Unexplored!

“My fault entirely,” Ace reproached himself, as he thought of the lost flour and bacon, rice, onions, cheese, smoked ham, dried fruit, coffee, canned beets and spinach, tinned jams, and other compact and rib-stretching items of their so lovingly planned duffle. “Never should have packed it all on one burro.”

The Senator’s son had a dry fly outfit that was his treasure. Ted used the crudest kind of hook and line for bait casting. The subject was one of keen rivalry between them.

“Dad always prayed: ‘May the East wind never blow,’ when we went fishing down in Maine,” dogmatized Ace.

“Well, Pop was born in Illinois, and he used to say, ‘When the wind is in the South, it blows your bait into a fish’s mouth.’”

“Huh! That may be poetry, but we don’t have much of any wind out here except the west wind. And if we wait for a cloudy day in this neck o’ the world, we’ll wait till September.”

“All the same,” insisted Ted, “trout do bite best when it rains, because, don’t you see, the big fellows lie on the bottom, just gobbling up the worms the rain washes down to them.”

“They won’t rise to a fly in the rain.”

“Well, I dunno anything about dry flies, though I sh’d think they couldn’t see the fly up on the surface, with the water all r’iled the way it gets in a storm.”

“No more can they when the sun glares.”

“Well, then, you better choose the shady spots. I don’t see sign n’r symptom of even a wind cloud to-day.” – And yet, even as he gazed argumentatively at the horizon, a pink-white bank of cumulus began drifting into view in the niche between two distant peaks.

“Gosh! It’s sunset already,” exclaimed Ted.

“At half-past five!” – Ace peered at his wrist watch, then held it to his ear. “Besides, it’s in the East–”

“Looks more like a fire starting off there,” contributed Norris. “Whew! See old Red Top, there?”

“Red Top! – Where Rosa is?”

“I think it must be.”

“Radcliffe’s plumb worried, with the woods so dry, I’ll bet,” Ted surmised. “And short a coupla fire outlooks, at that, I heard there in the Canyon.”

At this point they reached the mouth of the creek that had wriggled down from some spring, and Ace elected to follow it upstream with his Brown Hackles, which he dropped on the water with the most delicate care lest their advent appear an unnatural performance to the wary troutlets watching from the shady pools.

The slender stream raced dazzlingly in the reddening sunshine, as Ace tickled the placid surface of each pool, and the up-stream side of each fallen log, careful lest his shadow fall betrayingly across his miniature hunting grounds. He kept a good ten feet from the bank. And before the red glow had started climbing the Western slope, he had a full string of little fellows, – the prettiest rainbow trout he had ever seen.

Ted, sighting another creek, climbed back along the canyon wall to follow it down-stream with his bait can and his short, stiff willow rod, cut for the occasion with his good old jack-knife. His bait was the remnant of the ham sandwich he had saved that noon for the purpose, – though he had little dreamed at the time how much would depend on their next fishing jaunt.

Keen to out-do his chum by back-country methods, he pushed through the brush that made the gully a streak of green against the granite, until he came to a bend. Here, he knew, there would likely be a pool. He approached warily from above, lengthening his line. He cast well above the bend, so that his bait would sink to the bottom. He was rewarded at once with a bite. With a quick flip, he drew the fish away, and began his string.

For some time he followed down-stream before he saw another likely-looking place. An up-turned stump awoke his sporting blood. Safe refuge for a trout in more ways than one, it offered a 50-50 chance of losing his hook. But Ted lifted skyward at the instant of the bite, and all was well.

An eddy of foam, the shade of an over-hanging bowlder, then another upturned stump, (on these wind-swept mountain sides there were many such), and Ted’s spirits rose by degrees.

Meantime Pedro passed the rapids, climbed to a point well above, and selected a smooth green stretch of river for his operations. It had meant stiff going, and would mean more before he made his way back up the canyon wall, but something about their present crisis had challenged his reserves.

Pedro always used a spoon when he wasn’t fishing for pure sport. On this sunny stretch, so clear in the red glow of approaching sunset that the bottom was plainly visible, he could see the fat old patriarchs lazing the late afternoon away. But he was soon rousing them to find out what that little shining thing could be that darted so rapidly through their habitat, – that tiny bit of metallic white so unlike anything their jaded appetites had yet negotiated.

