How he would
have gloried to burn there in the forest, and for a million years in the dark
beyond, to save the girl!
He goaded the horse. Then he looked back.
Through the aisles of the forest he saw a strange, streaky, murky something
moving, alive, shifting up and down, never an instant the same. It must have
been the wind--the heat before the fire. He seemed to see through it, but
there was nothing beyond, only opaque, dim, mustering clouds. Hot puffs shot
forward into his face. His eyes smarted and stung. His ears hurt and were
growing deaf. The tumult was the rear of avalanches, of maelstroms, of rushing
seas, of the wreck of the uplands and the ruin of the earth. It grew to be so
great a roar that he no longer heard. There was only silence.
And he turned to face ahead. The stallion stretched low on a dead run; the
tips of the pines were bending before the wind; and Wildfire, the terrible
thing for which his horse was named, was leaping through the forest. But there
was no sound.
Ahead of Slone, down the aisles, low under the trees spreading over the
running King, floated swiftly some medium, like a transparent veil.
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