Just beyond Jack's horse the country lay blackened.
The pine needles had burned down to the soil; the seedlings and younger
trees had been withered away; the larger trees scorched; the fuel with
which every forest is littered consumed in the fierceness of the
conflagration. Here and there some stub or trunk still blazed and
crackled, outposts of the army whose camp-fires seemed to dot the hills.
The line of demarcation between the burned and the unburned areas seemed
extraordinarily well defined. Bob looked closer and saw that this
definition was due to a peculiar path, perhaps two yards wide. It looked
as though some one had gone along there with a huge broom, sweeping as
one would sweep a path in deep dust. Only in this case the broom must
have been a powerful implement as well as one of wide reach. The brushed
marks went not only through the carpet of pine needles, but through the
tarweed, the snow brush, the manzanita. This was technically the fire
line. At the sight of the positiveness with which it had checked the
spread of the flames, Bob's spirits rose.
"They seem to have stopped it here easy enough, already," he cried.
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