The bright silver blade, only a quarter inch in width, perhaps three times as long, spun against the current, cavorting along jerk by jerk, (with time between jerks for the scaly ones to think it over), soon began to get results. As the trout were all on the bottom resting till twilight should set in, Pedro craftily allowed the spinner to sink till it all but raked the bottom before beginning that tantalizing play.

Norris, too, tried a spinner, though he chose rapid water. There was one great beauty, green above and orange beneath, that baited his fancy. For some time he dangled the lure before he felt the heavy fish. Then a long rush, that sent his line whistling out like lightning, a moment’s quiet, followed by another rush, and he had landed a great beauty of a five-pounder with the hook hard fast in his jaws.

After that Norris returned to camp, where Ace and Ted were already jubilantly comparing notes. Long Lester came in with a bag of birds and rabbits.

Of course their catch had to be broiled. Pedro arrived in time to join them in “which will you have, or trout,” – for the game had been saved for breakfast. The boys ate with relish, though without salt, and later listened to Long Lester telling tales with his boots to the bon-fire, bronze faced, nonchalant. At 8,000 feet, the air grew noticeably cooler with the turning of the wind down-canyon, and the boys heaped down-wood liberally in a pyramid. The dry evergreens snapped in a shower of sparks as the full moon, silvering the snow-clad peaks, deepened the shadows under the trees.

On the fragrance of crushed fir boughs they finally slept, all thought of the morrow drowned in dreams.

Out of the painted sunsets and yellow sands of the Salton Sea, land of centipedes and cactus, blistering sun, and parching thirst, and all things cruel and ugly, had come Sanchez, a Mexican, with his son and an old man who had been his servant, to lay ties for the narrow gauge railway that was to zig-zag up the canyon walls for a lumber company. King’s Lumber Company had fired them for reasons that will appear. Suffice it now that all their blistering bitterness and parching hate had focused on these forests.

Rosa, alone on the Red Top fire outlook scaffold, had seen a pin-point of light the night before that she took for a camp-fire, but whose, she could not know.

Breakfast, such as it was, disposed of, the four deceptively meek looking burros were lined up in the lupin perfumed meadow, in semblance of a pack-train, (the hundred pounds of duffle divided between them that they might make faster time, as well as a safe-guard against further accidents). A committee of the whole now decided they must catch more fish and dry them, then lead a forced march to Guadaloupe Rancho, and if they found range cattle, they would bring down a calf and square it later with the owner.

For two days Norris, Ace and Ted caught fish, while Pedro dried them, and Long Lester scoured the woods for game birds, rabbits, – anything and everything he might find. Then came two strenuous days during which they bore in the general direction of Red Top.

Without warning, they came to a sheer ledge fringed with minarets, and stared across a glacier-gouged canyon a mile wide. Progress in that direction was effectually checked. They found themselves with a view of such miles of snow-capped peaks that they stood speechless, with little thrills running up and down their spines at the sheer beauty of the scene.

To the right, the way was clear across a rock-strewn elevation where the only trees were squat, twisted, with branches reaching along the ground as if for additional foot-hold against the never-ceasing trade winds. Again they were brought to a halt by a peak of granite blocks.

“Do you know, fellows,” said Norris, suddenly, “mountain-building is still going on, under our very feet.”

“Is there going to be an earthquake?” gasped Pedro.

“There are likely to be slight earthquake shocks any time in this region. The last big ’quake, that caused any marked dislocation, was in 1872, though, so we have nothing to worry about. But I’m going to be able to show you some rock formations that will illustrate what I was telling you the other day.”

“You mean,” brightened Ace, “showing how these 14,000 foot peaks attained their present height? – How there were two up-lifts?”

“Yes, and we are standing, this very minute, on a basalt step that some earthquake has faulted from the main basalt-capped mass. Just see how the whole story is revealed right there in this gorge! You can see the streaks of basalt, which we know lie in horizontal layers, and rest on vertical strata of the Carboniferous and Triassic age.”

