e remaining cages, he tore them
open; and then, with a summons to Lone Wolf to follow him, he threw
his arms over his face and dashed through the flames.

The three animals sprang out at once into the middle of the floor, but
their position seemed already hopeless. The leopard, thoroughly cowed,
leaped back into his cage and curled up in the farthest corner,
spitting insanely. Lone Wolf dashed at the door by which Toomey had
fled, but a whirl of flame in his face drove him back to the middle of
the floor, where the little bear stood whimpering. Just at this moment
a massive torrent of water from a fire engine crashed through the
window, drenching Lone Wolf, and knocking the bear clean over. The
beneficent stream was whisked away again in an instant, having work to
do elsewhere than on this already doomed and hopeless shed. But to the
wise little bear it had shown a way of escape. Out through the window
he scurried, and Lone Wolf went after him in one tremendous leap just
as the flames swooped in and licked the floor clean, and slew the
huddled leopard in its cage.

Outside, in the awful heat, the alternations of dazzling glare and
blinding smoke, the tumult of the shouting and the engines, the roar
of the flames, the ripping crash of the streams, and the cries of the
beasts, Lone Wolf found himself utterly confused. But he trusted, for
some reason, to the sagacity of the bear, and followed his shaggy
form, bearing diagonally up and across the wind. Presently a cyclone
of suffocating smoke enveloped him, and he lost his guide. But
straight ahead he darted, stretched out at top speed, belly to the
ground, and in another moment he emerged into the clear air. His eyes
smarting savagely, his nose and lips scorched, his wet fur singed, he
hardly realized at first his escape, but raced straight on across the
fields for several hundred yards. Then, at the edge of a wood, he
stopped and looked back. The little bear was nowhere to be seen. The
night wind here blew deliciously cool upon his face. But there was the
mad red monster, roaring and raging still as if it would eat up the
world. The terror of it was in his veins. He sprang into the covert
of the wood, and ran wildly, with the one impulse to get as far away
as possible.

Before he had gone two miles, he came out upon an open country of
fields, and pastures, and farmyards, and little thickets. Straight on
he galloped, through the gardens and the farmyards as well as the