He seemed to go faster and faster as
that wind of flame gained upon them. The air was too thick to breathe.
It had an irresistible weight. It pushed horses and riders onward in
their flight--straws on the crest of a cyclone.

Again Slone looked back and again the spectacle was different. There
was a white and golden fury of flame above, beautiful and blinding; and
below, farther back, an inferno of glowing fire, black-streaked, with
trembling, exploding puffs and streams of yellow smoke. The aisles
between the burning pines were smoky, murky caverns, moving and weird.
Slone saw fire shoot from the tree-tops down the trunks, and he saw
fire shoot up the trunks, like trains of powder. They exploded like
huge rockets. And along the forest floor leaped the little flames. His
eyes burned and blurred till all merged into a wide, pursuing storm too
awful for the gaze of man.

Wildfire was running down the King. The great gray had not lessened his
speed, but he was breaking. Slone felt a ghastly triumph when he began
to whirl the noose of the lasso round his head. Already he was within
range. But he held back his throw which meant the end of all. And as he
hesitated Wildfire suddenly whistled one shrieking blast.

Slone looked. Ahead there was light through the forest! Slone saw a
white, open space of grass. A park? No--the end of the forest!
Wildfire, like a demon, hurtled onward, with his smoothness of action
gone, beginning to break, within a length of the King.

A cry escaped Slone--a cry as silent as if there had been no deafening
roar--as wild as the race, and as terrible as the ruthless fire. It was
the cry of life--instead of death. Both Sage King and Wildfire would
beat the flame.

Then, with the open just ahead, Slone felt a wave of hot wind rolling
over him. He saw the lashing tongues of flame above him in the pines.
The storm had caught him. It forged ahead. He was riding under a canopy
of fire. Burning pine cones, like torches, dropped all around him. He
had a terrible blank sense of weight, of suffocation, of the air
turning to fire.

Then Wildfire, with his nose at Sage King's flank, flashed out of the
pines into the open. Slone saw a grassy wide reach inclining gently
toward a dark break in the ground with crags rising sheer above it, and
to the right a great open space.

Slone felt that clear air as the breath of deliverance. His reeling
sense righted. There--the King ran, blindly going to his death.
W