“Whoa – there!” groaned Long Lester. “Would you mind telling us that again, in words of one syllable? I calc’late it must be a mighty interesting yarn, from the hints you’ve let out now and ag’in, but how’n tarnation–”

“Yes,” grinned Ted, “do tell it, Mr. Norris, so’s Les and I can get it too.”

“’Bout all I’ve got any strangle hold on,” complained the old man, “so fur, is thet these yere valleys was gouged out by the glaciers, a good long spell ago. Now there’s one thing I’m a-goin’ to ask you, Mister, before we go any further. What did you mean by that there – coal age?”

“That,” vouched Norris, “was when most of the coal was formed, away back before man appeared on earth, – before there were any of the plants and animals as we know them to-day.

“Picture a time when the water was covered with green scum, and the air was steamy, when the swampy forests were composed of giant ferns and club mosses and inhabited by giant newts and salamanders, dragon-flies and snakes.”

“How – how do you know all thet?” gasped Long Lester.

“Partly by the fossils. It’s a big study, – geology, we call it, – and the scientists who reason these things out use what has been discovered by astronomy and chemistry and a lot of other sciences. It’s a long story.”

“But a thriller,” Ace assured them, as Norris lighted his pipe on the lee of a bowlder. “Can’t we rest here a few minutes, Mr. Norris? Those burros were about winded. Can’t get ’em to budge yet. Come on, fellows, snuggle up,” as Norris seated himself compliantly, back against the bowlder. They all crept close, for the wind was blowing hard.

“Where did this earth come from in the first place?” asked Ted.

“Well, of course you know that our sun is only one of millions of stars, and very far from being the largest, at that. Some larger star, in passing the sun, by the pull of its own greater gravity, separated some large fragments from that fiery, gaseous mass, and started our planetary system. We don’t want to go too far into astronomy.”

“But astronomy shows you how they know all this,” Ace assured the old man, who appeared divided between wide-eyed amazement and incredulity, (as, indeed, were Ted and Pedro).

“Our earth, like the other planets, was one of the knots of denser matter on the two-armed luminous spiral which began circling the sun. There were smaller particles which were attracted to the earth by earth gravity and which increased the size of the earth till it was far larger than it is now. Ever since, the earth has been shrinking periodically, and when it shrinks, its surface becomes wrinkled, and these wrinkles we call mountain ranges.”

“Of course,” interpolated Ace, shining eyed, “the crust of the earth got cooled, while the inside was still a mass of molten metal and gas, which kept boiling over on to the crust, – couldn’t you say, Mr. Norris?”

“You’ve got the idea.”

“I s’pose that’s the hot place!” chuckled the old man.

“Probably where they got the idea. In time the metals and heavier substances sank, while the lighter ones rose as granite rocks, till there was an outer shell miles thick.

“The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, in Alaska, is a volcanic region where the ground is hot and breaks through with one even now, – I was there several years ago, – but generally speaking, this earth has a crust 150 miles thick.

“As I was saying, the continents are built of the lighter granite, chiefly, while the oceans lie on the heavier basalt.”

“But I thought you said we were on a chunk of basalt now,” said Ted.

“We are. You know the Pacific has flowed where now you see these peaks, as the high lands have been worn down between successive upbuildings.”

“But – where did the water in the ocean come from in the first place?” marveled the old prospector.

“Out of the earth,” smiled Norris. “Up through hot springs, geysers and volcanoes. The water vapor was always here, you know, – mixed with the molten rock and gases.”

“I swan!” ejaculated the old guide. “I thought I knew something about rocks, but – this beats anything in my kid’s fairy books.”

“You bet!” Ace agreed. “You just wait till you hear–”

“I expect we’d better start on now,” Norris rose. “Do you chaps realize what a predicament we are in?” and shading his eyes with a lowered hat brim, he peered off across the hummocky granite slopes, which shone mirror-like in places under the noon-day sun.

A moving speck in the sky to the North drew an exclamation from him. In another moment a sound that increased to a hum like that of a giant motor-boat descended from the skies, and the speck disclosed itself as a mammoth aeroplane.

“Signal them!” cried Norris. “What can we signal them with? Get out your pocket mirrors, quick!”

CHAPTER IV

WITH THE AIR PATROL

“Signal them!” chorused the three boys, acting on Norris’s suggestion, (flashing their distress with their pocket mirrors), while Long Lester stood measuring the flight of the aeroplane.

