Overview
“A pall of smoke, dark, ugly, threatening, hung over a wood in which the Thirty-ninth Troop of the Boy Scouts had been spending a Saturday afternoon in camp. They had been hard at work at signal practice, semaphoring, and acquiring speed in Morse signaling with flags, which makes wireless unnecessary when there are enough signalers, covering enough ground. The Scout camp was near the edge of the woods. Beyond its site stretched level fields, sloping gradually upward from them toward a wooded mountain. The smoke came from the mountain, and in the growing blackness over the mountain a circular ring proclaimed the spreading fire.”