Perhaps for the first time in her life she was seized by a terrible fear that Frank would fail to accomplish his purpose. Always before, under the most trying circumstances, she had maintained perfect confidence in him, perfect faith that he would triumph in the end and come forth unscathed.
“He was a fool!” declared Roy Swift, who still was near.
“He’s the bravest fellow in the whole world!” declared Inza. “You escaped, but you thought of no one save yourself. He rescued me, and now he has gone back there, risking his own life in an attempt to find and save my father from a frightful death.”
Swift was silent, but he mentally told himself:
“That’s the end of the fellow! He’s gone back into the jaws of the trap, and he’ll never come out! The fire is spreading swiftly.”
“There’s a chance for him, Inza,” Walter declared, wishing to keep her courage up. “But father may have been taken out already. We can’t tell till we investigate.”
She rose to her feet and stood staring at the spot where Frank had vanished, her hands clenched, her face pale as death, her bosom heaving.
“He loves me!” she mentally cried. “I know it now! Oh, why did I let him throw his life away!”
Blacker rolled the smoke against the wintry sky. In the west the sun broke through a bank of clouds and shot a bar of yellow light across the snowy fields.
Was this Frank Merriwell’s funeral-pyre? Was this to be the tragic ending of the most remarkable youth of the New World?