Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/182

 the warden helped him to place it, a burst of cheers and yells went up from the front of the house.

Into the driveway they came, two long parallel files of them, like fast travelling snakes, their striped bodies wriggling this way and that, the right-angled turn from the road like a fold in the monster's tails. On they came, the convicts, thirty to the file, their white faces flushed now with their run from the prison gates, their eyes bright with eagerness and excitement; on they came, the tramp of their feet, the clatter of the swinging buckets sounding dominantly over the cries that hailed them.

Varge sprang upon the ladder and began to climb. They had placed it in the driveway, its top resting against the eaves at the peak of the roof. A clattering file swung by below him, heading for the cistern at the warden's direction. As Varge reached the top, others were already on the ladder behind him, following him up.

He pulled himself to the roof, and, straddling the peak, edged his way along past the chimney to a position near the centre. A dry, blighting breath swept his face; a cloud of smoke, full of eddying sparks, closed down upon him and left him for an instant choked and gasping—then it cleared away, leaving only the blazing patches of shingles around him and the airless, furnace heat of the solid flame from the kitchen roof and the rear side of the house itself, now in fierce conflagration.

A striped form took its place behind him on the roof, another and another, back to where the head and shoulders of a man standing on the ladder protruded over the eaves—then he lost the line until it appeared again close by the cistern's edge beside the conservatory. Below, on the other side, on the lawn, was a sea of upturned,