Through the night, with shovels and green boughs they had attacked the conflagration's outposts. The red army of destruction took this punishment sullenly. The main fire seemed to crouch and doze in the night, dulled by the condensation of dews and lacking the spur of the winds. At daylight Barnum Withee had arrived with his men and set them to trenching along the tote road parallel with the advance of the fire. He had not reconsidered his bitterness against his tyrant John Barrett. But the unconquerable instinct of the veteran woodsman, anxious to save his forest, had driven him to the scene. To Barnum Withee's crew Dwight Wade and Christopher Straight attached themselves by entirely natural selection, having excellent personal reasons for avoiding the direct commands of the Honorable Pulaski Britt. And to Wade, struggling with blistered hands to drive his mattock through roots and vegetable mould to the mineral earth, appeared Prophet Eli on his ding-swingle. The prophet surveyed him with almost arch look, and piped, in his shrill tones: "Oh, the little brown bull came down from the mountain, Shang-roango, whey?" Wade stared at him with a vivid recollection of the first time he had seen that strange figure and had heard that song. "So you didn't think I knew how to mend bones, eh, young man? Never heard of Prophet Eli, the charmer-man, the mediator between the higher and lower forces, natural healer and regulator of the weather? Don't you think a man an infernal fool to dig a hole out of the dirt when it is so much easier to dig a hole out of the air and put dirt around it?" Wade, not feeling inclined towards a discussion of this sort, fell to his labor again. "If John Barrett's daughter set this fire, why ain't John Barrett here to help put it out?" shrilled the prophet, and Barnum Withee hearing the amazing query, came hurrying out of the smoke. He found Wade staring at the man with astonished inquiry in his face. "You heard him say that, did you, Mr. Wade?" demanded Withee, with an emotion the young man could not understand. It was the bare mention of John Barrett's daughter that had stirred Dwight Wade; for in his soul's eye but one picture rose when she was mentioned--Elva Barrett of the glorious eyes and the loving heart--the one woman in the world for him--denied to him by the father who ruled her. "I heard him--yes," said Wade; "but what kind of lunatic's raving is it?" "It may not be a lunatic's raving, Mr. Wade," returned Withee, enigmatically, his face grave. The prophet cast a look about, striving to peer into the smoke, as though apprehensive that some one whom he didn't want in his confidence might be listening. In a lower tone he went on: "If a man has got a daughter and is tied to a tree, how much will 'Ladder' Lane scale to be cut up into bean poles?" There was alarm on Withee's features now. He took Wade by the arm and led him aside a few steps.