treetops--the first betraying marks of the licking flames below. 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. Venus, Mars,
Jupiter--at first he could not tell one from another, though he
watched them all. He had studied astronomy among other things in
school, but then it had been merely a hated task to be shirked and
slighted and forgotten as one's palate forgets the taste of bitter
medicine. Up here, with the stars all around him and above him for
many nights, he was ashamed because he could not call them all by
name. He would train his telescope upon some particularly bright star