lashing light she
could see a little figure rising from a bed. It was Sta. There was not
a moment to be lost, for the open window was beginning to draw the smoke
from the passage. Luckily, the boy, by some childish instinct, threw
his arms round her neck and left her hands free. Whispering him to
hold tight, she clambered out of the window. A narrow ledge of cornice
scarcely wide enough for her feet ran along the house to a distant
balcony. With her back to the house she zigzagged her feet along the
cornice to get away from the smoke, which now poured directly from the
window. Then she grew dizzy; the weight of the child on her bosom seemed
to be toppling her forward towards the abyss below. She closed her eyes,
frantically grasping the child with crossed arms on her breast as she
stood on the ledge, until, as seen from below through the twisting
smoke, they might have seemed a figure of the Madonna and Child niched
in the wall. Then a voice from above called to her, "Courage!" and she
felt the flap of a twisted sheet lowered from an upper window against
her face. She grasped it eagerly; it held firmly. Then she heard a cry
from below, saw them carrying a ladder, and at last was lifted with her
burden from the ledge by powerful hands. Then only did she raise her
eyes to the upper window whence had come her help. Smoke and flame were
pouring from it. The unknown hero who had sacrificed his only chance of
escape to her remained forever unknown.

*****

Only four miles away that night a group of men were waiting for the dawn
in the shadow of a pine near Heavy Tree Bar. As the sky glowed redly
over the crest between them and Hymettus, Hamlin said:--

"Another one of those forest fires. It's this side of Black Spur, and a
big one, I reckon."

"Do you know," said Barker thoughtfully, "I was thinking of the time
the old cabin burnt up on Heavy Tree. It looks to be about in the same
place."

"Hush!" said Stacy sharply.

CHAPTER IX.

An abandoned tunnel--an irregular orifice in the mountain flank which
looked like a dried-up sewer that had disgorged through its opening the
refuse of the mountain in red slime, gravel, and a peculiar clay known
as "cement," in a foul streak down its side; a narrow ledge on either
side, broken up by heaps of quartz, tailings, and rock, and half
hidden in scrub, oak, and myrtle; a decaying cabin of logs, bark, and
cobblestones--these made up the exterior of the Marshall claim. To th