Again Slone looked back and again the spectacle was different.There was a white and golden fury of flame above, beautiful and blinding; and below, farther back, an inferno of glowing fire, black-streaked, with trembling, exploding puffs and streams of yellow smoke.The aisles between the burning pines were smoky, murky caverns, moving and weird.Slone saw fire shoot from the tree-tops down the trunks, and he saw fire shoot up the trunks, like trains of powder.They exploded like huge rockets.And along the forest floor leaped the little flames.His eyes burned and blurred till all merged into a wide, pursuing storm too awful for the gaze of man.
Wildfire was running down the King.The great gray had not lessened his speed, but he was breaking.Slone felt a ghastly triumph when he began to whirl the noose of the lasso round his head.Already he was within range.But he held back his throw which meant the end of all.And as he hesitated Wildfire suddenly whistled one shrieking blast.
Slone looked.Ahead there was light through the forest! Slone saw a white, open space of grass.A park? No--the end of the forest! Wildfire, like a demon, hurtled onward, with his smoothness of action gone, beginning to break, within a length of the King.
A cry escaped Slone--a cry as silent as if there had been no deafening roar--as wild as the race, and as terrible as the ruthless fire.It was the cry of life--instead of death.Both Sage King and Wildfire would beat the flame.
Then, with the open just ahead, Slone felt a wave of hot wind rolling over him.He saw the lashing tongues of flame above him in the pines.The storm had caught him.It forged ahead.He was riding under a canopy of fire.Burning pine cones, like torches, dropped all around him.He had a terrible blank sense of weight, of suffocation, of the air turning to fire.
Then Wildfire, with his nose at Sage King's flank, flashed out of the pines into the open.Slone saw a grassy wide reach inclining gently toward a dark break in the ground with crags rising sheer above it, and to the right a great open space.
Slone felt that clear air as the breath of deliverance.His reeling sense righted.There--the King ran, blindly going to his death.Wildfire was breaking fast.His momentum carried him.He was almost done.
Slone roped the King, and holding hard, waited for the end.They ran on, breaking, breaking.Slone thought he would have to throw the King, for they were perilously near the deep cleft in the rim.But Sage King went to his knees.
Slone leaped off just as Wildfire fell.How the blade flashed that released Lucy! She was wet from the horse's sweat and foam.She slid off into Slone's arms, and he called her name.Could she hear above that roar back there in the forest? The pieces of rope hung to her wrists and Slone saw dark bruises, raw and bloody.She fell against him.Was she dead? His heart contracted.How white the face! No; he saw her breast heave against his! And he cried aloud, incoherently in his joy.She was alive.She was not badly hurt.She stirred.
She plucked at him with nerveless hands.She pressed close to him.He heard a smothered voice, yet so full, so wonderful!
"Put--your--coat--on me!" came somehow to his ears.
Slone started violently.Abashed, shamed to realize he had forgotten she was half nude, he blindly tore off his coat, blindly folded it around her.
"Lin! Lin!" she cried.
"Lucy--Oh! are y-you--" he replied, huskily.
"I'm not hurt.I'm all right."
"But that wretch, Joel.He--"
"He'd killed his father--just a--minute--before you came.I fought him! Oh!.
..But I'm all right....Did you--"
"Wildfire ran him down--smashed him....Lucy! this can't be true....Yet I feel you! Thank God!"With her free hand Lucy returned his clasp.She seemed to be strong.It was a precious moment for Slone, in which he was uplifted beyond all dreams.
"Let me loose--a second," she said."I want to--get in your coat."She laughed as he released her.She laughed! And Slone thrilled with unutterable sweetness at that laugh.
