He touched his horse, and they pressed forward along the bog's edge.
"Here," he pointed out, "they fired the grass again, you see, always counting on the west wind; and here again, and yonder too, and beyond that, Miss Elliott--in a dozen places they set the grass afire. If that wet east wind had not come up, nothing on earth could have saved a thousand acres of white pine--and I'm afraid to say how many deer and partridges and woodcock.... It was a savage bit of business, was it not, Miss Elliott?"
She sat her horse, silent, motionless, pretty head bent, studying the course of the fire in the swale. There was no mistaking the signs; a grass fire had been started, which, had the west wind held, must have become a brush fire, and then the most dreaded scourge of the north, a full-fledged forest-fire in tall timber. After a little while she raised her head and looked full at Burleson, then, without comment, she wheeled her mare eastward across the vlaie towards the pines.
"What do you make of it?" he asked, pushing his horse forward alongside of her mare.
"The signs are perfectly plain," she said. "Whom do you suspect?"
"I haven't been here long enough. I don't exactly know what to do about this. It is comparatively easy to settle cases of simple trespass or deer-shooting, but, to tell the truth, Miss Elliott, fire scares me. I don't know how to meet this sort of thing."
"So," he added, "I sent for the fire-warden. I don't know just what the warden's duties may be."
"I do," she said, quietly. Her mare struck solid ground; she sent her forward at a gallop, which broke into a dead run. Burleson came pounding along behind, amused, interested at this new caprice. She drew bridle at the edge of the birches, half turned in her saddle, bidding him follow with a gesture, and rode straight into the covert, now bending to avoid branches, now pushing intrusive limbs aside with both gloved hands.
Out of the low bush pines, heirs of the white birches' heritage, rabbits hopped away; sometimes a cock grouse, running like a rat, fled, crested head erect; twice twittering woodcock whirred upward, beating wings tangled for a moment in the birches, fluttering like great moths caught in a net.