“WRITHING AT HIS BONDS, HIS CONTORTED FACE TOWARDS THE RED FLAMES GALLOPING UP THE VALLEY”
And singing this over and over to himself, he whirled his stallion and hurried away. Wade ran behind him without question, for he guessed while he feared. Withee started, but turned back to his men with a sullen oath.
It was a long and a bitter chase through the smother of the smoke, and in the very forefront of the racing conflagration. At last Pogey Notch had begun to suck at the raging fires with its granite lips. It was the chimney-flue of the amphitheatre of Misery. The flames roared from tree to tree. Wade ran, stooping forward, clutching at the cross-bar of the ding-swingle. Without that help he never would have been able to reach the spot where at last he found John Barrett, writhing at his bonds, squealing like an animal—his contorted face towards the red flames galloping up the valley.
The prophet had left his vehicle to guide the rescuer up the slope. He stood by, grinning with enjoyment, when the two men faced each other. He chuckled when Wade cut the bonds. He laughed boisterously when Barrett, weeping like a child, threw his arms around the young man’s neck.
“Coals of fire!” he shrilled. “Heap ’em on! They’re hotter than the other kind that are dropping on you!”
Then he ran from them a few steps and rapped his skinny knuckles on a scar breast high on a tree.
“Your trail!” he cried. “It’s here! It’s blazed clear to the bald head of old Jerusalem. Get up there on the granite. Then sit down and talk it over! Coals of fire!”
They heard him shrieking it back at them as he fled up the Notch. And the two men took the trail, strangling, gasping, feeling their direction from blaze to blaze on the trees, fighting their way up from the Gehenna of Pogey.