red times, moving in the sun-pour
with elastic tread, full-throated and deep-chested, athrob with life in
every generous vein. How passionately she had loved things brave and
true! How anger had flamed up in her like fire among tow at meanness and
hypocrisy. Surely all the beauty of her person, the fineness of her
character, could not be blotted out so wantonly. If there was any economy
in his world God would never permit waste like that.

He wanted her. His soul cried out for her. and stormily he prayed that he
might find her alive and well, that the chance might still be given him
to tell her how much he loved her.

Sometimes he covered small distances where the flow structure was
comparatively smooth, broken only by minor irregularities. Again he came
to abrupt pits, deep caverns, tumbled heaps of broken slabs, or jagged
chunks of lava twisted into strange shapes. No doubt the volcanic flow
had hardened to a crust on top, cracked, and sunk into the furnace below.
This process must have gone on indefinitely.

He crept from slab to slab, pulled himself across chasms, worked slowly
forward in the darkness. At intervals he fired and listened for an
answer. Occasionally there drifted to him the sound of a shot from one of
the other searchers. As the hours passed and brought to him no signal
that the girl had been found, his hopes ebbed. It was very unlikely that
she could have wandered so far into the bad lands as this.

He shuddered to think of her alone in this vast tomb of death. Suppose
she were here and they never found her. Suppose she were asleep when he
passed, worn out by terror and exhaustion. His voice grew hoarse from
shouting. Sometimes, when the thought of her fate would become an agony
to him, he could hardly keep his shout from rising to a scream.

Billie struck a match and looked at his watch. It was five minutes past
three. A faint gray was beginning to sift into the sky. He had been
nearly seven hours in the Mal-Pais. Out in God's country the world would
soon be shaking sleep from its eyes. In this death zone there was neither
waking nor sleeping. "Frozen hell," Clanton had called it. Prince
shuddered.

The flare of the match had showed him that he was standing close to the
edge of a fissure. In the darkness he could not see to the bottom of it.

A faint breath of a whimper floated to him. He grew rigid, every nerve
taut. He dared not let himself believe it could be real. Of course he was
imagini