They stood there in the midst of the land they so arrogantly claimed, ready to toss her away once more in the everlasting game of battledore and shuttlecock. They were afraid for the dollars that made them different from the wretches of Misery. They gloried in their dollars--they mocked her in that moment, the bitterness of which only her heart understood. Let them look out for their dollars, then! Up there where the blue hills divided was sitting Colin MacLeod calling on the name of another woman and nursing a wound received for that woman's sake. Let him look out for himself! "We can make the Blake-cutting camps with you to-night," said Britt, his mind on business once again. "We'll take good care of you, and you might as well start one time as another. Out with the stuff and down with the houses, Rodliff." At the orders the men began to busy themselves, paying no further attention to Misery's inhabitants. The girl ran into the hut, lifted one of the cedar splints that made the floor, and took out a section of iron gas-pipe--the most prized possession of the tribe. It was their wand of plenty. It was Mother Nature's crutch. Out of it flowed bounty. Into the unplugged end she poured all the kerosene there was in a battered can. Then she stuffed into the tube a mass of wicking. It was a torch--the torch for the blueberry barrens. Dragged after one, it left a blazing trail such as no other form of fire could produce. There was a flicker of fire in the rusty stove. She thrust the wicking into the coals, and on the iron stalk a flame-flower sprang into huge blossom. She burst through the hut's rear window and ran straight for the edge of the clearing, towards the fuel piled high in the forest aisles. In that moment of blind and desperate fury she realized that the wind was swinging into the north. It was there that MacLeod was sitting at the foot of Pogey Notch. Ah, what a furnace-flue that would make! She did not pause to reason. Her single wild desire was to send the fire leaping towards him. The roar of voices behind--voices entreating, voices of malediction--made her smile. Above all was the Honorable Pulaski's bull roar. She began to drag the torch. "Catch her! Damnation, catch that girl!" howled Britt. She reached the edge of the distant woodland. Immediately his cry changed to "Shoot her!" He did not mean it the first time he cried it. He did mean it the second time. The deputies stared after her and joggled their weapons on their arms. "Shoot her, or fifty thousand acres of timber are gone!" But that was quarry before which official guns quailed. In his fury and his panic and his desperate fear for his fortune, Britt seized a gun from the nearest deputy and aimed it.