And though nobody at the ranch, including Rebecca knew it, Tom had been exposed to such music before. The Harvard Men’s Choir, founded in 1858, was one of the best musical ensembles in America, and Tom had sung with the group as 1st tenor.
“Son, you’re going to have to make up your mind whether you want to sing or play football,” the coach told him. But the other players, having heard Tom sing, told the coach that if Tom couldn’t do both, they wouldn’t play. The coach acquiesced and a timely tackle by Tom in the 1879 Harvard Yale game preserved a 0-0 tie, the first time in three years that Harvard hadn’t been beaten by Yale.
Tom thought of his fellow graduates of the class of 1880. They were all lawyers, professors, politicians, and business leaders now, all of them prominent members of society in their respective home cities. He wondered what they would think about him if they knew he was working as a cowboy for forty dollars and found. The West was wild, there was no denying that. In the last two weeks he had seen twelve men killed by gunfire. Such a thing, he knew, would leave his former acquaintances shocked and mortified, but he had come through it with no damage at all to his psyche.
On the Cimarron, November 27
The next morning during breakfast, Dusty suddenly put his tin plate down and got up and walked several feet away from the wagons and the campfire. He stood there for a long moment looking toward the ragged top of a bluff marking the western boundary of the prairie. He sniffed.
“Say, what’s got into Dusty?” Dalton asked.
“I don’t know,” Clay replied. “But whatever it is, I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be good.”
After a few minutes Dusty came back to the others. “Boss,” he said to Clay. “We’ve got us a fire. I can smell it.”
“What? Where?” Clay asked.
“I think it’s on this side of the river. And it’s west of us, which means it’ll be comin’ this way.”
“He’s right,” Matt said. “Look.” Matt pointed to the west and there, faintly visible, was a cloud of light brown smoke mixed in with the haze.
“Maybe it’s just a morning fog,” Dalton suggested.
“It’s a fire,” Smoke said. “And it’s a big one. Look, you can see the smoke from there, all the way down to there.”
Smoke pointed out the parameters of the approaching fire.
“We’d better start a back-fire if we want to keep it away from the herd,” Falcon said.
Setting a back-fire big enough to stop the oncoming flames would be quite an effort. It might have been easier if everyone could do it, but Clay knew that he would have to hold at least two people back to keep an eye on the herd. He gave that assignment to Matt and Dalton, then told the others to come with him to fight the fire.
“I think we should keep Maria back with the wagons,” Sally said.
“No, Maria can do her part,” Clay said. “We are going to need every hand.”
“Clay, you, more than anyone, should understand why she must stay behind,” Sally said.
“Oh,” Clay replied, understanding now, what Sally was saying. “Yes, you are right. She should stay behind.”
“I will stay by the river,” Maria offered. “That way, I can keep some sacks wet for you.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Smoke agreed. “We’ll need wet sacks to control the flames of the back-fire, to keep them going in the right direction.”
With improvised torches, Clay and the others crossed a shallow coulee and began setting fire to the tangled, brown mat which covered the ground just on the other side.
The men were setting the fires while Sally and Rebecca followed slowly behind them carrying wet sacks, making certain that the flames did not blow back across the ditch. When an errant blaze did attempt to come back, the women would beat it out while it was still small.
They were working under the most difficult of conditions, attempting to set a back-fire with no freshly plowed break of dirt, but only a shallow little dry ditch between the herd and the fire. And even the ditch had dry, tinder-like grass growing so high that it almost met over its top in places. This was anything but an ideal situation, but they had no choice but to try it.
They had barely gotten the back-fire started when a jagged line of fire with an upper wall of tumbling, brown smoke leaped into view at the top of the bluff.
“Smoke!” Sally called pointing to the fire.
“It’s closer than I thought it was,” Smoke said.
“We’ve got one thing in our favor,” Falcon said. “There is less grass on the hillside than there is down here.”
“Aye,” Duff said. “And on some places there is nae grass at all.” He pointed to a few patches of gray dirt, absolutely bare of vegetation.
When the fire reached those places it would not be able to leap over, but would have to move around. They had one more advantage. The fire was burning noticeably slower coming down a hill than it did while it was on level ground. But even that advantage was somewhat offset by the fact that there were a few long, narrow ditches that ran to the top of the bluff, and they were filled with dry brush. Those long seams would act as flues, drawing the fire down them as easily as flame following a wick.
Because Rebecca was driving a wagon instead of riding a horse, she had been alternating her apparel, wearing pants one day and a dress the next. As luck would have it, she had chosen this day to wear a dress, a choice that turned out to be unfortunate for her.
Maria was keeping the sacks wet, so that not only Rebecca and Sally, but Tom and Dalton also were carrying wet sacks with them. That helped as they beat out the errant little tongues of flame which managed to escape the back-fire line and retreat down one of the seams, or jump across the break to take up new residence.
Rebecca, in turning to extinguish a new outbreak of flames behind her, inadvertently swept her skirt across a clump of burning grass and set it aflame. Because she was intent upon her work, running from one outbreak of flame to another, and with the smoke and smell of fire all about her, she was totally unaware of what had happened.
Tom saw it, and moving quickly, wrapped a wet sack around her. Startled, and still unaware of the flaming skirt, Rebecca called out in shock.
“Tom! What are you doing?”
“Your dress was on fire,” Tom said.
Rebecca looked down to inspect the damage done to her dress. When she raised up again, her face was pale.
“Oh, Tom, I ...”
Tom saw that she was about to faint and he moved toward her quickly, catching her before she fell. She leaned into him, and as he held her, he could feel her heart beating rapidly. He remembered once having picked up a bird with a wounded wing. The little bird’s heart was beating rapidly, and it looked at him with eyes full of fear. He had felt nothing but compassion for that bird, and wished with all his heart he could comfort it, let it know that it had nothing to fear from him.
He felt that way now about Rebecca, holding her to him, wishing that he could turn time back a few months and start over with her. He knelt down, bringing her down with him, lying her down on the ground, with her face up. He then positioned her across his lap so that her heart was above her head, and her feet above her heart. After that, he tilted her head to one side to reduce the risk of her swallowing her own tongue.
“Yeah! Oh yeah!” Dusty shouted.
Tom looked to see what Dusty was shouting about, and saw that the back-fire was now well on the way to meeting the approaching fires, leaving behind it a long, very wide strip of black from the charred grass. As the fires met, there would no longer be fuel to sustain them, and they would quickly burn out. The herd was no longer in danger.