Once, during Alice’s brief stay at the mills, she had overheard Forrest censure a workman for finishing his pipe inside the restricted limits. This gave her an opportunity, that evening, to lead adroitly to the subject of forest fire. It was a perpetual menace in the settlement, she said; it sprang sometimes from almost nothing; a match dropped in a dry place, or a burning fragment shaken from a pipe; embers left alive by a passing camper; and oftener yet, it began with the ignition of slashed underbrush, when, to clear a bit of open for his cabin or pasture, a settler devastated whole areas of fine trees that could not be reproduced in a century. She wondered if Forrest, who so well understood the dangers as well as the values of timber, had ever devised a scheme, some practical, inexpensive method within the reach of ranchers, for its protection. And he had answered that of course the settlers should make it a local law never to start a "burn" in the dry season. But any man who knew the Washington woods, had learned that one of the surest ways to handle a first blaze was to smother it with shovelled earth. Even in midsummer the ground under the forest litter was damp; it was made porous by a network of roots and held moisture like a sponge; the trees drew from innumerable small reservoirs. But if he himself owned a section he would take the precaution to cut a broad swathe around the unprotected sides; and, if it was near a considerable water power, for instance those upper falls of the Des Chutes, he would keep in readiness a length of canvas hose, the big kind used for carrying a stream some distance in hydraulic mining, and be able to tap the river at a moment’s warning. She was particularly interested in this scheme, and gathered small details as to the size and make of the hose, and how he would connect it with the stream. He drew a rough plan on a card, showing a point where the river could be tapped with little trouble, by taking advantage of a certain jutting rock, to brace the necessary bit of flume and sluice-gate. "But," he had added, throwing aside the sketch to take his violin, "the chances are some other man will file on that section; he may even hit upon this little mechanism and have it all constructed before I see the headwaters again." Afterwards Alice found that card, on Louise’s table where he had left it, and saved it for future reference. The hose could not be secured in the Puget Sound towns; she could not obtain it in Portland; but finally it was purchased through a house carrying mining supplies in San Francisco.