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From the towns they’re rushing fighters—rushing, rushing them by rail. They’re meeting them in motors and they’ll tote ’em up the trail Where the pack-nags are a-packing with a tramp, tramp, tramp— Packing tools and grub and blankets up the canyon to the camp. And fire they’ll foil with back-fire—pitting pitch ’gainst snarling pitch, They’ll slash the brake and lacerate the earth with upturned ditch; Their skins will smart with singeing draughts that play along their tracks, They’ll sting with wet from reeking sweat of shovel, pick and ax.

She’s headed up for Clear Creek and she’ll make it ’fore she stops, For she’s a roaring crown-fire with her windswept, blazing tops. From flaming lance to flaming lance on through the parching day, Exhaling clouds of rolling black, she surges on her way. She sucks the flying embers like a burning hurricane, She flings them miles around her in a sputtering, sparking rain, She pants and thirsts for living green, she stays not for the snags, She’s changed the steep embankments and she’s gained the higher crags; Her Devil’s dance leads ever up—exultingly she swings Her wild red arms out toward the heights—she sizzles and she sings; With dragon-spit she hisses, a maniac in her wrath, She laughs to scorn the human things that try to block her path. On yonder crest they’ve made their stand—hark to the timber fall, Again the winds have veered around—the bosses curse and call Through driving blasts of pitch-pine heat and pitch-pine smoke and smell, “She’s turned again—hang to your tools—and damn you—run like Hell!” It takes a canny general whose eye’s a weather-vane, A mighty canny general with seamed and schemy brain, To meet the gay manœuvers and the unconventional ways That a breeze kicks up at noonday in a crown-fire forest blaze.