Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/343

 She didn't know her father was an old cormorant. She'll need me now," he panted, forgetting everything but that the girl he loved would now be a crushed and broken flower, prideless, disillusioned, needing only him. "She'll want me. . . she'll want me something awful!" he perceived eagerly, with all a lover's reviving faith.

Occasionally as he climbed, he glanced backward at that lurid sea of flames, a vast, yellow world blazing in the middle of night, and shuddered each time he looked, for his capacity to feel emotions was coming back to him once more. Newly impelled by these and by tenderer ones which kindled momently, he resumed, after each pause, his upward climb, more breathless than before, naturally unaware that some ten minutes earlier, say about the time when he was lifting the the body of Hulda Salzberg, a coupé had rolled madly down the roadway from Humboldt House to the town.

Daring desperately the very edge of the advancing wall of flames, this car reached the courthouse square, dashed upon the curb, bounded recklessly across the lawn and brought up quivering at the very entrance to the jail. Jailor White heard a clanging of his bell and answered it in person. As he set his iron gate ajar, two female figures, cloaked from head to foot, crowded in upon him and the slenderer of them instantly and boldly turned back the cowl-like collar, revealing the pale, agitated features of Miss Billie Boland.

"Oh!" she moaned, and reached out excited hands to the jailor. "Your prisoners!" she clamored, then choked: "They'll burn—they'll burn like rats in a trap."

Jailor White, who had started and stared wonder