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 eyeballs burned in dry sockets. All the surface moisture evaporated out of a man at the touch of that fiery hurricane, which whistled through the greasewood, sowing smoking twigs for the hasty harvest of flame.

Juan's great concern had come suddenly to center on himself. Grave peril had leaped up out of that lazy cloud of brushwood smoke, beside which Don Geronimo's was scarcely greater. Across the ridge of the mountain Juan believed he would be safe from this driving storm of fire, which he calculated would spend itself for want of fuel when it reached the top. Don Geronimo's captors would have fled to safety; there would be nobody on the mountain top for him to rescue but himself, and from the way things looked and felt at that moment, he would have quite enough to do to accomplish that.

The fire was more than half way up the mountain when Juan's horse scrambled up the last steep to the top. Looking back, Juan saw the forerunning surge of flame leaping from bush to bush, thicket to thicket, in a wild, avid, happy madness, a greedy delight of destruction, it seemed. Far below as the smoke broke for an instant and showed him the yellow-brown meadow of wild oats, he saw a man running with a brand of fire. It was only a glimpse, sharp, clear, distinct; the trailing torch dragging in the grass as the man ran, the quick-springing flame that followed.

There was no security on the summit at that