“Come, M’liss,” he said at last, “we’ll say quits. You’ve lost your brandy, and I’ve got some of the pieces of yonder bottle sticking in my shoulder yet. I suppose brandy is good for bruises, though. Hand me the light!”
M’liss reached the candle from the sconce and held it by the guard as he turned back the collar of his shirt to lay bare his shoulder. “So,” he muttered, “black and blue; no bones broken, though no fault of yours, eh? my young cherub, if it wasn’t. There—why, what are you looking at in that way, M’liss, are you crazy?—Hell’s furies, don’t hold the light so near! What are you doing; Hell—ho, there! Help!”
Too late, for in an instant he was a sheet of living flame. When or how the candle had touched his garments, saturated with the inflammable fluid, Waters, the only inactive spectator in the room, could never afterward tell. He only knew that the combustion was instantaneous and complete, and before the cry had died from his lips, not only the guard, but the straw mattress on which he had been sitting, and the loose strips of paper hanging from the walls, and the torn cloth ceiling above were in flames.
“Help! Help! Fire! Fire!”
With a superhuman effort, M’liss dragged the prisoner past the blazing mattress, through the doorway into the passage, and drew the door, which opened outwardly, against him. The unhappy guard, still blazing like a funeral pyre, after wildly beating the air with his arms for a few seconds, dashed at the broken window, which gave way with his weight, and precipitated him, still flaming, into the yard below. A column of smoke and a licking tongue of flame leaped from the open window at the same moment, and the cry of fire was reechoed from a hundred voices in the street. But scarcely had M’liss closed the open door against Waters, when the guard from the doorway mounted the stairs in time to see a flaming figure leap from the window. The room was filled with smoke and fire. With an instinct of genius, M’liss, pointing to the open window, shouted hoarsely in his ear:—
“Waters has escaped!”
A cry of fury from the guard was echoed from the stairs, even now crowded by the excited mob, who feared the devastating element might still cheat them of their intended victim. In another moment the house was emptied, and the front street deserted, as the people rushed to the rear of the jail—climbing fences and stumbling over ditches in pursuit of the imagined runaway. M’liss seized the hat and coat of the luckless “Bill,” and dragging the prisoner from his place of concealment hurriedly equipped him, and hastened through the blinding smoke of the staircase boldly on the heels of the retiring crowd. Once in the friendly darkness of the street, it was easy to mingle with the pushing throng until an alley crossing at right angles enabled them to leave the main thoroughfare. A few moments’ rapid flight, and the outskirts of the town were reached, the tall pines opened their abysmal aisles to the fugitives, and M’liss paused with her companion. Until daybreak, at least, here they were safe!
From the time they had quitted the burning room to that moment, Waters had passed into his listless, abstracted condition, so helpless and feeble that he retained the grasp of M’liss’s hand more through some instinctive prompting rather than the dictates of reason. M’liss had found it necessary to almost drag him from the main street and the hurrying crowd, which seemed to exercise a strange fascination over his bewildered senses. And now he sat down passively beside her, and seemed to submit to the guidance of her superior nature.
“You’re safe enough now till daylight,” said M’liss, when she had recovered her breath, “but you must make the best time you can through these woods to-night, keeping the wind to your back, until you come to the Wingdam road. There! do you hear?” said M’liss, a little vexed at her companion’s apathy.
Waters released the hand of M’liss, and commenced mechanically to button his coat around his chest with fumbling, purposeless fingers. He then passed his hand across his forehead as if to clear his confused and bewildered brain; all this, however, to no better result than to apparently root his feet to the soil and to intensify the stupefaction which seemed to be creeping over him.