“I am going back to the top of the hill,” she said suddenly to Mrs. Whiting. “I want to see what it looks like now. Go on down. I will catch you before long.”
“No. We will pull in at the side of the road here and wait for you. Don’t go past the hill. We’ll wait. There’s no danger down here yet, and won’t be for some time.”
Brom Bones made short work of the hill, for he was fresh and all day long he had been held in tight when he had wanted to run away. He 159 did not know what that thing was from which he had all day been wanting to run. But he knew that if he had been his own master he would have run very far, hunting water. So now he bolted quickly to the top of the hill.
But the Bishop, too, was riding a fresh horse and was not sparing him. When Ruth came to the top of the hill she saw the Bishop nearly a mile away, already past her own home and mounting the long hill.
She stood watching him, undecided what to do. The chances were all against him. Perhaps he did not understand how certainly those chances stood against him. And yet, he looked and rode like a man who knew the chances and was ready to measure himself against them.
“Brom Bones could catch him, I think,” she said as she watched him up the long hill. “But we could not make him come back until it was too late. I wonder if I am afraid to try. No, I don’t think I’m afraid. Only somehow he seems––seems different. He doesn’t seem just like a man that was reckless or ignorant of his danger. No. He knows all about it. But it doesn’t count. He is a man going on business––God’s business. I wonder.”
Now she saw him against the rim of the sky as he went over the brow of the hill, where Jeffrey and she had stopped yesterday. He was not a pretty figure of a rider. He rode stiffly, 160 for he was very tired from the unusual ride, and he crouched forward, saving his horse all that he could, but he was a figure not easily to be forgotten as he disappeared over the crown of the hill, seeming to ride right on into the sky.
Suddenly she felt Brom Bones quiver under her. He was looking away to the right of the long, terraced hill before her. The fire was coming, sweeping diagonally down across the face of the hill straight toward her home.
All her life she had been hearing of forest fires. Hardly a summer had passed within her memory when the menace of them had not been present among the hills. She had grown up, as all hill children did, expecting to some day have to fly for her life before one. But she had never before seen a wall of breathing fire marching down a hill toward her.
For moments the sight held her enthralled in wonder and awe. It was a living thing, moving down the hillside with an intelligent, defined course for itself. She saw it chase a red deer and a silver fox down the hill. It could not catch those timid, fleet animals in the open chase. But if they halted or turned aside it might come upon them and surround them.