e wood! The red rush of fire
in the air! The red flame of fire in my heart! Fear! Hate! Fire!" With
a terrible convulsion the man drew himself up in the Bishop's arms,
gazing wildly at the fire all about them, and screaming:

"On my knee I dropped and shot him, shot Rogers when he stopped!"

He fell back as the scream died in his throat.

The Bishop began the words of the Absolution. Some whisper of the
well-remembered sound must have reached down to the soul of Rafe
Gadbeau in its dark place, for, as though unconsciously, his lips
began to form the words of the Act of Contrition.

As the Bishop finished, the tremor of death ran through the body in
his arms. He knelt there holding the empty shell of a man.

Ruth Lansing, standing a little distance away, resting against the
flank of her horse, had time to be awed and subdued by the terrific
forces of this world and the other that were at work about her. This
world, with the exception of this little island on which she stood,
was on fire. The wind had almost entirely died out. On every side the
flames rose evenly to the very heavens. Direction, distance, place,
all were blotted out. There was no east, no west; no north, no south.
Only an impenetrable ring of fire, no earth, no sky. Only these few
bare rocks and this inverted bowl of lurid, hot, cinder-laden air out
of which she must get the breath of life.

Into this ring of fire a hunted man had burst, just as she had seen a
rabbit and a belated woodchuck bursting. And that man had lain himself
down to die. And here, of all places, he had found the hand of the
mighty, the omnipresent Catholic Church reached out ready to him!

She was only a young girl. But since that night when the Bishop had
come to her as she held her father dying in her arms she had thought
much. Thought had been pressed upon her. Forces had pressed themselves
in upon her mind. The things that she had been hearing and reading
since her childhood, the thoughts of the people among whom she had
grown up, the feeling of loyalty to her own kind, all these had fought
in her against the dominion of the Catholic Church which challenged
them all.

Because she had so recently come under its influence, the Catholic
Church seemed ever to be unfolding new wonders to her. It seemed as
though she stepped ever from one holy of holies into another more
wonderful, more awesome. Yet always there seemed to be something just
beyond, some deeper, more mysterious m