not get near the lake.

Water! There it lay, below them, at their feet almost! And they could
not reach it! The fire was marching in a swift, widening line between
them and the lake. Not so much as a little finger might they wet in
the lake.

Men lay down and wept, or cursed, or gritted silent teeth, according
to the nature that was in each.

Jeffrey Whiting stood up, looking towards the lake. He saw two men
pushing a boat into the lake. Through the shifting curtain of smoke
and waving fire he studied them out of blistered eyes. They were not
men of the hills.

They were!--They were the real enemy!--They were two of those who had
set the fire! They had not stopped to fight fire. They had headed
straight for the lake and had gotten there. _They_ were safe. And
_they_ had _water_!

All the hot rage of the morning, seared into him by the fighting fire
fury of the day, rushed back upon him.

He had not killed a man this morning. Men said he had, but he had
not.

Now he would kill. The fire should not stop him. He would kill those
two there in the water. _In the water!_

He ran madly down the slope and into the flaming, fuming maw of the
fire. He went blind. His foot struck a root. He fell heavily forward,
his face buried in a patch of bare earth.

Men ran to the edge of the fire and dragged him out by the feet. When
they had brought him back to safety and had fanned breath into him
with their hate, he opened bleared eyes and looked at them. As he
understood, he turned on his face moaning:

"I didn't kill Rogers. I wish I had--I wish I had."

And south and north of the Chain the fire rolled away into the west.

* * * * *

The Bishop of Alden looked restlessly out of the window as the
intolerable, sooty train jolted its slow way northward along the canal
and the Black River. He had left Albany in the very early hours of the
morning. Now it was nearing noon and there were yet eighty miles, four
hours, of this interminable journey before he could find a good wash
and rest and some clean food. But he was not hungry, neither was he
querulous. There were worse ways of travel than even by a slow and
dusty train. And in his wide-flung, rock-strewn diocese the Bishop had
found plenty of them. He was never one to complain. A gentle
philosophy of all life, a long patience that saw and understood the
faults of high and low, a slow, quiet gleam of New England humour at
the back