"Prairie fire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distance. We stop to listen, the sound gets louder; everyone stops to listen—the sound approaches, and is now distinguishable as rifle-fire. The firing becomes faster and faster; then suddenly swells into a roar and now comes the phenomenon of trench warfare: "wind up"—the prairie fire of ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... aristocratic nose to the plume of his sweeping tail, the collie was one blazingly vivid mass of crimson! He fairly irradiated flaring red lights. His coat was wet and it hung stickily to his lean sides, as if he had just come from a swim. And it was tinted like a chromo of a prairie fire. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... the way up on the boat she continued to fill his mind. The slowness of the steamer fretted him. He paced up and down the deck for hours at a time worried and anxious. Sometimes the jealousy in his heart flamed up like a prairie fire when it comes to a brush heap. The outrage of it set him blazing with indignation. Diane ought to be whipped, he told himself, for her part in the deception. It was no less than a conspiracy. What could an innocent young girl ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Western America, and in 1848 or 1849 gold was found accidentally by Captain Sutter, in digging a mill-race on his ranch, which discovery at once settled the status and fortunes of California. The news soon reached the States, and spread like a prairie fire on a windy day. All the subsequent gold excitements of Frazier river, down to and including the Klondike, have been insignificant in comparison. I was in New York at the time, and used to sit on the East river wharves, ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... party feeling engendered once more by the debates over Hamilton's Report spread over the country like a prairie fire, and raged until, in the North at least, it was met by the back fire of increasing prosperity. As the summer waned farmers and merchants beheld the prices of public securities going up, heard that in Holland the foreign loan had gone above par, and that ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... ears. It was mingled with a curious buzzing and a dizziness that made him grip his chair lest it pitch him to the floor. Chills, in which his bones were a mere rattlebox, alternated with little rushes of prairie fire across his skin. Throes ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... sky, as into an enormous furnace. Gigantic rolling clouds of flame were sweeping before the roaring wind like some vast prairie fire across the firmament. As they passed overhead, the reflection of the lurid light on them was smitten earthwards, and passed with them, making everything it traversed clear as noon—the lion on the swinging sign ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... when Russia drove Japan out of Manchuria, and reduced her to a third-rate power. He told me of his part in the invasion as we sat, after the bombardment of Tokio, on the ramparts of the Emperor's palace, watching the walls of the paper houses below us glowing and smoking like the ashes of a prairie fire. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... the three men away, and then opened the sty gate and beckoned Sandy to come—which she did; and not leisurely, but with the rush of a prairie fire. And when I saw her fling herself upon those hogs, with tears of joy running down her cheeks, and strain them to her heart, and kiss them, and caress them, and call them reverently by grand princely names, I was ashamed of her, ashamed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was rife in the community, and that the story of the strange contents of Cap'n Abe's chest had spread like a prairie fire, Louise was sure. Yet at supper time Cap'n Amazon was as calm and cheerful as usual and completely ignored the accident ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... bed of our wagon-box that night while the crew rode away to fight a prairie fire. We heard them come quietly in toward dawn, and when we awoke and looked out of our cover we saw them lying all about us on the ground each rolled up in his tarpaulin like a boulder. Altogether it was a stirring glimpse of ranch life ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... not loved her before; for he had known her since his father brought him home from Paris, a boy of eight, after his mother died there. The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... a big coulee among the hills, an', one summer, when there'd been a prairie fire that wiped out a lot o' feed, a bunch o' cattle was headed into this coulee. Three cowpunchers and a cook with the chuck wagon made up the gang. But this yar cook was one o' them fellers what's not only been roped by bad luck, but hog-tied and branded good and plenty. He ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... only blackened walls and smouldering ashes. In no part of northern Europe is there a countryside fairer than that between Aix-la-Chapelle and Brussels, but the Germans had made of it a graveyard. It looked as though a cyclone had uprooted its houses, gardens, and orchards and a prairie fire had followed. ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... bound to be higher grade ores deeper down. The finder filed his necessary "locations," and doubtless aided by copious draughts of "red-eye" saw, in swift imagination, his claim develop into a mine as rich as those that had made the millionaires of Virginia City. Anyhow the rumor spread like a prairie fire, and men came rushing in from Georgetown, Placerville, Last Chance, Kentucky Flat, Michigan Bluff, Hayden Hill, Dutch Flat, Baker Divide, Yankee Jim, Mayflower, Paradise, Yuba, Deadwood, Jackass Gulch and all the other camps whose locators and residents had not been ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... the point was reached where the graders had left off work for that year. Here had been a huge construction camp; and the bare and squalid place looked as if it once had been a town of crudest make, suddenly wrecked by a cyclone and burned by prairie fire. Fifty miles farther on, representing two more long, tedious, and unendurable days, and Neale heard the whistle of a locomotive. It came from far off. But it was a whistle. He yelled, and the men journeying with him ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... neighborly turn without feeling herself under any painful state of obligation. Naturally his custom grew. One moment he would be mending a yoke or plaiting a lash, the next moment he would be clapping himself on a broncho to outdodge an escaped bull, or dashing up the road to put out a prairie fire before it reached the stable; he could lift a stove or drive a nail or spade up a little place for flower seed; he could do any one of these things in about a minute and then have time to sit down and have a good neighborly visit. Possibly ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... accompanied by instant thunder I had never before witnessed, though the rainfall, after the first dash, was light in quantity. Several times the rain ceased entirely, when the phosphorus, like a prairie fire, appeared on every hand. Great sheets of it flickered about, the cattle and saddle stock were soon covered, while every bit of metal on our accoutrements was coated and twinkling with phosphorescent light. My gauntlets were covered, and wherever I touched myself, it seemed to smear and spread and ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... literature, we are grateful even for the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the Republic ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... heap. But they've got other ways of talkin'. Looks like a Injun could set right down on a hill, and think good and hard, and some other Injun a hundred miles away'd know what he was thinkin' about. You talk about a prairie fire runnin' fast—it ain't nothin' to the way ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... the Civil War, the most momentous conflict of recent times, was marked by a wave of fervent enthusiasm in the States of the South which swept with the swiftness of a prairie fire over the land. Pouring in multitudes into the centres of enlistment, thousands and tens of thousands of stalwart men offered their services in defence of their cause, gathering into companies and regiments far more rapidly than they could be absorbed. This state of affairs, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... surprised at these wild animals being in the state of utter exhaustion which I have described; but he must be reminded that, in all probability, this prairie fire had driven them before it for hundreds of miles, and that at a speed unusual to them, and which nothing but a panic could have produced. I think it very probable that the fire ran over an extent of five hundred miles; and my reason ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... universally true. Its truth assumes, first, that the source is a point or sphere; next, that there is no reflection or refraction of any kind; and lastly, that the medium is perfectly transparent. The law of inverse squares by no means holds from a prairie fire for instance, or from a lighthouse, or from a street lamp in ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... did have fun," assented Ruth. "But it was hard work, too,—especially when that prairie fire came a ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... Bell told about a big prairie fire. On the flat, level fields, where he pastured his cattle, grew long grass. When this gets dry it burns very easily, and, once started, it is hard ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Uncle Fred's • Laura Lee Hope
... a prairie fire—they had not realized it could be so terrible and menacing until they actually saw it. ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker |
