Part 2
"Yes, ma'am," Kate said. "I would."
Mrs. Kearney's eyes narrowed.
"I came out here for that pass," Kate said. "To bring my mother west. I've counted the days since March. But his mother is seventy, and she's alone, and that fire will be in her yard in two hours." Her voice shook and she let it. "I can't serve pie to the seven-forty and think about that. I'm sorry. I'll forfeit the pay."
For a moment Mrs. Kearney did not answer.
Then she reached behind her own back and untied her own apron.
"You'll forfeit nothing," she said. "Not while I'm house mother at Raton." She folded the apron over a chair. "The contract says a Harvey girl does not leave her post without leave of the house mother. Well, I'm the house mother, and you have leave. And so do I." She turned to the dining room. "Mary. Josie. Lou. Get your shawls. Bring every wet sack and bucket in the kitchen. Mr. Pell!"
The manager came running out of his office.
"Mrs. Kearney, you can't..."
"Mr. Harvey's rule is the rule, Mr. Pell, and I know it better than you do," said Mrs. Kearney. "The seven-forty can eat cold ham. I'm borrowing four girls and the section wagon."
"If I let four girls walk out for a cowboy's mother," Pell said, "I'll have forty girls marrying cowboys by Easter."
"Then you'll have forty good wives on this railroad," said Mrs. Kearney, "and the Santa Fe will be the better for it. Kate, find the section boss."
They went out in the railroad section wagon, with four mules and six women and a dozen buckets, and every gunny sack in the Harvey House kitchen soaked in the horse trough.
The smoke came over them before they reached the ranch. The sky turned yellow, then brown. Ash fell like gray snow. Kate tied a wet napkin over her mouth and nose and could still taste the fire.
The Ashby place was a low adobe house and a pole corral, with a plowed fire guard around the yard. Old Mrs. Ashby was out beyond the guard with a bucket and a burning stick, all alone, small and bent in a black dress, setting the grass alight.
"She's lost her mind," gasped Lou.
"No, she hasn't," said Mrs. Kearney. "She's setting a backfire. Lord bless her. My mother did that in '71."
Old Mrs. Ashby straightened up when she saw the wagon. Her face was black with soot.
"Who in the world are you?" she shouted over the wind.
"Harvey House," said Mrs. Kearney. "Tell us what you want, ma'am."
Mrs. Ashby did not waste a word.
"The big fire's a mile off and coming on the wind," she said. "We burn a strip between it and us, along the wagon road. Burn it against the wind, so it creeps instead of runs. Then when the big fire gets here, there's nothing left to eat. But we have to keep our own fire from jumping the road. That's what the sacks are for."
Kate looked at the long line of the wagon road, and the six women with buckets, and the wind.
Then she did what she did every day at the Raton lunch counter when a train whistled at the yard limit. She set the stations.
"Mrs. Ashby lights," she said. "Mrs. Kearney, Mary, you're on the road edge with sacks. Josie, Lou, buckets behind them. I'll run water from the trough. Nobody moves off their place unless I call them. And everybody keeps the wind at their back."
Mrs. Kearney looked at her and nodded once.
They burned a strip a quarter mile long. Old Mrs. Ashby walked along the road with her torch, touching the grass, and the little fire crept back into the wind, low and crackling. Wherever a spark jumped the road, a wet sack came down on it. Kate ran buckets until her arms were numb and her skirt was black to the knees.
The big fire came at six o'clock.
It came roaring across the plain in a wall of flame and smoke twenty feet high. Kate stood behind the fire guard with the others and watched it come, and thought, very clearly, that she had made a mistake and they would all die here.
It hit the burned strip and stopped.
There was nothing left to burn. The fire ran along the edge of the black ground, hissing and snapping, and split, and went on north on either side of the ranch, past the house, past the corral, past six women standing in the yard with their buckets.
The house did not burn.
Jim Ashby came at a dead gallop at nine o'clock that night, on a horse lathered white, having seen the smoke from forty miles off.
He found his mother sitting on the porch drinking coffee with six sooty Harvey girls. Kate Brennan was asleep in a chair with her head on Mrs. Kearney's shoulder.
They caught the eleven o'clock freight back to Raton. Mrs. Kearney wrote in the house log that night, in her own firm hand: Miss Brennan, Miss Kerr, Miss Ortiz, Miss Lowe. On duty, away, with the house mother.
Kate finished her contract on the eleventh day. She worked her last shift, folded her apron, and collected her full pay and her railroad pass.
She used the pass to go home to Missouri. She came back three weeks later with her mother, on the same train.
They were married at Raton in October, in the Harvey House dining room, between the morning and noon trains. Mrs. Kearney served the cake. Kate's mother cried through the whole of it. Old Mrs. Ashby did not cry at all, and said that somebody had to keep her head.
Jim ate two slices of peach pie.