Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/200

 dramatic. The mounting flames singed the down from Lonely's bare legs. While the Apaches and the would-be rescuers still fought desperately, hand to hand, the flames began to lick cruelly up at the now terrified boy's trousers-legs. He shouted and called in vain. Equally in vain he strained and pulled at the stake to which he had been too well tied.

Then, with a sudden sickening pang, the thought came to him that he was to die there, that in another minute all his life would be blotted out and he would have to stand before the Judgment Seat of his Maker with all his great misdeeds on his head.

From his earliest childhood his mental conception of this Judgment Seat had been a grimly concrete one. It was a great black oak chair, which stood high above the sky-line, like a sombrely towering island above the horizon, and on each side of it rose two great desks of black oak, on which stood two ledgers bound in red leather. At each of these open ledgers, on a high black stool through the legs of which clouds came and went, sat a stern-faced angel with a goose-quill pen, calmly turning over pages and writing down little