Wall of Fire Placement

A while back the thought occurred to me: If in Original D&D, the wall of fire spell has a 6" area width and also a 6" maximum range, and we assume that the entire conjured wall must be within that range limit, wouldn't the wall have to automatically get squeezed pretty close to the caster to fit in the range limit? The answer turns out to be "no", my intuition was mistaken about that. I could have computed the distance to an arc of length x in a circle of radius x, but it seemed easier to just test it physically.