Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/192

 nearer; saw the gray-green smoke rising in growing volume above the red flame that mounted and wavered and whipped in the wind; saw the scuffing feet of Findlay and his man as they pushed at the thick wagon-tongue, peering through the smoke and flame to guide the load precisely.

All this he saw, although his eyes were blinded in the obscuration of a blackness deeper than the deepest night, and his limbs lay heavy, helpless, immovable as if weighted with chains.

Perhaps the spirit, apart from his body save by some thin filament that soon must dissolve, hovered there cognizant of all this striving, this cruel determination, to have an insignificant human life. Whatever it was, Edgar Barrett saw without eyes, heard without ears, but did not feel again the pain of his wound or the dread of death.

Then away from this immediate scene the sentinel seemed to speed, discovering one riding swiftly, a coiled rope swinging at the saddle-horn, dust of the fleet horse gray in the green plain.

Nearer the rider came, yet there seemed a mist before his face. Barrett was conscious of a struggle to identify the rider, as a man rebels and fights to break through the inconsistencies of a dream, knowing that it is nothing more than a dream, and turns in relief, though still asleep, when he has thrown off the overriding terror of its shadow.

Dan Gustin, said that living sense that struggled in the wounded man's soul to pierce the mist before the rider's face; Dan Gustin, the man logically to be ex-