rolled overhead. Jack stood dazed, watching the yellow tongues go
licking up the smaller branches. While he stood looking, the ravaging
flames had devoured leaves and twigs and a dead branch or two, and
left the bush a charred, smoking, dead thing that waved its blackened
stubs of branches impotently in the wind. Alone it had stood, alone it
had died the death of fire.

"Marion Rose!" he shouted abruptly, and began running again. "Marion
Rose!" But the hot wind whipped the words from his lips, and the deep,
sullen roar of the fire drowned his voice. Still calling, he reached
the road that led to Crystal Lake. The wind was hotter, the roar was
deeper and louder and seemed to fill all the world. Hot, black ash
flakes settled thick around him.

Then, all at once, he saw her standing in the middle of the road, a
little farther up the hill. She was staring fascinated at the fire,
her eyes wide like a child's, her face with the rapt look he had seen
when she stood looking down from the peak into the heart of the
forest. And then, when he saw her, Jack could run no more. His knees
bent under him, as though the bone had turned suddenly to soft
gristle, and he tottered weakly when he tried to hurry to her.

"Isn't it wonderful?" she called out when she saw him. Her words came
faintly to him in all that rush and crackle of flame and wind
together. "I never saw anything like it before--did you? It sprung up
all at once, and the first I knew it was sweeping along."

"Don't stand here!" Jack panted hoarsely. "Good Lord, girl! You--"

"Why, you've been running!" she cried, in a surprised tone. "Were you
down there in it? I thought you had to stay up on top." She had to
raise her voice to make him hear her.

Her absolute ignorance of the danger exasperated him. He took her by
the arm and swung her up the trail. "We've got to beat it!" he yelled
in her ear. "Can't you see it's coming this way?"

"It can't come fast enough to catch us," she answered impatiently.
"It's away back there down the hill yet. Wait! I want to watch it for
a minute."

A bushy cedar tree ten feet away to their left suddenly burst into
flame and burned viciously, each branch a sheet of fire.

"Well, what do you know about _that_?" cried Marion Rose. "It jumped
from away down there!"

"Come on!" Pulling her by the arm, Jack began running again up the
hill, leaving the road where it swung to the east and taking a short
cut through the open space in the