Lyle looked at the fire. Then he looked at the shovel, and at the old man holding it.
He had about eight minutes. He'd been angry for forty years, and he found he had no time left for it.
He held out the drip torch.
"Then you light it," Lyle said.
Amos stared at him.
"Your land. Your fire. I'll tell you where."
Lyle held the torch out further. "Or we can stand here and argue, and it can have both of us."
For a long second Amos didn't move. Then he dropped the shovel and took the torch.
"Start right on the shoulder," Lyle said. "Right where the gravel meets the grass. Keep it tight to the road. You don't want it getting out in the tall stuff on you."
Amos tipped the torch. A thin stream of burning fuel dripped onto the dry grass at the edge of the road. Fire caught, small and low.
"Now walk north. Slow. Keep the drip going."
Amos walked. Lyle walked beside him on the gravel. Behind them, Dana's crew followed with backpack pumps and flappers, and the water tender crept along with its hose ready.
The little fire along the road didn't run. It couldn't. The wind was blowing into its face, so it crept backward against the wind, slow, a foot at a time, eating the grass and leaving a strip of black behind it.
"That's it," Lyle said. "Let it back up into the wind. It'll go slow. That's what you want."
"It's not going anywhere," Amos said.
"It's going exactly where it needs to. Straight at the big one."
The strip of black behind them grew. Ten feet. Thirty.
Fifty. The head fire came down the slope toward it, roaring, throwing smoke so thick Lyle tied a handkerchief over his face.
"Here's the wind," Lyle said at the draw by the creek. "It curls back on you here. Stop the drip. Let it come to you."
Amos stopped. Twenty yards on, the wind came down off the ridge, hit the draw, and swung back on itself, and the backfire licked toward the road instead of away. Dana's crew was already there with the flappers, beating it out.
"How'd you know that?" Dana asked.
"Same as I knew it in '86," Lyle said.
The head fire hit the black line at 4:20 in the afternoon.
It came down the slope at a run, and then it ran out of grass. The tall flames reached the strip of burned ground and had nothing to eat. They laid down.
They sputtered. Along most of the line, they simply went out.
But the wind was still blowing forty miles an hour.
Lyle saw it first. A burning clump of sandreed lifted off the head fire like a bird and sailed over the black line, over the road, and came down a hundred yards behind them in Amos's bale yard.
Then another one. Then a dozen, glowing like cigarettes in the smoke.
"Spots," Dana yelled into her radio. "Spot fires in the Kettering bale yard."
The tender roared up the lane. The crew ran.
By the time they got there, two round bales were burning on top, and the grass around them was catching. The crew drowned the bales and stomped and flapped the grass until the fire was out and the bales were smoking black lumps.
Amos stood in the lane and watched it.
He watched the burning stems come over the backfire and drop into his hay, a hundred yards from any fire a man had lit. He watched for a long time, until the last of the smoke had blown past and the crew was rolling up the hose.
Then he turned around and looked at Lyle.
"It was the embers," Amos said. "In '86."
Lyle didn't say anything.
"Your fire never touched my stacks. It was the head fire. It threw them right over you, same as today."
Amos's voice was rough, and not from the smoke. "I came home from the sale and saw your black line smoking and my stacks gone, and I put it together wrong. And I kept it wrong for forty years."
"I tried to tell you," Lyle said.
"No, you didn't. You said believe what I wanted."
Lyle thought about that. "That was about as close to trying as I knew how to get, back then."
Amos almost laughed. It came out as a cough.
The fire burned forty-one hundred acres before the wind laid down that night. It took fence and grass and one old shed out by the Holt place. It didn't take a single house.
The fence on Cottonwood Creek was gone. All of it, a mile and a half of posts burned off at the ground and wire lying in the black.
On Monday morning, Lyle drove down to the creek with a load of new posts on the flatbed. Amos was already there with a post-hole digger and a roll of barbed wire.
They didn't talk much. They didn't need to. Lyle dug and Amos set and Cody tamped, and by Wednesday they had a mile of new fence standing along the creek.
One fence this time. The posts sat right on the line, and there was a new gate in the middle of it, wide enough for a pickup, with a chain on it that either man could open.
At noon on Wednesday, Amos brought a thermos up to the ridge where they'd lit the backfire. They sat on the tailgate above the burned ground and looked down at the new fence.
Amos poured two cups and handed one to Lyle without a word, and Lyle drank it.