t!
And now--that is, unless you kin save me an' prevent--it's 'bout time
for--"

His piteous and beseeching voice was interrupted by a sound that was
like the roar of wind coming across the lake. The trees overhead shook
their tangled branches. The blazing fire bent its flames as before a
blast. And something swept with a terrific, rushing noise about the
little camp and seemed to surround it entirely in a single moment of
time. Defago shook the clinging blankets from his body, turned towards
the woods behind, and with the same stumbling motion that had brought
him--was gone: gone, before anyone could move muscle to prevent him,
gone with an amazing, blundering swiftness that left no time to act. The
darkness positively swallowed him; and less than a dozen seconds later,
above the roar of the swaying trees and the shout of the sudden wind,
all three men, watching and listening with stricken hearts, heard a cry
that seemed to drop down upon them from a great height of sky and
distance--

"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of
fire ...!" then died away, into untold space and silence.

Dr. Cathcart--suddenly master of himself, and therefore of the
others--was just able to seize Hank violently by the arm as he tried to
dash headlong into the Bush.

"But I want ter know,--you!" shrieked the guide. "I want ter see! That
ain't him at all, but some--devil that's shunted into his place ...!"

Somehow or other--he admits he never quite knew how he accomplished
it--he managed to keep him in the tent and pacify him. The doctor,
apparently, had reached the stage where reaction had set in and allowed
his own innate force to conquer. Certainly he "managed" Hank admirably.
It was his nephew, however, hitherto so wonderfully controlled, who gave
him most cause for anxiety, for the cumulative strain had now produced a
condition of lachrymose hysteria which made it necessary to isolate him
upon a bed of boughs and blankets as far removed from Hank as was
possible under the circumstances.

And there he lay, as the watches of that haunted night passed over the
lonely camp, crying startled sentences, and fragments of sentences, into
the folds of his blanket. A quantity of gibberish about speed and height
and fire mingled oddly with biblical memories of the classroom. "People
with broken faces all on fire are coming at a most awful, awful, pace
towards the camp!" he would moan one minute; and the next w