y.

"Nellie!"

With a sharp cry he let her slip to the ground. All the pent-up agony,
rage, and mortification of the last hour broke from him in that
inarticulate outburst. Then, catching her hands again, he dragged her
to his level.

"Hear me!" he cried, disregarding the whirling smoke and the fiery
baptism that sprinkled them--"hear me! If you value your life, if you
value your soul, and if you do not want me to cast you to the beasts
like Jezebel of old, never--never take that accursed name again upon
your lips. Seek her--_her_? Yes! Seek her to tie her like a witch's
daughter of hell to that blazing tree!" He stopped. "Forgive me," he
said in a changed voice. "I'm mad, and forgetting myself and you.
Come."

Without noticing the expression of half savage delight that had passed
across her face, he lifted her in his arms.

"Which way are you going?" she asked, passing her hands vaguely across
his breast, as if to reassure herself of his identity.

"To our camp by the scarred tree," he replied.

"Not there, not there," she said, hurriedly. "I was driven from there
just now. I thought the fire began there until I came here."

Then it was as he feared. Obeying the same mysterious law that had
launched this fatal fire like a thunderbolt from the burning mountain
crest five miles away into the heart of the Carquinez Woods, it had
again leaped a mile beyond, and was hemming them between two narrowing
lines of fire. But Low was not daunted. Retracing his steps through the
blinding smoke, he strode off at right angles to the trail near the
point where he had entered the wood. It was the spot where he had first
lifted Nellie in his arms to carry her to the hidden spring. If any
recollection of it crossed his mind at that moment, it was only shown
in his redoubled energy. He did not glide through the thick underbrush,
as on that day, but seemed to take a savage pleasure in breaking
through it with sheer brute force. Once Teresa insisted upon relieving
him of the burden of her weight, but after a few steps she staggered
blindly against him, and would fain have recourse once more to his
strong arms. And so, alternately staggering, bending, crouching, or
bounding and crashing on, but always in one direction, they burst
through the jealous rampart, and came upon the sylvan haunt of the
hidden spring. The great angle of the half fallen tree acted as a
barrier to the wind and drifting smoke, and the cool spring sparkled
an