lections the voice of a girl broke insistently
with a shrill hail. A horse somewhere neighed to his horse, and the
Bishop realised with a start of horror that a woman was here in this
square of fire.

"It's you, Bishop, isn't it?" the voice cried frantically. "I thought
I'd never find you. Over here to the right. Let your horse come. He'll
follow mine. The Gaunt Rocks," she yelled back over her shoulder, "we
can make them yet! There's nothing there to burn. We may smother. But
we won't _burn_!"

Thus the Bishop found himself and his horse taken swiftly under
command. It was Ruth Lansing, he recognised, but there was no time to
think how she had gotten into this fortress of death. His horse
followed Brom Bones through a whirl of smoke and on up a break-neck
path of loose stones. Before the Bishop had time to get a fair breath
or any knowledge of where he was going, he found himself on the top of
what seemed to be a pile of flat, naked rocks.

They stopped, and Ruth was already down and talking soothingly to Brom
Bones when the Bishop got his feet to the rocks. Looking around he saw
that they were on a plateau of rock at least several acres in extent
and perhaps a hundred feet above the ground about them. Looking down
he saw the sea of fire lapping now at the very foot of the rocks
below. They had not been an instant too soon. As he turned to speak to
the girl, his eye was caught by something that ran out of one of the
lines of fire. It ran and fell headlong upon the lowest of the rocks.
Then it stirred and began crawling up the rocks.

It was a man coming slowly, painfully, on hands and knees up the side
of the refuge. The Bishop went down a little to help. As the two came
slowly to the top of the plateau, Ruth stood there waiting. The Bishop
brought the man to his feet and stood there holding him in the light.
The face of the newcomer was burned and swollen beyond any knowing.
But in the tall, loose-jointed figure Ruth easily recognised Rafe
Gadbeau.

The man swayed drunkenly in the Bishop's arms for a moment, then
crumpled down inert. The Bishop knelt, loosening the shirt at the neck
and holding the head of what he was quick to fear was a dying man.

The man's eyes opened and in the strong light he evidently recognised
the Bishop's grimy collar, for out of his cracked and swollen lips
there came the moan:

_"Mon Pere, je me 'cuse--"_

With a start, Ruth recognised the words. They were the form in which
the F