She stood at the edge of the eastern corn and looked at it for long enough to understand what she was seeing, which was not long. She went to the barn for tools before she thought through why. Her hands knew before her mind finished the calculation. A fire in dead grass moving east with the summer wind in a drought year was not a thing that stopped on its own. It had nothing to stop it.
The grass between the settlement's western claims had been dead since June. The failed fields--Hiram's corn, the Hendricks property, Pruitt's goat pasture on the eastern edge--were dried stalks and brown chaff, as flammable as anything she had ever stood near. If the fire caught the road brush along the western approach and moved into those fields, there was nothing between it and her acreage but a plowed lane and a split-rail fence. She had four acres of the only standing crop in Dry Willow Valley. She had also, as of last Tuesday, confirmed in writing that it constituted a productive homestead operation.
She carried the shovel, the pickaxe, and the axe out to the field perimeter and stood at the western fence looking at the horizon. The air was distinctly browner than before and the wind was the same steady westerly that had been coming in all summer. She looked at the distance between the smoke signature and her property and made a rough estimate, 2 hours, maybe 3 if the fire moved through heavier brush areas that slowed it, maybe less if it caught the open range. She went inside and changed her boots. She was tying the second lace when she heard a horse coming down the lane at a pace that meant something had happened.
Silas came around the barn hard and was off the horse before it fully stopped, which she had never seen him do before. He was looking at the horizon and then at her and his face carried an expression that he usually kept below the surface, not panic. Silas Ward did not panic, but the tight specific alertness of a man who has assessed a situation and found it worse than he hoped.
"It started on the Crandall property," he said. "Freight wagon. Brake sparked in the dry grass along the road. Crandall's field was gone in twenty minutes."
"How wide is the line?" "Quarter mile at least. Moving east-northeast." He looked at her fence, at the field behind it, at the distance to the smoke.
"Where do you want to make the stand?" She had been calculating since she came out of the barn. "Western boundary. The squash rows." He looked where she was pointing, the outer edge of her western plantings, where the dense small vessel placement had produced the thickest squash growth in the field.
Broad leaves shading soil that had been continuously moist for 3 months. He understood the logic immediately because he had helped build that section and he knew what was under it. "If we tear out the outer squash and widen the soil break--" he started. "We need more hands." She was already untying the barn horse.
"Go to Bell's first. Tom Hendricks next. Anyone with a shovel and a barrel." "Evie--" "Go. I'll start cutting the perimeter."