He rode down the winding trail apart from the guides. Darkness was beginning, and the lights of Ajoupa Boullion showed ahead. The mountain carried on a frightful drumming behind. Coiling masses of volcanic spume, miles above the craters, generated their own fire; and lit in the flashes, looked like billows of boiling steel. Charter rode upon sheer nerve--nerve at which men had often wondered. At length a full-rigged thought sprang into his mind, which had known but the passing of hopeless derelicts since the first moment of descent. It was she who had called to save him. The woman of flesh had become a vision indeed. The little Island mule felt the heel that moment.... Charter turned back to the red moiled sky--a rolling, roaring Hades in the North. "I can't help it, Skylark," he murmured, "if you _will_ merge into this woman. She may never know that a man fled from her to the mountain to-day, and is hurrying back--as to the source of all beauty!... Charter, Charter, your thoughts are boiling over----" He rode into the streets of Morne Rouge, so over-crowded now with the frightened from the lower city, that many were huddled upon the highway where they would be forced to sleep. Here he paid the three guides, but retained his mule.... On the down trail again, he re-entered the bank of falling ash and the sulphurous desolation. Evil as it was, the taint brought a sense of proximity to the _Morne_ and the _Palms_. Saint Pierre was dark and harrowingly still under the throbbing volcano. The hoof-beats of the mule were muffled in ash, as if he pounded along a sandy beach. Often a rousing fetor reached the nostrils of the rider, above the drying, cutting vapor from Pelée, and the little beast shied and snorted at untoward humps on the highway. War and pestilence, seemingly, had stalked through Saint Pierre that day and a winter storm had tried to cover the aftermath.... He passed through _Rue Rivoli_, but was far too eager to reach the _Palms_ to stop at the wine-shop. The ugly mystery there could be penetrated afterward. Downward, he turned toward the next terrace, where the solitary figure of a woman confronted him. "Mr. Charter!" she cried. "And--you are able to ride?" "Why, what do you mean, Miss Wyndam?" he said, swiftly dismounting. "What are you doing 'way up here alone--in this dreadful suffocation?" "I was looking for a little stone wine-shop----" She checked herself, a scroll of horrors spreading open in her brain. "It's just a little way back," he said, in a repressed tone. "I have an errand there, too. Shall I show you?" "No," she answered shuddering. "I'll walk with you back to the _Palms_. I must think.... Oh, let us hurry!" He lifted her to the saddle, and took the bridle-rein. TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER CHARTER AND STOCK ARE CALLED TO THE PRIEST'S HOUSE IN THE NIGHT, AND THE WYNDAM WOMAN STAYS AT THE _PALMS_