Between gasps he shouted her name as Hank Brown had repeated it to him. He stopped on a ledge and stared wildly, in a sudden panic, lest he should somehow miss her. He called again, even while reason told him that his voice could not carry any distance, with all that crackle and roar. He forced himself to stand there for a minute to get his breath and to see just how far the fire had already swept, and how fast it was spreading. Even while he stood there, a flaming pine branch came whirling up and fell avidly upon a buck bush beside him. The bush crackled and shriveled, a thin spiral of smoke mounting upward into the cloud that rolled overhead. Jack stood dazed, watching the yellow tongues go licking up the smaller branches. While he stood looking, the ravaging flames had devoured leaves and twigs and a dead branch or two, and left the bush a charred, smoking, dead thing that waved its blackened stubs of branches impotently in the wind. Alone it had stood, alone it had died the death of fire. "Marion Rose!" he shouted abruptly, and began running again. "Marion Rose!" But the hot wind whipped the words from his lips, and the deep, sullen roar of the fire drowned his voice. Still calling, he reached the road that led to Crystal Lake. The wind was hotter, the roar was deeper and louder and seemed to fill all the world. Hot, black ash flakes settled thick around him. Then, all at once, he saw her standing in the middle of the road, a little farther up the hill. She was staring fascinated at the fire, her eyes wide like a child's, her face with the rapt look he had seen when she stood looking down from the peak into the heart of the forest. And then, when he saw her, Jack could run no more. His knees bent under him, as though the bone had turned suddenly to soft gristle, and he tottered weakly when he tried to hurry to her. "Isn't it wonderful?" she called out when she saw him. Her words came faintly to him in all that rush and crackle of flame and wind together. "I never saw anything like it before--did you? It sprung up all at once, and the first I knew it was sweeping along." "Don't stand here!" Jack panted hoarsely. "Good Lord, girl! You--" "Why, you've been running!" she cried, in a surprised tone. "Were you down there in it? I thought you had to stay up on top." She had to raise her voice to make him hear her. Her absolute ignorance of the danger exasperated him. He took her by the arm and swung her up the trail. "We've got to beat it!" he yelled in her ear. "Can't you see it's coming this way?" "It can't come fast enough to catch us," she answered impatiently. "It's away back there down the hill yet. Wait! I want to watch it for a minute." A bushy cedar tree ten feet away to their left suddenly burst into flame and burned viciously, each branch a sheet of fire. "Well, what do you know about _that_?" cried Marion Rose. "It jumped from away down there!"