For the first time came the horror of the thought that in such a fire as this people must have died.  It had swept upon them like a tidal wave, galloping the forests with the speed of a race horse, with only this thin line of rail leading to the freedom of life outside.  In places only a miracle could have made escape possible.  And here, where Nada had lived, with the pitch-wood forests crowding close, the fire must have burned most fiercely.  In this moment, when fear of the unspeakable set his heart trembling, his faith fastened itself grimly to the little old gray Missioner, Father John, in whose cabin Nada had taken refuge many months ago, when Jed Hawkins lay dead in the trail with his one-eyed face turned up to the thunder and lightning in the sky.  Father John, on that stormy night when he fled north, had promised to care for Nada, and in silence he breathed a prayer that the Missioner had saved her from the red death that had swept like an avalanche upon them.  He told himself it must be so.  He cried out the words aloud, and Peter heard him, and followed closer, so that his head touched his master’s leg as he walked.

But the fear was there.  From a spark it grew into a red-hot spot in Jolly Roger’s heart.  Twice in his own life he had raced against death in a forest fire.  But never had he seen a fire like this must have been.  All at once he seemed to hear the roar of it in his ears, the rolling thunder of the earth as it twisted in the cataclysm of flame, the hissing shriek of the flaming pitch-tops as they leapt in lightning fires against the smoke-smothered sky.  A few hours ago he had stood where Father John’s Cabin had been and the place was a ruin of char and ash.  If the fire had hemmed them in and they had not escaped—­

His voice cried out in sudden protest.

“It can’t be, Peter.  It can’t be!  They made the rail—­or the lake —­and we’ll find them in the settlements.  It couldn’t happen.  God wouldn’t let her die like that!”

He stopped, and stared into the moon-broken gloom on his left.  Something was there, fifty feet away, that drew him down through the muck which lay knee deep in the right-of-way ditch.  It was what was left of the cutter’s cabin, a clutter of burned logs, a wind scattered heap of ash.  Even there, within arm’s reach of the railroad, there had been no salvation from the fire.

He waded again through the muck of the ditch, and went on.  Mentally and physically he was fighting the ogre that was striving to achieve possession of his brain.  Over and over he repeated his faith that Nada and the Missioner had escaped and he would find them in the settlements.  Less than ever he thought of the law in these hours.  What happened to himself was of small importance now, if he could find Nada alive before the menace caught up with him from behind, or ambushed him ahead.  Yet the necessity of caution impinged itself upon him even in the recklessness of his determination to find her if he had to walk into the arms of the law that was hunting him.