ast run? Slone knew it was Wildfire's
greatest and last race.

Suddenly Slone's ears rang with a terrible on-coming roar. For an
instant the unknown sound stiffened him, robbed him of strength. Only
the horn of the saddle, hooking into him, held him on. Then the years
of his desert life answered to a call more than human.

He had to race against fire. He must beat the flame to the girl he
loved. There were miles of dry forest, like powder. Fire backed by a
heavy gale could rage through dry pine faster than any horse could run.
He might fail to save Lucy. Fate had given him a bitter ride. But he
swore a grim oath that he would beat the flame. The intense and
abnormal rider's passion in him, like Bostil's, dammed up, but never
fully controlled, burst within him, and suddenly he awoke to a wild and
terrible violence of heart and soul. He had accepted death; he had no
fear. All that he wanted to do, the last thing he wanted to do, was to
ride down the King and kill Lucy mercifully. How he would have gloried
to burn there in the forest, and for a million years in the dark
beyond, to save the girl!

He goaded the horse. Then he looked back.

Through the aisles of the forest he saw a strange, streaky, murky
something moving, alive, shifting up and down, never an instant the
same. It must have been the wind--the heat before the fire. He seemed
to see through it, but there was nothing beyond, only opaque, dim,
mustering clouds. Hot puffs shot forward into his face. His eyes
smarted and stung. His ears hurt and were growing deaf. The tumult was
the rear of avalanches, of maelstroms, of rushing seas, of the wreck of
the uplands and the ruin of the earth. It grew to be so great a roar
that he no longer heard. There was only silence.

And he turned to face ahead. The stallion stretched low on a dead run;
the tips of the pines were bending before the wind; and Wildfire, the
terrible thing for which his horse was named, was leaping through the
forest. But there was no sound.

Ahead of Slone, down the aisles, low under the trees spreading over the
running King, floated swiftly some medium, like a transparent veil. It
was neither smoke nor air. It carried faint pin points of light,
sparks, that resembled atoms of dust floating in sunlight. It was a
wave of heat driven before the storm of fire. Slone did not feel pain,
but he seemed to be drying up, parching. And Lucy must be suffering
now. He goaded the stallion, raking his flank