CHAPTER XXIV

OUT OF THE FLAMES

WITH the bursting into flames of the great pine tree so near the hotel wing, a new danger threatened those imprisoned by the circle of forest fire. Yet it was not so much a new danger as an extension of that already menacing them.

“Quick with that hose!” cried Mr. Thorndyke, as his crew of amateur firemen responded to the summons. “Hurry, men!”

“Can any of us help?” asked Mr. Damon.

“We’ll do our share,” added Mr. Nestor.

“You may have to—later,” said the manager, as he directed his men. “This is an isolated blaze at present. It will easily be put out. But the fire from below is drawing nearer. Unless the wardens and their men can check it, I don’t see what is to become of us!”

By this time the water was spurting through the hose that had been run out through a lower door. The hotel was provided with great tanks on the roof, thus affording a gravity supply to different rooms. But the long, dry season had depleted the springs from which water was pumped to the roof tanks, so they were not more than half full.

Suddenly, just as the first sprays of water were directed at the blazing pine tree, the forest giant exploded with a loud report. The heated pitch and other sap within had reached a temperature where they must expand, and they did so, rending the bark and trunk.

This explosion, which felled the tree, sent more masses of blazing material in every direction, and for a moment it looked as if that whole wing of the hotel would catch fire, even though the actual burning forest was some distance down the mountain side.

“Run out another hose!” ordered Mr. Thorndyke; and when this had been done, the blaze, after hard work, was sufficiently wet down to afford temporary relief.

However, all this time the circle of fire about the seemingly doomed hotel was slowly growing closer. The conflagration was eating its way up the mountain, as well as down, but more slowly in the latter direction, as the wind was sweeping toward the summit.

“They should make a back-fire!” declared Mr. Damon, who, with the other guests, including Mr. Swift, Mary, and her parents, was watching the progress of the fire from a veranda. “It’s the only way.”

“I think they are doing that,” said Mr. Nestor.

Mr. Swift said nothing, but every now and then he would look up toward the smoke-obscured sky, trying to pierce the murky haze.

“What are you looking for?” asked Mary, coming to his side.

“For my son Tom,” answered the aged inventor. “He said in his note that he would save us.”

“And he will, too! I am sure of it!” declared Mary earnestly.

“Then he must make haste,” said the old man in a low voice. “It is getting hard to breathe up here. Don’t you feel the heated air, Mary? It is getting closer—the fire!”

“Oh, I hardly think the air is any hotter than it was two hours ago,” Mary answered, more because she wanted to reassure the old man than because she really believed it. She felt a sense of oppression and she did have difficulty in breathing, just as Mr. Swift had.

“He can’t be long now,” went on Tom’s father, his weary eyes scanning the sky. “Do you see anything of an airplane, Mary?”

“Not yet, Father. But it would have to be a very big airplane to save all at this hotel, even if he could land and take a few in at a time. How do you think Tom will manage?”

“I don’t know. But he’ll find a way,” said the old man. “I’ll leave it to my son Tom. He’ll know what to do.”

“Yes,” said Mary softly.

“If he had the big aerial warship that we sold to the government, that might do,” went on Mr. Swift. “I wonder if Tom thinks of that? But the warship is far away. However, he might get another big craft from the government and come for us in that.”

“If he comes at all, I think it will be in the new dirigible,” said Mary.

“Oh, Tom will come!” his father declared. “But he would not dare hover the dirigible above the forest of fire.”

“Why not?”

“The gas in it would explode. It would mean death for all on board. But Tom will save us somehow.”

With weary eyes, the anxious ones in the hotel looked first to the efforts of the men below them, fighting the flames, and again toward the sky, for the message Tom had dropped from the _Wasp_ had been picked up, carried to Mary, and had been eagerly read aloud, so that all in the hotel knew its contents and looked for the young inventor to save them. How, they did not know, nor did even Tom’s friends. So they could only wait and hope while the fire hemmed them in closer and closer.

