Now, he ran with less caution. For, he knew the arrival of so formidable a body of men must have been enough to send the Caesars scattering for cover.
Before he reached the enclosure he veered abruptly to one side, dashing across a patch of moonlit turf, and heading for the giant live oak that stood gauntly in its center.
Under the "Ghost Tree's" enormous shade he came to a stop, glancing back to see if the direction of his headlong flight had been noted. Above him towered the mighty corpse of what had once been an ancestral tree. He remembered how it had stood there, bleakly, under the morning sunlight,—its myriad spreading branches and twigs long since killed by the tons of parasitical gray moss which festooned its every inch of surface with long trailing masses of dead fluff.
Not idly had Brice studied that weird tree and its position. Now, standing beneath its black shade, he drew forth a matchbox he had taken from the smoking table after dinner.
Cautiously striking a match and shielding it in his cupped palms, he applied the bit of fire to the lowest hanging spray of the avalanche of dead gray moss.
A month of bone-dry weather had helped to make his action a success. The moss ignited at first touch of the match. Up along the festoon shot a tongue of red flame. The nearest adjoining branch's burden of moss caught the fiery breath and burst into blaze.
With lightning speed, the fire roared upward, the branches to either side blazing as the outsputtering flames kissed them.
In a little more than a breath, the gigantic tree was a roaring sheet of red-and-gold-fire, a ninety-foot torch which sent its flood of lurid light to the skies above and made the earth for a radius of two hundred yards as bright as day.
Far out to sea that swirling tower of scarlet flame hurled its illumination. For miles on every hand it could be seen. The sound of its crackle and hiss and roar was deafening. The twigs, dry and dead, caught fire from the surrounding blaze of moss, and communicated their flame to the thicker branches and to the tree's towering summit.
And thus the fierce vividness of blazing wood was added to the lighter glare of the inflammable moss.