ess yuh can't. Flames don't travel like that--huh?"

The light had moved suddenly, so that it seemed to jump clean away from
the field of vision embraced by the glasses. I had a little trouble in
picking it up again. I had to take down the glasses and look; and then I
left them down and watched the light with my naked, lying eyes. They did
lie; they must have. They said that a camp fire had abruptly picked itself
up bodily and was slipping rapidly as a speeding automobile up a bare
white slide of rock so steep that a mountain goat would give one glance
and hunt up an easier trail. All my life I have had intimate acquaintance
with camp fires; I have eaten with them, slept with them, coaxed them in
storm, watched them from afar. I thought I knew all their tricks, all
their treacheries. I have seen apparently cold ashes blow red quite
unexpectedly and fire grass and bushes and go racing away,--I have fought
them then with whatever came to hand.

I admit that an odd, prickly sensation at the base of my scalp annoyed me
while I watched this fire race up the slope and leave no red trail behind
it. Then it disappeared, blinked out again. I opened my mouth to call
Casey's attention to it--though I felt that he was watching it with that
steady, squinting stare of his that never seems to wink or waver for a
second--but there it was again, come to a stop just under the crest of the
mountain where the white slide was topped by a black rim capped with
bleak, bare rock like a crude skullcap on Tippipah. The fire flared,
dimmed, burned bright again, as though some one had piled on dry brush. I
caught up the glasses and watched the light for a full minute. They were
good glasses,--I ought to have seen the flicker of flames; but I did not.
Just the reddish yellow glow and no more.

"Must be fox fire," I said, feeling impatient because that did not satisfy
me at all, but having no other explanation that I could think of handy.
"I've seen wonderful exhibitions of it in low, swampy ground--"

Casey spat into the dark. "I never heard of nobody boggin' down, up there
on Tippipah." He put his cold pipe in his mouth, removed it and gestured
with it toward the light. "I've seen jack-o'-lanterns myself. You know
darn well that ain't it; not up on them rocks, dry as a bone. A minute ago
you said it was lightnin' burnin' a yucca. Why don't yuh come out in the
open, an' say you don't _know_? Mebby you'll come closer to believin' what
I told yuh a