"I 'low hits too late now, Belle-Ann," returned he, in tones a trifle unsteady. "Hit air God's buryin' now," he added, with no trace of venom in his tones. [Illustration: "Hit air God's buryin' now."] "Oh!--Lem, it's too awful--too terrible to watch and think about," pursued Belle-Ann in half whispers broken with emotion. She dropped her lids and placed her hands over her eyes. The night wind carried an ominous groan. A dully grinding, crepitating sound came up to the lofty heights of Eagle Crown. Even now there was a tremendous gutting upheaval below them; then with a dynamitic cough of concussion the entire roof of the church belched upward and fell in and a wide black flight of smoke hurried up to the high heavens and blotted the scintillant stars. Then a measureless, flanged blanket of blood-hued flame followed, propelling still higher the ebon clouds above it. Here the flame turned to orange and split, and dropped back into a seething pit, where it gathered another and greater force. Then a lance-like turret of pure fire spurted straight upward, struggling and twisting and stabbing its lurid path through the pitchy volumes of smoke that rolled and plunged and tumbled infernally; filching with edacious swirls, great amber flakes of tinder, delivering them up in spiral gusts to the whining wilderness wind, which in turn hurtled its meteoric salvage, red and alive, out over the rampant waters of Hellsfork. The clearing was transformed into an oscillating arena of lurid light that eclipsed the stars and drove the moon pallid. The front wall supporting the belfry was last to go. Its superstructure half devoured, the belfry itself clung on fearfully askew, like a man skidded from a high cliff, hanging by a single root awaiting his strength to ebb. The pitiless flames duelled, raged and fought ferociously over their prey of fire-bitten logs that strove vainly to rise, only to be stricken, again to fall back, casting groans to the spectral night. They turned and stirred and crawled in agony, like the maimed half dead. Suddenly the sheet of flame scathing the front wall fell back again for another assault and, taking it thrice with blasting, mighty tongues, took the key-log to the belfry for its own. And as it went the belfry trembled and quaked on the threshold of its doom. For a minute it hung there like a mortal thing, having eyes to see down into the white-hot pit--fearing something there that this grim-hell clasped to its red breast, vauntingly and gloatingly. Something more scathing, more horrifying, more contaminating than the mere scourge of molten annihilation. The fire gnawed its trembling support away, and the belfry staggered, tottered and succumbed.