His practiced eye also detected a faint bluish haze that rose behind the ridge at the North, – a haze altogether unlike that which foretells a storm. In fact, the sun glinting from the wings of the giant wings and from the glacial-polished slopes beneath forbade that explanation.

Like most backwoodsmen, the old prospector said the least when he felt the most. His lean body suddenly grew tense. “It’s a fire,” he told himself. “An everlastingly big one, too.”

“That’s a DeHaviland,” decided Ace, as the huge bombing-plane came nearer. “Must be the Fire Patrol!”

A moment more and the buzzing apparatus began sinking into a “pancake” landing, – fortunately, just above the wide sweep of the granite butte. Could it be engine trouble, Norris wondered, or had it seen their signals? Lucky they were on an elevation.

With the sound like a saw-mill in full blast, the great ship jolted to terra firma, within shouting distance, – and hardly had she come to a full stop than the boys had raced to her side.

“I say!” exclaimed a familiar voice, as the observer climbed out. It was Ranger Radcliffe! “Where did you folks drop from?”

Norris explained the marooned camping expedition.

Radcliffe’s face was lined with fatigue and anxiety. “Big fire off there!” he motioned. “Been directing a hundred men. Broke out in three places, all within twenty-four hours, and not even an electric storm to account for it. Want to help?” And as the little party voiced unanimous consent, he proceeded to draft them in, at the Government nine dollars per day.

He could have compelled their services, as he had that of a party of campers down towards Kings’ River. In a few words, his voice vibrating to his high nervous tension, the young forest officer had them all thrilling with patriotic fervor.

“Now get your things,” he directed. “May have to fight it for a week! You can turn your burros out to forage for themselves, and I guess you’ll find them again when this is over. If you don’t the Government will probably square it with you.”

The chums swiftly retraced their steps to where the animals waited patiently, removing the packs and sending the little donkeys down the trail to better pasturage. They might wander, but they would be safe. With their swift heels they could defend themselves from even a mountain lion. And they were apt to keep to the mountain meadows, where was food and water.

Their run at such an altitude had given Pedro a touch of mountain sickness, and he had to lie flat till his heart beat more normally and his nose stopped bleeding.

The big ’plane carried a relay of provisions for the fire fighters already established, whom it had brought for the purpose from the Zuni Mine. As corned beef and hardtack were distributed, the hungry campers thought they had never tasted anything so good in their lives. Not even the Thanksgiving turkeys of later years were ever spiced with such appetites.

This fire, – or rather, these three fires, so mysteriously concomitant, the Ranger explained when the boys returned, had broken so far from any ranch or work camp that they were hard pressed for men to fight it.

“You fellows will have a mighty important part to play for the next few days,” he assured them, “or I miss my guess.”

“Hurray!” shouted Ace. “Three cheers for the U. S. Airplane Patrol!” For he knew something of the work started at the close of the war. Following regular daily routes, this patrol not only detects fires and follows up campers or others who may have started them, (carelessly or otherwise), but in times of emergency carries the fire leader from one strategic point to another, – where as likely as not there are neither roads for him to go in his machine, nor even horse-back trails, – till he has shown the volunteer firemen how to trench and back-fire.

They needed some one, the Ranger said, to hold the top of the next ridge, – between which and the boys lay that inaccessible canyon it would have taken them days to have scaled afoot. By day they were merely to watch for flying brands. Their chief work would come at night, when the wind would turn and blow down canyon, and they might successfully back-fire.

The fire had started in two places on the opposite bank of the Kawa, and in one place this side of the river, and was eating its way along the slopes with the wind which swept them by day. It certainly looked like the work of incendiaries.

Ace begged permission to wireless for his little Spanish ’plane, in its hangar in Burlingame, that it might be employed in some volunteer capacity, and Radcliffe accepted his offer.

The huge DeHaviland required all of the flat surface afforded by the butte, for its preliminary run. They were off with a roar. As they glided across to the flat-topped ridge on the other side of the canyon, they could see the ravenous flames climbing tall pines and firs, racing from limb to limb, through the forest roof, devouring the steeps, doubtless richly coated with underbrush and downwood. The roar and crackle of it filled their ears sickeningly, as they thought of the naked mountainsides that would be left, – mere skeletons of barkless tree trunks, where they had camped on brown pine needles, – smooth, silent, inches deep, soft under their tired feet, dry as tinder and aromatic with Nature’s finest perfume.

