ppeared. She sat up
choking--staring with wide open, stinging eyes, into an acrid haze.
She felt for the matches beside her bed and struck one. Its flame
burned saffron for an instant and went out as if it had been plunged
into a bottle. At this instant she would have shrieked with fright
had not the sound of a man leaping up the stairs leading to her room
reached her ears. Then her door crashed in clear of its hinges. She
remained sitting bolt upright in bed, too terrified to move. A pair of
sinewy arms reached out for her, groping in the strangling haze.

"Who's there?" she gasped.

"Keep your mouth shut!" commanded a voice close to her ear; then the
arms lifted her bodily out of bed and swung her clear of the floor;
a glimmering tongue of flame licking up the stairway revealed the
features of the man in whose arms she struggled.

"Holcomb!" she started to cry out, but the acrid fog closed her
throat.

"Keep your mouth shut--do you hear!" he muttered in her ear; "we'll be
out of this in a minute." He lunged with her headlong over the smashed
door and reached the top of the flight, feeling for the first step
cautiously with his foot. She screamed this time, beating his face
with her clenched hands.

"Keep your mouth shut," he mumbled; "you'll strangle."

Her arm became limp. "Where's Sam?--where's--" she pleaded feebly.
Then a dull roar rang in her ears; she lay unconscious, a dead weight
in his arms.

Holcomb began to stagger on the bottom step, reeling like a drunkard;
again he proceeded, stumbling on through the passageway leading to
Blakeman's pantry. The ceiling of varnished yellow pine above him
rained down sputtering drippings of flame; they burned his neck, his
hands, his hair. He dashed on through a pantry of sizzling blisters,
past a glowing wall in a hot fog of yellow smoke, one burned hand
covering her mouth. Then he turned sharply to the left, striking his
shoulder heavily against a corner beam!

The blow made him conscious of a man crawling on his hands and knees
toward them. The man rose--groped blindly like an animal driven to bay
and rushed straight at him.

"Give her to me, Billy," he hissed in his ear, "Quick--save yourself!"
Then a burned fist struck straight out and missed--struck again and
Holcomb fell senseless.

With the quickness of a cat the man caught the woman in his arms,
groped his way to the open, laid her prostrate body on the charred
grass--sprang back into the swirl and c