Again they went about their dogged routine; they chopped with their hatchets, they spaded, they beat upon the fire with their wet sacks--until there was no water left to make the sacks wet with. Dean Wolcott thought with worshipful longing of summer rains in the east; why did they never come to this parched land of summer? A downpour now ... the sound of rushing rain.... They worked, the young man and the thin Boy Scout, until it seemed certain that they could not work any longer, and then they worked on. They dug frantically into the sun-baked earth; they chopped frantically with their hatchets into the singeing chaparral; they slapped frantically at the flames with their dry sacks; and sometimes the sacks caught on fire. Then the witch-wind went away as suddenly as it had come, and up from the ocean--as if impelled by the Ranger’s rain-prayer--rose a dense gray fog, blessédly cool, blessédly wet, blessédly enveloping. At the end of another hour they were able to stop; a charred world was smudging sullenly into a soft, gray curtain. They went a few yards back on the trail and dropped thankfully to the ground. They were utterly spent; their hair was singed, and their eyebrows, and they could hardly see out of their bleared and smarting eyes, and they had both burned their hands again and again. They were too weary to speak, but somewhere in the great gray space they heard the lone lion, calling ... calling.... CHAPTER XVI AT first, when she set out on the trail for Marble Peak, Ginger hurried a little. She had a guilty fear that the doctor might have read her mutinous purpose in her face and ridden after her to make sure, but when ten minutes had passed she knew she was not being followed, and she ceased to urge her mount. The fire fighters had exhausted the camp’s supply of good horses and this was an old and spiritless beast, hardly more than adequate for the daily trip with supplies. “Easy, now, Pedro,” she patted the lean neck. “We’ll take it easy, old boy.” She saw she would have to nurse him along very carefully to make the ride, but once they came up with Dean he could rest, and she felt rather ruthless. Her only real concern was getting to Dean, and she felt as she had felt that day in Boston, waiting in the hushed little hotel for an answer to her note. Yet there was a great and shining difference. That had been undertaken as a duty of decent reparation; beyond the fact that she was going to ask his pardon or at least to state her regret for her crude and callous behavior at Dos Pozos, she had not mentally set the stage.