-and thrust it among the yellow pine
splinters with which he had laid the foundation of his deathfire. The
blue light of the match flashed close to his face, revealing it white as
death, but smiling.

Directly a column of flame shot upward, first in fine quivering flashes,
then in long, curling wreaths of fire, that the wind seized upon and
tore into hot, red tatters, laughing and wrangling among them with
fearful grotesqueness.

North retreated from the blaze, and ran back into the woods, hiding
himself, for he feared to be seen from the tavern below. Now and then he
would start forth, toss a handful of fuel on the flames, and plunge back
into the darkness, where he listened greedily for some token to come out
of the storm and prove that his evil work was well done.

It came at last--a gun boomed out from the tempest. The man started and
began to tremble. Still he listened. Another gun, with loud cries
cutting sharply through the storm, then dead silence, followed by a
tumult upon the shore, as if men were gathering in haste.

North was not surprised at this. When a vessel struck in these days on
the Long Island shore, wreckers appeared in dozens, not eager for death,
for they would rather have avoided that, but keen for plunder. Now the
cries of these men made the storm terrible. Blue lights from the
stricken ship revealed her struggling fiercely among the breakers, which
were rending her like wild beasts.

Then North trampled out his death fire and went down to the beach among
the crowd of wreckers that stood waiting, with horrid patience, for the
ship to go to pieces and give its treasures into their greedy keeping.

"No boat could live among the breakers three minutes, I tell you," said
old Benson with gruff decision, when North, horrified by the terrible
shrieks that rang up from the sinking ship, was seized with an awful fit
of remorse, and cried out fiercely for help which no man could give. He
would have undone his work then had it been possible, for the last faint
light that went up from the wreck revealed a woman, with outstretched
arms and hair streaming back on the storm, pleading so wildly for help
that a fiend would have pitied her. It was this woman's life he had
sought, but with the sight of her his heart failed utterly.

But an evil deed once written in the eternal book of God cannot be
recalled. While this man stood in dumb helplessness on the beach, the
ship sunk. Out of the whirlpool which it