He had to draw thrice before the spark of flint and standard ignited the charge on the stone; then it caught, and he drew the heather close over it. A bright little flame licked and crackled; it spread; and a thin smoke and the pungent smell of burning heather arose. Monjoy tore up a smaller bush and held it for a moment in the blaze. “Now we begin, Jimmy,” he said. “This is very bad for the birds, and you’re not to do it when you get older, remember; but once in a while----” A few yards on he fired another bush. After the weeks of drought a spark sufficed; and he advanced at a quick walk trailing his brand. When it burnt out he took another. Already from the first point of firing, the flames, of an orange scarce visible, were advancing up the hillside before the light breeze. “Variable; but there’ll be more wind higher up,” he assured Jimmy; “whew, but it’s dry! Too dry; we want some damp to make a smoke--a nice dense smoke to hide us. What, Jim?--There, I think that’ll do.” He flung his brand from him and turned north again and a little west. Cicely had mounted the rocky cleft in pitiful trepidation. “Brave and clever,” she told herself she must be; she repeated the words over and over, but they did not stop the painful thumping of her heart. This increased as she neared the head of the ravine, and she felt that a crisis of nerves was seizing her. It came, and she sank in a huddle under a rock, stifling hysterical sobs in a fold of her skirt. She could see the open space at the top of the ravine; she dared not approach it. For nearly twenty minutes she lay, her sobs gradually subsiding, but her will gone from her; and then there chanced something that brought her round like vinegar. A stone’s-toss away she saw appear the red back of a soldier.