ll
consciousness. Terror had mercifully saved her from a contemplation of
those things which had inspired it.

These two were alone. The other woman had gone, fled at the first
coming of that dreaded fiend--fire. And those others, those wretched,
besotted creatures whose mischief had brought about this wanton
destruction, they too had fled. But their flight was in answer to the
wrathful voice of the heavens which they feared and dreaded above all
things in the wild world to which they belonged.

Alone, helpless, almost nerveless, Joan waited that end which she felt
could not long be delayed. She did not know, she could not understand.
On every hand was a threat so terrible that in her weakness she
believed that life could not long last. The din in the heavens, the
torturing heat so fierce and painful. The glare of light which
penetrated even her closed eyelids, the choking gasps of smoke-laden,
scorching air with which she struggled. Death itself must come, nor
could it be far from her now.

The wind rushed madly down from the hilltops. It swept over forest and
plain, it howled through canyon and crevasse in its eager haste to
reach the centre of the battle of elements. It pounced upon the
blinding smoke-cloud and swept it from its path and plunged to the
heart of the conflagration with a shriek and roar of cruel delight.
One breath, like the breath of a tornado, and its boisterous lungs
had sent its mischief broadcast in the flash of an eye. With a howl of
delight it tore out the blazing roof of the house, and, lifting it
bodily, hurled it like a molten meteor against the dark walls of the
adjacent pine forest.

Joan saw nothing of this, she understood nothing. She was blind and
deaf to every added terror. All she felt, all she understood was
storm, storm, always storm. Her poor weary brain was reeling, her
heart was faint with terror. She was alive, she was conscious, but she
might well have been neither in the paralysis that held her. It meant
no more that that avalanche of fire, hurled amidst the resinous woods,
had suddenly brought into existence the greatest earthly terror that
could visit the mountain world; it meant no more to her that an added
roar of wind could create a greater peril; it meant no more to her
that, in a moment, the whole world about her would be in a blaze so
that the burning sacrifice should be complete. Nothing could possibly
mean more to her, for she was at the limit of human endurance.