Below the creek we quit the paved highway and took the lower trail. Through the brush we could see where the vast blue eye of the lake had quit winking and was beginning to scowl. The wind must have changed quarters; it no longer brought us smells of ashes and char, but a fresher, sweeter smell as of rain gathering; and puffed clouds were forming over the range to the westward. The sunshine shut itself off with the quickness of a stage effect. Along the shore toward us limped a blackened smudge of a man, like a ranger turned chimney-sweep. For a fact, that precisely was what he was--Melber, assistant chief of the park forestry service. From tiredness he was crippled. He could shamble and that was about all. "Well, we've got her whipped," he told us, and leaned against a tree. He left smears like burnt cork on the bark where his shoulders rubbed. "This breeze hauling around ought to finish the job. She'll burn herself out before dark, with or without showers. I'm on my way now to long-distance to notify the chief that we won't need any reinforcements." "Much damage?" "The colony is saved. By backfiring we held the flames on the upper edge of the road leading in from the station. But Ordman's ranch is gone up in smoke, and the Colfax & Webster sawmill and eighteen thousand acres of the handsomest virgin pine on this side of the Divide. Man, you'd weep to see those raped woodlands--and all because some dam'-fool hiker didn't have sense enough to put out his cigarette! Or hers, as the case may be!" He grinned through his mask and we were reminded of nigger minstrels. "How close up did the burning get to my shebang?" inquired the Native Genius. "Dog-gone close, Charley. But that wasn't the big blaze--that was the other blaze which broke out soon after midnight. We got her--the second one, I mean--licked just over the rise behind your studio. My force fought till they dropped and even that bunch of I.W.W.'s that they rushed in on the special from Spokane did fairly well. I've revised some of my opinions about Wobblies. But there's a million dead cinders in the grass around your cottage right now, Charley. And your back corral fence is all scorched.