birth and his strange boyhood at Woodleigh. There Jack had lived in a cabin in the woods with a quaint old character called Dan. He had always been known as Jack, and people had spoken of him as Dan's boy. By an easy corruption that had been transformed into Danby, and the name had stuck.

He had come to the city through the very Troop of Boy Scouts to which he now belonged. They had been in camp near Woodleigh, and Jack had played various pranks on them before he had struck up a great friendship with one of them, little Tom Binns, and so had been allowed by Durland to join the Scouts. More than that, Durland had persuaded him to come to the city, and had found a job for him, in which Jack had covered himself with glory, and done credit both himself and Durland, who had recommended him.

"Gee, it's getting smoky," said Pete, as they reached the first gentle rise at the foot of the mountain, though it had seemed to rise abruptly when viewed from a distance.

"A woods fire always makes this sort of a thick, choking smoke. There's a lot of damp stuff that burns with the dry wood. Leaves that lie on the ground and rot make a good deal of the smoke, and then there's a lot of moisture in the trees even in the driest weather."

"Sure there is, Jack! They take all the water there is when the rain falls and keep it for the dry weather, don't they, like a camel?"

"That's a funny idea, Pete, comparing a tree to a camel, but I don't know that it's so bad, at that. It is rather on the same principle, when you come to think of it."

Men were working in the fields as they approached the fire. They seemed indifferent to the danger that Durland feared. One boy not much older than themselves stared at the carroty head of Pete Stubbs, and laughed aloud.

"Hey, Carrots," he cried, "ain't you afraid of settin' yourself on fire?"

"You ain't so good lookin' yourself!" Pete flamed back, but Jack put a hand on his arm.

"Easy there, Pete!" he said. "We're on Scout duty now. Don't mind him."

A little further on they met an older man, who seemed to be the farmer.

"Aren't you afraid the fire may spread this way?" asked Jack, stopping to speak to him.

"Naw! Ain't never come here yet. Reckon it won't now, neither."

"There always has to be a first time for everything, you know," said Jack, secretly annoyed at the stolid indifference of the farmer, who seemed interested in nothing but the tobacco he was chewing.

"Tain't no consarn of your'n, be it?" asked the farmer, looking at them as if he had small use for boys who were not working. He forgot that Pete and Jack, coming from the city, might work almost as hard there through the week as he did on his farm, without the healthful outdoor life to lessen the weariness.

"Sure it ain't!" said Pete, goaded into replying. "We thought maybe you'd like to know there was a good chance that your place might be burnt up. If you don't care, we don't. That's a lead pipe cinch!"

"Come on, Pete," said Jack. "They'll be looking for a signal pretty soon. If we don't hurry, it'll be too dark for them to see our flags when we really have something to report."

The fields nearest the mountain and the fire were full of stubble that would burn like tinder, as Jack knew. The corn had been cut, and the dry stalks, that would carry the flames and give them fresh fuel to feed on, remained. Not far beyond, too, were several great haystacks, and in other fields the hay had been cut and was piled ready for carrying into the barns the next day. If the fire, with a good start, ever did leap across the cleared space from the woods it would be hard, if not impossible, to prevent it from spreading thus right up to the outhouses, the barns, and the farmhouses themselves. Moreover, there was no water here. There were the courses of two little brooks that in rainy weather had watered the land, but now these were dried up, and there was no hope of succor from that side.

As they approached the woods, too, Jack looked gravely at what he saw. Timber had been cut here the previous winter, and badly and wastefully cut, too, in a way that was now a serious menace. The stumps, high above ground, much higher than they should have been, offered fresh fuel for the fire, dead and dry as they were, and over the ground were scattered numerous rotting branches that should have been gathered up and carried in for firewood.

"Looks bad, doesn't it?" Jack said to Pete.

"It certainly does," rejoined his companion. "Now we've got to find a place where we can do the signaling."

"I see a place," said Jack, "and I think I can reach it pretty easily, too. See that rock up there, that sticks out from the side of the mountain? I bet you can see that a long way off. You go on up to where the fire's burning. Get as near as you can, and see how fast it's coming. Then work your way back to the rock and tell me what you've seen."

"Right, oh!" said Pete. "I'm off, Jack!"

Though the smoke was thick, now, and oppressive, so that he coughed a good deal, and his eyes ran and smarted from the acrid smell, Jack made his way steadfastly toward the rock, which he reached without great difficulty. He was perhaps a mile from the Scout camp, and there, he knew, they were looking anxiously for the first flashing of his red and white flags to announce that he was ready to report.

He stood out on the rock, and, after a minute of hard waving of his flags, he caught the answer. Thus communication was established, and he began to make his report. He had no fear of being misunderstood, for it was Dick Crawford, the Assistant Scout-Master and his good friend, who was holding the flags at the other end, and not some novice who was getting practice in signaling, one of the pieces of Scout lore in which Jack had speedily become an adept.

"Bad fire," he wig-wagged back. "Seems to be spreading fast. Ground very bad. Likely to spread, I think. Fields full of stubble. No water at all. Brooks and springs all dried up."

"Mr. Durland says have you warned men working in the fields?"

"Not yet," was the answer from Jack. "But they think it's all right, and seem to think we're playing a game."

Then Jack dropped his flags in token of his desire to stop for a minute, and turned to Pete Stubbs, who had come up.

"It's burning mighty fast," said Pete. "The woods are awfully dry up there. There's no green stuff at all to hold it in check. If those people on the farm down there don't look out, they'll be in a lot of trouble."

Jack sent that information, too, and then came orders from Dick Crawford.

"Return to camp," the Assistant Scout-Master flashed. "Warn farmer and men of danger. Suggest a back fire in their fields, to give clear space fire cannot jump. Then report, verbally, result of warning."

The warning was a waste of breath and effort.

"Think you can learn me my business?" asked the farmer, indignantly. "I don't need no Boy Scouts to tell me how to look after my property. Be off with you, now, and don't bother us! We're busy here, working for a living. Haven't got time to run around playing the way you do."

Jack felt that it was useless to argue. This farmer was one who believed that all boys were full of mischief. He didn't know anything about the Boy Scout movement and the new sort of boy that it has produced and is producing, in ever growing numbers. So Jack and Pete went on to camp, and there Jack made his report to Durland.

"It would serve him right to have his place burned," said Durland, "but we can't work on that theory. And there are others who would suffer, too, and that wouldn't be right. So we'll just go over there and stop that fire ourselves."

There was a chorus of cheers in reply to that. The idea of having a chance to fight a really big fire like this awoke all the enthusiasm of the Scouts of the three Patrols, the Whip-poor-wills, the Raccoons and the Crows, this last the one to which Jack and Pete belonged.

So off they went, with Durland in the lead.