She pushed back the tangle of yellow hair that the wind tumbled into her face, and coughed violently. Her chubby hands were stained with tears and soot. She doubled one of them and gouged it into her eyes.
“I want my mamma!”
“I will take you to her,” Justin promised, as he tore the blankets and slicker from behind the saddle.
One of the blankets he wrapped about her; the other he threw over his shoulders and secured in place with a pin. The slicker he cast away, fearing its coating of oil would make it inflammable. Having done this, he clambered into the saddle, with the child in his arms.
But the fire had been as busy. A long red prong thrown in the direction of the ranch buildings had widened and was drawing back toward the cañon. It lapped across the open grassy space toward which he rode before he could gallop a dozen rods, thus hemming them in.
As Justin dashed furiously at this wall of flame, he drew the hood of the blanket well over his head; and while still holding the child closely wrapped, and clinging to the rein, he sought protection for his hands in the folds of the blanket. There was no protection for the horse. Yet he drove it to the plunge, which it took with blind and maddened energy.
The fire flashed about him and roared like a furnace. The flesh of his hands and face cried out in pain and seemed to crisp under the lash of that whip of flame. Giddy and reeling, he set his teeth hard and gouged his booted heels furiously into the broncho’s flanks. The blanket seemed to be burning about his head.
For a few brief moments after that he was but half conscious; then he felt the broncho fall under him, and was pitched from the saddle. He staggered to his feet, still holding the child. His blanket had been torn aside by the fall; and he saw that he had broken through the cordon of flame, and that the fire was behind him. The broncho lay quivering where it had dropped, having run to the last gasp. He could not have recognized it. Its hair was burnt off, and blood gushed from its nostrils.
Helen seemed to be uninjured, though she cried lustily. Still resolved to save her from the fire, Justin began to stagger with her across the unburned grass. As he did so he heard a shout, followed by galloping hoofs. He saw the horsemen dimly as they rode toward him, and he ran in their direction. As he thus ran on he fell.
When he came to himself he was on a horse in front of some one who clasped him firmly about the body. Horses’ feet were rustling noisily over the grass. The sky was black with smoke; its taste was in his mouth, it cut his lungs and pinched his quivering nostrils. His face and eyes; his hands, his whole body, throbbed with the smarting pain of fire.