As the morning wore on, the wind grew stronger, blowing the leaping flames straight toward the river bank, where Bob and Twinkly Eyes huddled side by side in terror.

It was not a big fire, but it swept through the dry underbrush of the hardwood grove from Pollywog Pond to the plowed fields at the Valley Farm, and from the Old Logging road to the river.

Had the trees not been of hardwood, a fire might have started that would have eaten its way over miles of woodland. As it was, everyone at the farm turned out with wet gunny sacks to beat back every flame that leaped across the road as it wound from the pond on around at right angles to the river. It should at least be kept within those natural boundaries.

But to the Forest Folk whose homes were in the burned area, the fire seemed the most terrible thing that had ever happened to them. To those who crouched, waiting, on the bank of the river, the approaching flames and the long swim across the current to the opposite bank seemed equally impossible to face. Bobby Lynx, coughing and blinking in the acrid smoke, as he clung to the limb of his pine tree, felt, catlike, that it would scarce be worse to stay where he was than to plunge into the water.

Twinkly Eyes, sitting like a black stump beneath, stared with amazement as a band of hares, cousins of Mammy Cottontail, came galloping madly before the racing flames. They were gasping for breath, their round eyes bulging in terror and their hearts beating like trip-hammers in their furry chests.

One scatter-brained brown bunny so far lost his wits as to circle around and go dashing straight back into the advancing fire, while another sought shelter fairly between Twinkly’s black feet. But the little Bear was far too interested in the crackle of the flames to notice.

Almost on the heels of the hares loped Red Fox and his family, whom a sudden shift of the wind had cut off from safety. But they likewise gave the hares no more than a passing glance, but sat down opposite them at the river’s brink to watch, and cough, and blink their smoke-stung eyes.

Next came Mother Red Squirrel and others of her kin, leaping from branch to branch above the smoking ground till they had taken up their places directly above the stream’s edge.

Here, too, came Betty Bluebird and Conqueree the Blackbird, and Mother Grouse Hen, hurrying her fledglings along as best she could. Jim Crow and his black brothers, frightened from their nest in the top of the Pine, had gone soaring high above the smoke line, and so off to a point from which they could watch in safety.

There were other creatures, too, who sought haven along the River Bank. There was Writho the Black Snake, and Timothy Field Mouse, and Fleet Foot, the Spotted Fawn who had strayed too far from her mother. The little deer huddled with the hares as far from Twinkly Eyes and Red Fox as they could crowd, without actually leaping off the bank.

The Red Squirrel family hid out of sight of both Bobby Lynx and Red Fox, and Timothy Field Mouse and his deadliest enemy, the Black Snake, both tried to hide in the same hole under the very nose of Red Fox, without any one of the three having a thought beyond their common peril.