It was so far!  There was a faint smell of smoke and a mysterious low humming in the air.  Was it too late?

A swift, absurd, wholly useless memory came to her from the preceding day.  Yes, it would be no more than a prayer, but she would send it out blindly into the air....  Some instinct—­yes, quite likely.

Molly ran to her abandoned wagonette, pushed in under the white tilt where her pallet bed lay rolled, her little personal plunder stored about.  Fumbling, she found her sulphur matches.  She would build her signal fire.  It was, at least, all that she could do.  It might at least alarm the camp.

Trembling, she looked about her, tore her hands breaking off little faggots of tall dry weed stems, a very few bits of wild thorn and fragments of a plum thicket in the nearest shallow coulee.  She ran to her hillock, stooped and broke a dozen matches, knowing too little of fire-making in the wind.  But at last she caught a wisp of dry grass, a few dry stems—­others, the bits of wild plum branches.  She shielded her tiny blaze with her frock, looking back over her shoulder, where the black curtain was rising taller.  Now and then, even in the blaze of full day, a red, dull gleam rose and passed swiftly.  The entire country was afire.  Fuel?  Yes; and a wind.

The humming in the air grew, the scent of fire came plainly.  The plover rose around their nests and circled, crying piteously.  The scattered hares became a great body of moving gray, like camouflage blots on the still undulating waves of green and silver, passing but not yet past—­soon now to pass.

The girl, her hands arrested, her arms out, in her terror, stood trying to remember.  Yes, it was three short puffs and a long pillar.  She caught her shawl from her shoulder, stooped, spread it with both hands, drove in her stiffest bough for a partial support, cast in under the edge, timidly, green grass enough to make smoke, she hoped.

An instant and she sprang up, drawing the shawl swiftly aside, the next moment jealously cutting through the smoke with a side sweep of the covering.

It worked!  The cut-off column rose, bent over in a little detached cloud.  Again, with a quick flirt, eager eyed, and again the detached irregular ball!  A third time—­Molly rose, and now cast on dry grass and green grass till a tall and moving pillar of cloud by day arose.

At least she had made her prayer.  She could do no more.  With vague craving for any manner of refuge, she crawled to her wagon seat and covered her eyes.  She knew that the wagon train was warned—­they now would need but little warning, for the menace was written all across the world.

She sat she knew not how long, but until she became conscious of a roaring in the air.  The line of fire had come astonishingly soon, she reasoned.  But she forgot that.  All the vanguard and the full army of wild creatures had passed by now.  She alone, the white woman, most helpless of the great creatures, stood before the terror.