The red radiance was upon it, and all semblance of humanity seemed gone. Rather it seemed the face of some dreadful inmate of an Inferno. The glow was in his dark eyes too: they were too close to hers for her to mistake this fact. They smouldered, like the dead trees where the flame had swept. Her throat convulsed, and a high, far-carrying, piercing scream shuddered out above the roar of the fire.
But it was cut off as from beneath a blade. She had summoned all the strength of her will and spirit. After all, it was only wasted strength to scream. There were none to hear her in these fire-swept forests. When the pack of hounds had been about her, she had still retained a dim and flickering hope that Hugh would come to her aid, but she had no such hope now. She knew that stern, unbending man who watched the sheep. All her tears, all her prayers could never move him: he would linger, still at his post, till the insatiable tongues of fire licked at his breast. She was only the woman, but Hugh watched the sheep! Besides, the thing to do was to show this dark man before her that even if this was the moment of her death she would show no fear.
And this was no easy thing. Only because she was of the mountains, because the spirit that dwells in the forest, the rugged places, the wilderness primeval dwelt also in her, was she able to effect it at all.
“Don’t be afraid,” the man was saying. “You ain’t goin’ to be hurt. I’m goin’ to let you go in plenty of time. In the first place, I’ve got to get out the same way myself.”
She could believe this, at least. She saw that he kept close watch of the fire as it crept down toward the floor of the canyon.
Her eyes looked straight into his. Yet the fear crept at her heart—for if indeed he intended to let her go, none but the most dreadful reason occurred to her why she should be tied. And in truth, the spirit of Landy Fargo was far distant now. José knew perfectly that before she could reach a ’phone and men be secured to battle at this last stand against the fire, the hungry little tongues would have already encompassed the canyon. He only knew that he was shivering strangely, and that he was not yet ready to let her go. “Untie my hands,” she commanded.
“I will—quick enough. I just thought we’d talk a while first. It ain’t often I get to talk to a pretty girl like you——”
There in the path of the advancing flame the words were ineffably strange and terrible to the girl,—like some demoniac torture of a shadow world. “And you’re not going to have a chance now,” she told him clearly. “If you want to leave me here in the track of the fire, it’s in your power to do it—but it won’t make me bend to you, or plead with you, or treat you any different than I’ve ever treated you.”
The man stiffened. She saw the gleam of his teeth through his thin lips. “Don’t be too sure. I was told to let you go, but nothin’s goin’ to happen to me if I don’t. Your position ain’t what it used to be, Alice, and maybe I’m a different kind of man than you’re used to. I come from a different race. And maybe you’d better try to be a little more polite.”
“And I can only tell you this,” she went on as if she had not heard. “If you do leave me here, if you put one indignity to me above what you’ve already put by tying me up and making me listen to your talk, you’ll pay for it. I’m just as sure of that as I am that I’m alive.”