l-bound wonder of the demoniac _fete_. The ground
under his feet felt gratefully cool. He bent down, and shudderingly
laved his burning face in the inky water. The sick man had slept more
peacefully during the last half-hour. He no longer breathed in gasping
efforts; his sleep was unbroken by muttering or outcry. But now he must
be aroused. He must be taken out of the circle of fire, for, sooner or
later, the curling waves would lick downward from the dry vines above
and scorch the mound. How to get away? The horses were long since gone.
They might be miles from the spot! Dick touched the sleeping man, filled
with a new suspense. He breathed so softly, or did he breathe at all?

"For God's sake, Mr. Jones, wake up! We must go from here; the swamp is
burning!"

"Eh--who is it? Where am I? Was--I dreaming? I thought my boy was with
me, and we were in the old home at Acredale."

He lay quite still, staring upward with unseeing eyes. Dick's heart gave
a great throb of grateful, devout thanksgiving. The madness and fever
were gone.

"You remember you were too worn out to go on, and Jack has gone to get
food. But the swamp has caught fire, and we must move away."

Jones had risen to his elbow; then, with an exclamation that sounded
like an oath, to his feet, gazing on the flaming specters rising and
falling, enlarging and shrinking, among the black tracery of limbs
and trunks.

"You ought to have waked me before," Jones said, when he had swept the
scene, with sane realization in his eye. "I'm afraid we can never break
through the fire. It reaches a mile or more all about us, and I--I am in
no condition to move. I feel as if I had been down months with illness."

"But if you could eat something you would be able to move," Dick
ventured, cruelly hurt at the implied delinquency.

"Eat!" Jones held up one of the luckless torches that Dirk had lighted
in a circle about the mound, and began to examine the ground. "What is
there to eat? Stay! By Heaven, I have it! The bushes are filled with
fluttering game. There, see that! and that, and that!" As he spoke he
had thrust the burning torch into a thick clump of bushes, dense and
glistening as laurels, that looked like wild huckleberry. The branches
were laden with birds, and in a moment be had seized three or four
partridges.

"What better do we need? We have salt, water, and fire. I'll prepare
them. Do you keep your face well bathed, and heap up embers at the foot
of that