emerald. He
dried his face, loosened his collar, and, gasping for air, came out into
the narrow hall.

The hotel was very still. He hurried through it, his face bent, and went
by the back way to the saloon. At this hour Sheila was asleep. Carthy
would be alone in The Aura and there would be few, if any, customers.
Dickie found the place cool and quiet and empty, shuttered from the sun,
the air stirred by electric fans. Carthy dozed in his chair behind the
bar. He gave Dickie his order, somnambulantly. Dickie took it off to a
dim corner and drank with the thirst of a wounded beast.

Three or four hours later he staggered back to his room. A thunderstorm
was rumbling and flashing down from the mountains to the north. The
window was purple-black, and a storm wind blew the dirty curtains,
straight and steady, into the room. The cool wind tasted and smelt of hot
dust. Dickie felt his dazed way to the bed and steadied himself into a
sitting posture. With infinite difficulty he rolled and lighted a
cigarette, drew at it, took it out, tried to put it again between his
lips, and fell over on his back, his arm trailing over the edge of the
bed. The lighted cigarette slipped from his fingers to the ragged strip
of matting. Dickie lay there, breathing heavily and regularly in a
drunken and exhausted sleep.

A vivid, flickering pain in his arm woke him. He thought for an instant
that he must have died and dropped straight into Hell. The wind still
blew in upon him, but it blew fire against him. Above him there was a
heavy panoply of smoke. His bedclothes were burning, his sleeve was on
fire. The boards of his floor cracked and snapped in regiments of flame.
He got up, still in a half stupor, plunged his arm into the water
pitcher, saw, with a startled oath, that the woodwork about his door was
blazing in long tongues of fire which leaped up into the rafters of the
roof. His brain began to telegraph its messages ... the hotel was on
fire. He could not imagine what had started it. He remembered Sheila.

He ran along the passage, the roar of that wind-driven fire following
him as the draft from his window through his opened door gave a sudden
impulse to the flames, and he came to Sheila's sitting-room. He
knocked, had no answer, and burst in. He saw instantly that she had
gone. Her father's picture had been taken, her little books, her
sketches, her work-basket, her small yellow vase. Things were scattered
about. As he stood starin