LITMIR.BIZ

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without love, whomsoever he might be. You will be happier,” she concluded, “alone—with my respect and friendship, than with me and my contempt.”

      He did not press the matter further, but if ever a man had murder in his heart it was William Cecil Clayton, Lord Greystoke, when, a week later, Robert Canler drew up before the farmhouse in his purring six cylinder.

      A week passed; a tense, uneventful, but uncomfortable week for all the inmates of the little Wisconsin farmhouse.

      Canler was insistent that Jane marry him at once.

      At length she gave in from sheer loathing of the continued and hateful importuning.

      It was agreed that on the morrow Canler was to drive to town and bring back the license and a minister.

      Clayton had wanted to leave as soon as the plan was announced, but the girl’s tired, hopeless look kept him. He could not desert her.

      Something might happen yet, he tried to console himself by thinking. And in his heart, he knew that it would require but a tiny spark to turn his hatred for Canler into the blood lust of the killer.

      Early the next morning Canler set out for town.

      In the east smoke could be seen lying low over the forest, for a fire had been raging for a week not far from them, but the wind still lay in the west and no danger threatened them.

      About noon Jane started off for a walk. She would not let Clayton accompany her. She wanted to be alone, she said, and he respected her wishes.

      In the house Professor Porter and Mr. Philander were immersed in an absorbing discussion of some weighty scientific problem. Esmeralda dozed in the kitchen, and Clayton, heavy-eyed after a sleepless night, threw himself down upon the couch in the living room and soon dropped into a fitful slumber.

      To the east the black smoke clouds rose higher into the heavens, suddenly they eddied, and then commenced to drift rapidly toward the west.

      On and on they came. The inmates of the tenant house were gone, for it was market day, and none was there to see the rapid approach of the fiery demon.

      Soon the flames had spanned the road to the south and cut off Canler’s return. A little fluctuation of the wind now carried the path of the forest fire to the north, then blew back and the flames nearly stood still as though held in leash by some master hand.

      Suddenly, out of the northeast, a great black car came careening down the road.

      With a jolt it stopped before the cottage, and a black-haired giant leaped out to run up onto the porch. Without a pause he rushed into the house. On the couch lay Clayton. The man started in surprise, but with a bound was at the side of the sleeping man.

      Shaking him roughly by the shoulder, he cried:

      “My God, Clayton, are you all mad here? Don’t you know you are nearly surrounded by fire? Where is Miss Porter?”

      Clayton sprang to his feet. He did not recognize the man, but he understood the words and was upon the veranda in a bound.

      “Scott!” he cried, and then, dashing back into the house, “Jane! Jane! where are you?”

      In an instant Esmeralda, Professor Porter and Mr. Philander had joined the two men.

      “Where is Miss Jane?” cried Clayton, seizing Esmeralda by the shoulders and shaking her roughly.

      “Oh, Gaberelle, Mister Clayton, she done gone for a walk.”

      “Hasn’t she come back yet?” and, without waiting for a reply, Clayton dashed out into the yard, followed by the others. “Which way did she go?” cried the black-haired giant of Esmeralda.

      “Down that road,” cried the frightened woman, pointing toward the south where a mighty wall of roaring flames shut out the view.

      “Put these people in the other car,” shouted the stranger to Clayton. “I saw one as I drove up—and get them out of here by the north road.

      “Leave my car here. If I find Miss Porter we shall need it. If I don’t, no one will need it. Do as I say,” as Clayton hesitated, and then they saw the lithe figure bound away cross the clearing toward the northwest where the forest still stood, untouched by flame.

      In each rose the unaccountable feeling that a great responsibility had been raised from their shoulders; a kind of implicit confidence in the power of the stranger to save Jane if she could be saved.

      “Who was that?” asked Professor Porter.

      “I do not know,” replied Clayton. “He called me by name and he knew Jane, for he asked for her. And he called Esmeralda by name.”

      “There was something most startlingly familiar about him,” exclaimed Mr. Philander, “And yet, bless me, I know I never saw him before.”

      “Tut, tut!” cried Professor Porter. “Most remarkable! Who could it have been, and why do I feel that Jane is safe, now that he has set out in search of her?”

      “I can’t tell you, Professor,” said Clayton soberly, “but I know I have the same uncanny feeling.”

      “But come,” he cried, “we must get out of here ourselves, or we shall be shut off,” and the party hastened toward Clayton’s car.

      When Jane turned to retrace her steps homeward, she was alarmed to note how near the smoke of the forest fire seemed, and as she hastened onward her alarm became almost a panic when she perceived that the rushing flames were rapidly forcing their way between herself and the cottage.

      At length she was compelled to turn into the dense thicket and attempt to force her way to the west in an effort to circle around the flames and reach the house.

      In a short time the futility of her attempt became apparent and then her one hope lay in retracing her steps to the road and flying for her life to the south toward the town.

      The twenty minutes that it took her to regain the road was all that had been needed to cut off her retreat as effectually as her advance had been cut off before.

      A short run down the road brought her to a horrified stand, for there before her was another wall of flame. An arm of the main conflagration had shot out a half mile south of its parent to embrace this tiny strip of road in its implacable clutches.

      Jane knew that it was useless again to attempt to force her way through the undergrowth.

      She had tried it once, and failed. Now she realized that it would be but a matter of minutes ere the whole space between the north and the south would be a seething mass of billowing flames.

      Calmly the girl kneeled down in the dust of the roadway and prayed for strength to meet her fate bravely, and for the delivery of her father and her friends from death.

      Suddenly she heard her name being called aloud through the forest:

      “Jane! Jane Porter!” It rang strong and clear, but in a strange voice.

      “Here!” she called in reply. “Here! In the roadway!”

      Then through the branches of the trees she saw a figure swinging with the speed of a squirrel.

      A veering of the wind blew a cloud of smoke about them and she could no longer see the man who was speeding toward her, but suddenly she felt a great arm about her. Then she was lifted up, and she felt the rushing of the wind and the occasional brush of a branch as she was borne along.

      She opened her eyes.

      Far below her lay the undergrowth and the hard earth.

      About her was the waving foliage of the forest.

      From tree to tree swung the giant figure which bore her, and it seemed to Jane that she was living over in a dream the experience that had been hers in that far African jungle.

      Oh, if it were but the same man who had borne her so swiftly through the tangled verdure on that other day! but that was impossible!

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