One of the trainmen saw Merry’s movement, saw the grim look of determination on his white face and the glare in his eyes. He grasped Frank, demanding; “What’re you goin’ to do, young feller? Don’t get crazy!” Frank grasped the man’s wrists and flung him off, sending him reeling. Then he crouched and plunged headlong through the very opening by which he had escaped from the wreckage. “Mad as a March hare!” gasped the trainman. “He’ll roast in there, for the whole thing will be a roaring bonfire in less than five minutes! He’s a goner!” Inza had watched him, and now she was seized by a frightful terror lest he had indeed gone to his death. He had called her sweetheart again as of old! He had held her clasped in his strong arms! She had seen the old love-light in his eyes! And now he was gone! “Walter,” she sobbed, “he’ll not come back! Look! See the fire! He will be burned to death!” Perhaps for the first time in her life she was seized by a terrible fear that Frank would fail to accomplish his purpose. Always before, under the most trying circumstances, she had maintained perfect confidence in him, perfect faith that he would triumph in the end and come forth unscathed. “He was a fool!” declared Roy Swift, who still was near. “He’s the bravest fellow in the whole world!” declared Inza. “You escaped, but you thought of no one save yourself. He rescued me, and now he has gone back there, risking his own life in an attempt to find and save my father from a frightful death.” Swift was silent, but he mentally told himself: “That’s the end of the fellow! He’s gone back into the jaws of the trap, and he’ll never come out! The fire is spreading swiftly.” “There’s a chance for him, Inza,” Walter declared, wishing to keep her courage up. “But father may have been taken out already. We can’t tell till we investigate.” She rose to her feet and stood staring at the spot where Frank had vanished, her hands clenched, her face pale as death, her bosom heaving. “He loves me!” she mentally cried. “I know it now! Oh, why did I let him throw his life away!” Blacker rolled the smoke against the wintry sky. In the west the sun broke through a bank of clouds and shot a bar of yellow light across the snowy fields. Was this Frank Merriwell’s funeral-pyre? Was this to be the tragic ending of the most remarkable youth of the New World? There rose a sudden shout. Men sprang forward to assist some one from the wreck. Then, with his clothes torn, his hands bleeding, but with triumph written on his determined face, Frank Merriwell, of Yale, reappeared. In his arms he bore Bernard Burrage! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXIV “A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.”