For the space of four minutes the children bent to their oars, while the breath of the flames on the shore behind them scorched their cheeks and parched their nostrils, and the fire ate its way through the brush to the very water’s edge.

The bunnies fairly stood on top of one another till they filled the rowboat with brown billows of soft fur. And Fleet Foot, the little spotted Fawn, crouched with soft eyes fastened appealingly on the children’s faces. In all the wilderness there is no creature so innocent and so helpless and so altogether lovely as a spotted fawn. So at least the children thought.

“Poor, poor bunnies!” sighed the Girl, as one was all but crowded over the edge of the boat.

“Aw, they’ll be all right once they’re on the other side,” said the Boy. “Get in there, you!” and he shoved the hare back from the edge with his foot. His voice was just gruff enough to hide the pity in it.

But once drawn up on the opposite bank, he paused not even to help lift the bunnies out, but grabbed the belt axe that a backwoods boy always carries, and went hacking away at a slender sapling just opposite the tree the squirrels were on.

He made quick work of it, I can tell you, for there wasn’t a moment to lose. Notching it first on the side toward the river, he took care that it fell so that its slender top reached into the far-hanging branch on which the little family had taken its last stand.

As the sapling landed, Mother Red Squirrel’s black eyes snapped with a sudden hope. I can assure you she needed no second invitation to use the bridge thus mir-a-cu-lous-ly thrown across to her. With a glad bark to the youngsters to follow, she raced down the sapling across the stream, Shadow Tail at her heels. They didn’t even stop to draw breath till they had scrambled up a pine tree set well back from the sight and the smell of the fire across the stream.

The Boy’s eyes shone. “It didn’t take them long to make up their minds,” he chuckled.

“Now, get out of here,” and he lifted the last of the bunnies out of the boat, to go bounding off into the depths of the green woods beyond,—far too fast for either Bob or Twinkly, I can assure you.

For the truce of their common peril was over, and the hares well knew if they didn’t get into hiding before Bobby Lynx got sight of them, he’d celebrate his escape on one of his fellow-refugees.

Back on the wet mud of the bank they had left, Mother Grouse Hen seemed in a fair way to pull through after all, for the fire had stopped at the River’s brink, and there was now but one great vista of charred and smoking tree trunks for as far as the eye could reach.