Suddenly the sheet of flame scathing the front wall fell back again for another a.s.sault and, taking it thrice with blasting, mighty tongues, took the key-log to the belfry for its own. And as it went the belfry trembled and quaked on the threshold of its doom. For a minute it hung there like a mortal thing, having eyes to see down into the white-hot pit--fearing something there that this grim-h.e.l.l clasped to its red breast, vauntingly and gloatingly. Something more scathing, more horrifying, more contaminating than the mere scourge of molten annihilation.

The fire gnawed its trembling support away, and the belfry staggered, tottered and succ.u.mbed.

As it hurtled headlong downward, the bell shrieked out across the night,--a throttled, frenzied medley of fear-stricken mad utterances, and tumbled over and over, and went screaming into the ghost-man's casket of destruction. And roundabout them fluted leaves of flame grew.

And the fire made flowers that covered them over.

Incessantly the lurid l.u.s.tre of the embers died down, only to leap pulsing up anew, like the rhyming flush of heat lightning playing behind pearly clouds. As the dull red flung its cycle outward from the vermilion pyre of the doomed church, it caught in bold, startling relief, the mask of a human visage. The russet of the dancing, dying flames touched this pale, marcid face with a florid, sanguine flush.

Only his peaked, lupine features were visible against the purple green of the laurel. He was there in the beginning, and he meant to stay there to the end. He meant to keep his adder-like eyes charm-fixed and unmoved upon this death pile, until its face was gray and cold. He meant to see that no treacherous, human skeleton pushed up out of the yielding ashes and stalked abroad. There was reverence and infinite tenderness in his fondling of the rifle Buddy now hugged in his lap.

His dead father's gun. His heritage that naught would part, until the epoch, that came to still his little hardened heart, stepped between them. As the fire smouldered, thus did the boy's eyes smoulder, while he watched audaciously and fixedly; for deep down in his warped, puerile soul the curtained joy of revenge was a-sputter. Now his weazened countenance broke with a satanic grin, ill to behold, the while he mumbled things to himself.

"I 'low th' ol' Scratch ez a pickin' em, an' a spearin' em, an' a humpin' em 'roun' down below 'bout now--leastways I'll see his bones burn up, I will," he muttered in sibilant, soul-deep glee.

Like a luscious, esculent morsel he rolled the words over and over. The sound of these disjointed phrases spelled happiness to his soul.

"I'll see his bones burn--he cyan't c.u.m back ef I burn his bones all up--th' ol' Scratch'll have t' keep em, ef I burn his bones up--he'll have t' keep em." The jungled hills, a-hush, were ominously empty of night voices.

And all the soft-footed creatures of the wild crouched fear-crazed in their lairs, and peered tremblingly out at this fire-swept, fearful night. A furtive, fleeing wind, ocean-bound, whipped the slatternly dawn clouds away from the wan face of a vigilant moon. Its haggard visage looked pityingly down upon a boy-heart clasping a rifle to his breast like a brother, his dream-dizzied head, pillowed upon the soughing bosom of a wilderness world--fast asleep.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

GOLIATH'S BRIDE THE APOSTLE ON h.e.l.lSFORK A GHOST'S VENGEANCE THE REDEMPTION OF ZACK McCOY MR. HARTEM'S SPECULATION