The smoke, at first rising from the burning brakes, lodged among the tree-tops; then, meeting the humid night-air in the matted leaves, descended slowly.  Dick found himself nearly smothered when he had partly recovered from the spell-bound wonder of the demoniac fete.  The ground under his feet felt gratefully cool.  He bent down, and shudderingly laved his burning face in the inky water.  The sick man had slept more peacefully during the last half-hour.  He no longer breathed in gasping efforts; his sleep was unbroken by muttering or outcry.  But now he must be aroused.  He must be taken out of the circle of fire, for, sooner or later, the curling waves would lick downward from the dry vines above and scorch the mound.  How to get away?  The horses were long since gone.  They might be miles from the spot!  Dick touched the sleeping man, filled with a new suspense.  He breathed so softly, or did he breathe at all?

“For God’s sake, Mr. Jones, wake up!  We must go from here; the swamp is burning!”

“Eh—­who is it?  Where am I?  Was—­I dreaming?  I thought my boy was with me, and we were in the old home at Acredale.”

He lay quite still, staring upward with unseeing eyes.  Dick’s heart gave a great throb of grateful, devout thanksgiving.  The madness and fever were gone.

“You remember you were too worn out to go on, and Jack has gone to get food.  But the swamp has caught fire, and we must move away.”

Jones had risen to his elbow; then, with an exclamation that sounded like an oath, to his feet, gazing on the flaming specters rising and falling, enlarging and shrinking, among the black tracery of limbs and trunks.

“You ought to have waked me before,” Jones said, when he had swept the scene, with sane realization in his eye.  “I’m afraid we can never break through the fire.  It reaches a mile or more all about us, and I—­I am in no condition to move.  I feel as if I had been down months with illness.”

“But if you could eat something you would be able to move,” Dick ventured, cruelly hurt at the implied delinquency.

“Eat!” Jones held up one of the luckless torches that Dirk had lighted in a circle about the mound, and began to examine the ground.  “What is there to eat?  Stay!  By Heaven, I have it!  The bushes are filled with fluttering game.  There, see that! and that, and that!” As he spoke he had thrust the burning torch into a thick clump of bushes, dense and glistening as laurels, that looked like wild huckleberry.  The branches were laden with birds, and in a moment be had seized three or four partridges.

“What better do we need?  We have salt, water, and fire.  I’ll prepare them.  Do you keep your face well bathed, and heap up embers at the foot of that ash.”

Sure enough, sometimes hidden by billows of smoke, rising lazily among the burning bushes, Jones stripped the birds, spitted them on his bayonet, and, holding them in the hot coals, soon presented a well-browned portion to his companion.