He could not abandon Helen; and holding his wife in his arms he rode toward the fire.
“Save your wife!” Justin shouted to him.
He was already moving off, forcing the broncho toward the point where the smoke lay heaviest. Again he shouted to Harkness, begging him to save his wife. Then a moving wall of smoke swept between them.
“Helen! Helen!” Justin began to call, circling swiftly about the spot where Pearl Harkness believed she had left her child.
The heat and smoke were becoming unbearable.
“I must find her!” was his thought, as he recalled Pearl’s hysterical screams and the anguished face of Steve Harkness.
Then, as if in a fire-framed picture, he saw her, well up toward the head of the cañon, whither she had fled in a panic of fright. The strong upward pull of the heated air, lifting the smoke for an instant, revealed her, clad in her short dress of striped calico, her yellow head bare.
As the flames flared thus on high, their angry red blending and tangling with the thick black smoke on the rim of the cañon, Justin’s broncho became almost unmanageable. He struck it now, pounding his fist against its body, kicking it mercilessly, and jerking like a madman at the sharp bit. Fighting with the scared broncho, he drove it toward the child.
She heard him call to her; and seeing him, she began to run toward him. She stumbled and fell, and rose crying. Her small face was smeared with soot and tears, with charred plum leaves and with sand. All about her, as the flames and the smoke lifted and fell under the force of the wind, flakes of soot, plum leaves, and burning grass, floated and flew. It was a wonder to Justin that her striped dress was not already ablaze. In a few moments he was at her side.
“I want my mamma!” she wailed, as he leaped down by her. “Where is my mamma?”