Her heart sank within her as she saw the danger leaping toward her like some fiery and maddened race-horse. Was there no escape? Her children were sweetly sleeping, and the faithful dog, her only guardian, was gazing as if with mute sympathy into her face. Within an hour she calculates the conflagration would be at her very door. All around her is one dry ocean of combustibles. She cannot reach the tree-tops, and if she could, to cling there would be impossible amid those towering flames. The elements seemed to grow madder as the fire approached; fiercer blew the blast, intermitting for a moment only to gather fresh potency and mingle its own strength with that of the flames. She still had a faint hope that a creek a few miles away would be a barrier over which the blaze could not leap. She saw by the broad light which made even the distant prairie like noonday, the tops of the trees that fringed the creek but for a few moments, and then they were swallowed up in that crimson furnace. Alas! the stream had been crossed by the resistless flames, and her last hope died away. Bewildered and half stupefied by the terrors of her situation, she had not yet wakened her children. But now no time was to be lost. Already in imagination she felt the hot breath of her relentless foe. It was with much difficulty that she awoke them and aroused them to a sense of their awful danger. Hastily dressing them she encircled them in her arms and kissed and fondled them as if for a last farewell. Now for the first time she missed the dog, the faithful companion and guardian of her solitude, and on whose aid she still counted in the hour of supreme peril. She called him loudly, but in vain. Turning her face northward she saw one unbroken line of flame as far as the eye could reach, and forcing its way towards her like an infuriated demon, roaring, crackling, sending up columns of dun-colored smoke as it tore along over the plain. A few minutes more and her fate would be decided. Falling on her knees she poured out her heart in prayer, supplicating for mercy and commending herself and her helpless babes to Almighty God. As she rose calmed and stayed by that fervent supplication a low wistful bark fell on her ear; the dog came bounding to her side; seizing her by the dress as if he would drag her from the spot, he leaped away from her, barking and whining, looking back towards her as he ran. Following him a few steps and seeing nothing, she returned and resumed her seat, awaiting death beside her children.