How the devourer would relish the pitch and resin oozing from the juicy bark! How secure it must feel, on those slopes never climbed by man, with the autumn rains months away, and the fire fighters like so many ants trying with axe and shovel to mark off on the hot forest floor a boundary beyond which the fiery tongues must not lick.

Had the wind not been in the other direction, they would have been overwhelmed with the smoke that billowed darkly till it could have been seen 50 miles away, the red sun scarcely lightening the gloom. Even where they landed, an occasional hot breath scorched their faces and set their eyes to smarting, while their winged ship nosed frantically up and away again before she should meet Icarus’ fate.

“Some day,” Radcliffe had told them that day at the rodeo, “the Forest Service Air Patrol, which serves now to give warning of the tiniest smoke, and so saves men and millions where every minute counts, will fight with glass bombs of fire extinguisher, whose trajectory falling from a ’plane in rapid flight will have to be calculated to a nicety, but which, delivered while the fire is in its infancy, will do the work of many men.”

The worst difficulty would be at night, when though the fire shows plainer, the pilot would have to depend largely on his own sense of equilibrium to tell him at what angle his ship was inclined. True, acetylene gas lamps properly protected from the wind could be made to light up the ground below when alighting, but at an altitude of even a mile, little can be seen of the landscape to guide one on one’s course. The 2,000-foot firs of the Sierra slopes appear but as green-black billows.

As the great ship raced toward the flaming forest, their talk at the barbecue raced through the mind of the Senator’s son. “Some day,” Radcliffe had challenged them, “you want to see Glacier National Park, with its ice-capped peaks and its precipices thousands of feet deep, its glacier-fed lakes and Alpine scenery. And of course you must all see the geysers of the Yellowstone, its petrified forests and mud volcanoes.”

“And bears?” Ted had laughed with a glance at Pedro.

“Yes, all sorts of wild animals. And some time you want to explore the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and the 14,000 foot peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park. By that time you will be ready to go to Southern Alaska and try Mt. McKinley, which is worth while not so much because it is the highest mountain in North America, (Mt. Whitney is nearly as high), but because it stands the highest above the surrounding country of any mountain in the world. Mt. Whitney is just an easy climb above a sea of surrounding peaks; you don’t realize the height at all.

“Then you know we have a National Park in Hawaii? – But Roosevelt, – or Greater Sequoia Park, – is going to remain an unspoiled wilderness for a good many years to come, with three great canyons larger than that of Yosemite itself.”

“Kings’ River and the Kern,” Ace had agreed, “but what is the third?”

“Tehipite.”

“Oh, of course.”

“We wanted to go over the John Muir Trail right along the crest of the Sierras to Yosemite.”

“You’ve hundreds of miles of almost unexplored country! Enough vacation places to last a lifetime! Rivers alive with trout! Bears! Cougars!” the Ranger had commented.

“And rattlers,” Long Lester had added grimly.

“And rattlers. And they’re the only living thing we need fear.”

“Not excluding range cattle?” Pedro had wanted to be assured.

“Not when you’re all together. Of course if you were alone you might break a leg or something that would leave you helpless, and you’d sure be a long way from anything to eat unless you had it with you.

“But unless we look alive the Big Interests are going to wrest away these beauty spots that we have set aside for our National playgrounds,” Radcliffe had declared.

“That’s just what Dad says!” Ace had remembered.

“And why? Not because they need the irrigation and water power of the big falls, for they can have it after the streams leave the parks, but because it would cost them a good deal less to secure these things of Uncle Sam than it would to build their projects outside Park limits. There isn’t a beauty spot in the West that some commercial interest hasn’t designs on.”

“That’s one thing I mean to fight!” Ace squared his chin as the DeHaviland whisked them to their particular ridge, a table mountain, or butte, where half a dozen recruits had already been landed with tools and grub.

“Sure seems as if these fires had been set,” mused Long Lester, as Radcliffe bade them good-by, – for he had to be in a dozen places at once, that day.