Leaving Wirth at the camp to cook up a regular dinner, Miller, Peterson, and I left for Mulvaney’s Camp to see what condition it would be in, if we had the unexpected fire. We arrived there about ten o’clock and opened up the blacksmith shop, got out empty barrels, cooking utensils, and everything that would hold water, and started Miller out to round up a couple of yokes of cattle. He returned in an hour or so with about ten head. We selected two yokes out of the bunch and, hooking them up to a breaking-plow, plowed about a dozen furrows around the camp, after which we turned them loose. They immediately started off in a westernly direction, which you may call animal instinct if you will, for we afterward found that to be the only possible direction they could have taken and evaded the fire, which unbeknown to us was so soon to follow. We sat down and smoked our pipes and joked about the unnecessary precaution of filling the barrels, as at that time it was one of the prettiest autumn days I have ever seen, not a cloud in the sky, not a breeze stirring, no sign of smoke anywhere, and no possible chance, apparently, of there ever being a fire. Nevertheless, we were carrying out instructions and we set to work to fill up the barrels, which took about an hour. We had just filled the barrels on the roof of the long barns, when Miller, who was on top of one of the barns, called my attention to a cloud of smoke that had suddenly sprung up on the horizon about five or six miles to the south and west of us. I climbed up on the roof of the barn, where I could get a better view. The wind suddenly arose and within ten minutes it had attained the velocity of a cyclone; what followed happened so quickly it has never as yet been quite clear to me. I can remember the black cloud settling down and in less time than it takes to write this, the fire was upon us--not on the ground as you might imagine, but in the air. The heat became terrific and the first sign of a blaze sprang up in the top of a broken stump about twenty feet in height and a hundred feet from the sleeping-shanty.