Flying U Coulee was safe, thanks to the permanent fire-guards which the Old Man maintained year after year as a matter of course.

But there were the claims of the Happy Family and all the grassland east of there which must be saved.
Men drove their work horses at a gallop after plows, and when they had brought them they lashed the horses into a trot while they plowed crooked furrows in the sun-baked prairie sod, just over the eastern rim of Antelope Coulee.

The Happy Family knelt here and there along the fresh-turned sod, and started a line of fire that must beat up against the wind until it met the flames, rushing before it.

Backfiring is always a more or less, ticklish proceeding, and they would not trust the work to stranger.
Every man of them took a certain stretch of furrow to watch, and ran backward and forward with blackened, frayed sacks to beat out the wayward flames that licked treacherously through the smallest break in the line of fresh soil.

They knew too well the danger of those little, licking flame tongues; not one was left to live and grow and race leaping away through the grass.
They worked--heavens, how they worked!--and they stopped the fire there on the rim of Antelope Coulee.