is
crisis as always. She shook off his touch with repugnance and crouched
close to the wall, as near as she could get to her child.

Then there passed a few of those terrible moments that are as nothing
and as a lifetime crowded with agony to the human being. The wind poured
noisily through the canon, bending before its blast the swaying trees,
but even louder than the wind was the roar of the conquering fire that
now illuminated all the hillside like day and revealed the little
figures of impotent men and women, who ran this way and that confusedly,
helplessly, crying and shouting. The center of the great house was a
solid pillar of flame, and the fire was eating its way on either side
into the wings. The wing where the child slept rose from the canon like
a walled castle, impregnable--Adelle might remember that "Boy" had
chosen these rooms in the remote corner of the house, fascinated by
their lofty perch over the deep canon. And there, at the bottom of the
wall that she had built, the mother clung, helpless, beyond reach of her
child.

A man ran out on the parapet of the terrace past Adelle. He stopped
where the parapet touched the sheer wall of the building, looked up at
the burning house which cast out great waves of heat, knocked off his
shoes, threw down his coat, and dove as it seemed into space. She knew
it was Clark, the stone mason. People crowded around Adelle and leaned
over the parapet to see what had become of him. They shouted--"See him!
There! There!"--pointing, as the wreaths of smoke rose and revealed the
man's dark figure clinging to the wall, creeping forward, walking, as it
were, on nothing in space. With fingers and toes he stuck himself like a
leech to the broken surfaces of the rock wall, feeling for the cracks
and crannies, the stone edgings, the little pockets in the masonry that
he himself had laid. He climbed upwards in a zigzag, slowly, steadily,
groping above his head for the next clutch, clinging, crawling like a
spider over the surface of sheer rock. As he rose foot by foot he became
clearly visible in the red light of the flames, a dark shadow stretched
against the blank surface above the gulf. The Scotch foreman said,--

"He's crazy--he can't skin that wall!"

Adelle knew that he was speaking of the stone mason; she knew that Clark
was daring the impossible to get at her child, to save her "Boy." She
felt in every fiber of her body the strain of that feat--the clinging,
creeping pr