s, and burning like the pit of Hell!" he exclaimed.
"And--what's that, under it? A man?"

He could not distinctly make out, so thick the foliage was. But it
seemed to him that, from under the jumbled wreckage of the blazing
machine, something protruded, something that suggested a human form,
horribly mangled.

"Here's where I go down this cliff, whatever happens!" decided Gabriel.
And, acting on the instant, he began swinging himself down from tree to
bush, from shrub to tuft of grass, clinging wherever handhold or
foothold offered, digging his stout boots into every cleft and cranny of
the precipice.

The height could not have been less than a hundred and fifty feet. By
dint of wonderful strength and agility, and at the momentary risk of
falling, himself, to almost certain death, Gabriel descended in less
than ten minutes. The last quarter of the distance he practically fell,
sliding at a tremendous rate, with boulders and loose earth cascading
all about him in a shower.

He landed close by the flaming ruin.

"Lucky this isn't in the autumn, in the dry season!" thought he, as he
approached. "If it were, this whole cliff-side, and the woods beyond,
would be a roaring furnace. Some forest-fire, all right, if the woods
weren't wet and full of sap!"

Parting the brush, he made his way as close to the car as the intense
heat would let him. The gasoline-tank, he understood, had burst with the
shock, and, taking fire, had wrapped the car in an Inferno of
unquenchable flame. Now, the woodwork was entirely gone; and of the
wheels, as the long machine lay there on its back, only a few blazing
spokes were left. The steel chassis and the engine were red-hot, twisted
and broken as though a giant hammer had smitten them on some Vulcanic
anvil.

"There's a few thousand dollars gone to the devil!" thought he. But his
mind did not dwell on this phase of the disaster. Still he was hoping,
against hope, that human life had not been dashed and roasted out, in
the wreck. And again he shouted, as he worked his way to the other side
of the machine--to the side which, seen from the cliff above, had seemed
to show him that inert and mangled body.

All at once he stopped short, shielding his face with his hands, against
the blaze.

"Good God!" he exclaimed; and involuntarily took off his cap, there in
the presence of death.

That the man _was_ dead, admitted of no question. Pinned under the
heavy, glowing mass of metal, his body m