Читать книгу Camping in the Winter Woods: Adventures of Two Boys in the Maine Woods онлайн

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The roar of the flames through the trees and the crackling of burning brush echoed in their ears. Then the awful heat swept over them and stifled their very breath as they groped their way uncertainly about through the yellow pall of smoke.

“Here she is—lie low!” yelled Ben, from somewhere below them; but the rest of his orders were drowned by the noise.

A host of burning embers came glowing through the smoke and alighted on the cabin. A jet of flame started up near the peak of the roof, and the boys dashed water on the spot. Birds struck against them, cinders lit in their hair, and their heads reeled from the intense heat and suffocating smoke.

“Look! Oh, look!” screamed George, hysterically, as a solid sheet of flame flew from the top of a pitch-pine and caught again in a neighboring tree, which it consumed with a sullen roar.

Smoke began to twist up over the edge of the roof, and they realized that the cabin was on fire. With blanched faces and set teeth they crawled to the spot, but were driven back by a tongue of flame which leaped in their faces.