t her arms
creeping up out of the bearskin and clinging about his neck he felt
upon him like a weight of lead the hopelessness of a despair as black
as the night itself. The cabin was now a pillar of flame, and in it was
everything that had made life possible for them. Food, shelter,
clothing--all were gone. In this moment he did not think of himself,
but of the girl he held in his arms, and he strained her closer and
kissed her lips and her eyes and her tumbled hair there in the
storm-swept darkness, telling her what he knew was now a lie--that she
was safe, that nothing could harm her. Against him he felt the tremble
and throb of her soft body, and it was this that filled him with the
horror of the thing--the terror of the thought that her one garment was
a bearskin. He had felt, a moment before, the chill touch of a naked
little foot.

And yet he kept saying, with his face against hers:

"It's all right, little sweetheart. We'll come out all right--we sure
will!"

CHAPTER XVI

His first impulse, after those few appalling seconds following their
escape from the fire, was to save something from the cabin. Still
talking to Celie he dropped on his knees and tucked her up warmly in
the bearskin, with her back to a tree. He thanked God that it was a big
skin and that it enveloped her completely. Leaving her there he ran
back through the gate. He no longer feared the wolves. If they had not
already escaped into the forest he knew they would not attack him in
that hot glare of the one thing above all others they feared--fire. For
a space thought of the Eskimos, and the probability of the fire
bringing them from wherever they had sought shelter from the storm, was
secondary to the alarming necessity which faced him. Because of his
restlessness and his desire to be ready for any emergency he had not
undressed when he threw himself on his bunk that night, but he was
without a coat or cap. And Celie! He cried out aloud in his anguish
when he stopped just outside the deadline of the furnace of flame that
was once the cabin, and standing there with clenched hands he cursed
himself for the carelessness that had brought her face to face with a
peril deadlier than the menace of the Eskimos or Bram Johnson's wolves.
He alone was responsible. His indiscretion in overfilling the stove had
caused the fire, and in that other moment--when he might have snatched
up more than the bearskin--his mind had failed to act.

In the s