170 FOREST OUTINGS 



"I got one on 69%. Look at her! She's a snake in the grass!" 



The guard in another tower. "Keep your shirt on; that's a chimney 

 glow. OF George Pratt's chimney, that's all." 



First guard. "I'm gonna report it! Ranger said to report everything!" 



Second guard. "Lissen now! Don't give way before the water comes. 

 Let the ranger lay in tonight. He'll need it. [Pause] They tell me a lookout 

 over on the De Soto got so worked up he called the dispatcher every time 

 the moon rose." 



First guard. "Ain't it never gonna rain?" 



Second guard. "I sure hope that lady brings it!" 



Then they laughed. The lady in question provided no end of cackling 

 talk, and a needed comic relief of some sort, during the 1939 spring fire 

 season in Florida, with the Everglades burning. She was a rain maker, a 

 gentle soul beyond her middle years, who employed no apparatus more 

 elaborate than her own person, and a fixed conviction that if she sat by a 

 body of water long enough, even in the driest time, she somehow brought 

 on rain. 



She sat there by a lake in the drought, with photographers attending, 

 and the news of her sitting held almost equal interest, to Floridians, with 

 the European situation. Indeed, she made more talk than Europe made 

 there, at the time. But it stayed dry, terribly dry; and every day the woods 

 burners, seeking to hurry the greening, slipped out and set more fires. 

 Most of them were set outside of the forest, to be blown in by a strong 

 northeast wind; but fires were set inside the forest, too. Then came a March 

 day with a high northeast wind, and no soot. Abruptly the fire dispatcher 

 at the Jackson Ranger Station had 15 fires on his switchboard all at once; 

 and in 3 days more than 2,000 acres on the Choctawhatchee Forest burned, 

 about its annual average. 



But now, at length, some rain fell, patchily, throughout Florida and to 

 the west; not rain enough to put the 'glades fire out, but enough to dampen 

 things a little, and give the forest guards and fire fighters some measure of 

 relief. A forest inspector driving west from the Choctawhatchee at this junc- 

 ture, to have a look at the situation on the De Soto, with headquarters at 

 Jackson, Miss., read in the paper at Mobile, Ala., midway, that a Florida 



