He had watched the puff balls grow until they exploded into rolling clouds of smoke, yellow where the flames mounted high in some dead pine or into a cedar, black where a pitch stump took fire.
After he had telephoned the alarm to headquarters he would watch anxiously the spreading pall.

To stand up there helpless while great trees that had been a hundred years or more in the growing died the death of fire, gave him a tragic feeling of having somehow betrayed his trust.

Every pine that fell, whether by old age, fire or the woodmen's axe, touched him with a sense of personal loss.

It was as though he himself had made the hills and clothed them with the majestic trees, and now stood godlike above, watching lest evil come upon them.

But he did not feel godlike when through the telescope he watched great leaping flames go climbing up some giant pine, eating away its very life as they climbed; he was filled then with a blind, helpless rage at his own ineffectiveness, and he would stand and wonder why God refused to send the rain that would save these wonderful, living things, the trees.
At night, when the forests drew back into the darkness, he would watch the stars slide across the terrible depth of purple infinity that seemed to deepen hypnotically as he stared out into it.