The crackling of the flames could now be plainly heard by those on the hotel grounds and verandas. Every one was outside, for it could not be told at what moment some burning masses might be wafted by the wind and fall on the roof, to set it ablaze.

No one thought of eating, though some of the cooks had prepared a breakfast. A few took coffee, but it was no time to spend over food. When the blazing pine tree had been well doused with water, Mr. Thorndyke sent a crew of men with a hose up to the roof to watch for an outbreak of flames there.

Meanwhile, Tom Swift and Ned Newton, in charge of the big dirigible, had guided the craft until by afternoon it was directly over the hotel, with the circle of fire ever drawing tighter. For a time the smoke was so thick that it obscured the woods and the buildings, and more than once, as Tom gave the signal to descend, such a blast of heated air, tipped with red flames, arose that he had to increase his gas pressure and go up.

“Looks as if we couldn’t make it, Tom,” gasped Ned, for some smoke had gotten into the control cabin.

“We’ve got to make it!” was the fierce answer.

“My fortune is yours if you save my wife and children!” cried Mr. Jardine.

“That looks like an opening,” Ned cried, pointing down through a rift which appeared in the pall of smoke. “If the wind only holds that way for a time, we can go down and let them know we have come to save them.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Tom Swift, and he gave the signal for going down.

Fortunately the wind held, and, for a time at least, the summit of the mountain was comparatively free of the hot, white vapor.

The airship went down rapidly, almost as straight as a descending elevator. It was now within a few hundred feet of the hotel, and suddenly, above a temporary lull in the crackling of the flames, voices from below cried:

“There it is!”

“The big airship!”

“Tom Swift has come to save us!”

Mary, her parents, Mr. Swift, and Mr. Damon heard the cries of joy and hastened toward the rear of the hotel whence came the shouts and on toward the ball field, the largest space around the hotel where there were no trees or shrubbery to catch fire.

“Yes, that’s Tom!” cried Mary, recognizing the big dirigible. She waved her hands and kissed them to Tom, but it is doubtful if he saw her.

Slowly the giant of the clouds descended lower and lower.

Then came a cry of despair from a crowd at the rear of the hotel. A great mass of blazing material, matted together, came floating up, borne by a strong wind and, landing in a pile of broken boxes and other débris piled near the main building of the hotel, set it on fire.

“The hose! The hose!” came the appeal.

But before the men with the hose could run the nozzle of it around to the new point of danger the dry wooden structure of the hotel, parched by many days of hot sunshine, had burst into flames almost with the rapidity of an explosion.

“The place is doomed now!” cried Mr. Damon.

“Only Tom Swift and his big dirigible can save us!” exclaimed Mr. Nestor.

Leaving the end of the hotel to burn, and knowing the fire would soon communicate to the entire structure, the guests and help gathered at the ball field, looking up to observe the _Silver Cloud_.

The crowd had no sooner reached the place than flames broke out in the trees and bushes around the ball field. So with one end of the hotel afire and the underbrush at the edges of the recreation ground burning, the guests were fairly hemmed in.

“Get shovels and dig up the field!” cried Mr. Thorndyke. “If we can make a wide enough patch of bare earth the flames may not cross it. Dig, everybody!”

Shovels were hastily procured and the men and even some of the women, Mary and Mrs. Nestor among them, worked desperately to keep the fire from their little patch of safety. It was an island in a sea of flames.

Tom’s airship was now directly above the flames and was coming still lower.

“He’ll explode if he comes down any further!” cried Mr. Swift. “That gas can stand so much heat and no more! Go back, Tom! Go back!”

But the _Silver Cloud_ came lower and lower, closer to the raging fire that was now consuming the north end of the hotel. Below and all around was a seething caldron of leaping flames.

The dirigible was soon within two hundred feet of the ground. Tom Swift dared not go lower. But it was enough. He gave the word:

“Lower the metal cage!”