Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/101

100 over to the fireplace where he had his fire ready laid and looked closely at what he had picked up in the failing light. It was the thin match, intact. Pete's grinding, angry heel had only rolled her about in the dirt. Her body was wrenched—her poor, pitiful little body, thin and crooked—but there had been something of stiffness in that disfiguring brown streak which she had inherited from being too near the bark.

The thin match summoned up all her resolution. The time had come for her to fulfil her destiny

Against his broken, begrimed fragment of the box-side, Pete scraped the crazy, splintered, wobbly, thin match. A bright, steady little flame sprang up at him. Not breathing, his aching hands laboriously cupped, he reached for the under side of the fire.

The thin match slipped from between his numbed fingers and fell, but she landed just within the fireplace. Exactly above her hung a fragment of oily pine bark. With her last expiring fragment of will, the thin match, now two-thirds burned away, squeezed a thin trickle of yellow flame up until it touched the very tip of the fringed edge of that piece of pine bark. There was a fearful instant of suspense; then—then—a thin and growing little blaze began to run up the bark-splinter's edge; the fire caught and roared up the stone chimney. Pete wept, crouching there benumbed, his great body in the ungainly furs sagging down almost against the blaze under the stress of this reaction.

slither of tearing wood came from the other side of the hut. Pete turned his head dully. The lynx had thrust an entire foreleg through into the hut; the great head with its staring, inhuman yellow eyes was pushing through. Peter saw the foamy slaver drip from the snarling mouth.

Every joint protesting, aching in all his bones, Pete reached across to the bunk for the rifle. His jaw set, and he dragged himself to his feet. He took four steps across the hut, and thrust the muzzle of the rifle against the lynx's forehead between the great, staring eyes. A shattering roar shook the solid hut, and, dropping his rifle, Pete staggered back to the life-giving blaze.