care of her, but he could not even defend himself.  He had told her that he would die to save her any suffering, but, before her, he had writhed and gasped helplessly under the weight of another man’s hand, his open hand, not even a fist....  No after act of his could efface from Sheila’s memory that picture of his ignominy.  She had seen him twisted and bent and beaten and thrown away.  His father had triumphantly returned to reassure and comfort her for the insult of a boy’s impertinence.  Would Sheila defend him?  Would she understand?  Or would she not be justified in contemptuous laughter at his pretensions?

Such thoughts—­less like thoughts, however, than like fiery fever fits—­twisted and scorched Dickie’s mind as he lay there.  They burnt into him wounds that for years throbbed slowly into scars.

At noon the heat of his room became even more intolerable than his thoughts.  His head beat with pain.  He was bathed in sweat, weak and trembling.  He dragged himself up, went to his washstand, and dipped his wincing face into the warmish, stale water.  His lips felt cracked and dry and swollen.  In the wavy mirror he saw a distorted image of his face, with its heavy eyes, scattered hair, and the darkening marks of his father’s blows, punctuated by the scarlet scratches of the emerald.  He dried his face, loosened his collar, and, gasping for air, came out into the narrow hall.

The hotel was very still.  He hurried through it, his face bent, and went by the back way to the saloon.  At this hour Sheila was asleep.  Carthy would be alone in The Aura and there would be few, if any, customers.  Dickie found the place cool and quiet and empty, shuttered from the sun, the air stirred by electric fans.  Carthy dozed in his chair behind the bar.  He gave Dickie his order, somnambulantly.  Dickie took it off to a dim corner and drank with the thirst of a wounded beast.

Three or four hours later he staggered back to his room.  A thunderstorm was rumbling and flashing down from the mountains to the north.  The window was purple-black, and a storm wind blew the dirty curtains, straight and steady, into the room.  The cool wind tasted and smelt of hot dust.  Dickie felt his dazed way to the bed and steadied himself into a sitting posture.  With infinite difficulty he rolled and lighted a cigarette, drew at it, took it out, tried to put it again between his lips, and fell over on his back, his arm trailing over the edge of the bed.  The lighted cigarette slipped from his fingers to the ragged strip of matting.  Dickie lay there, breathing heavily and regularly in a drunken and exhausted sleep.

A vivid, flickering pain in his arm woke him.  He thought for an instant that he must have died and dropped straight into Hell.  The wind still blew in upon him, but it blew fire against him.  Above him there was a heavy panoply of smoke.  His bedclothes were burning, his sleeve was on fire.  The boards of his floor cracked and snapped in regiments of flame.  He got up, still in a half stupor, plunged his arm into the water pitcher, saw, with a startled oath, that the woodwork about his door was blazing in long tongues of fire which leaped up into the rafters of the roof.  His brain began to telegraph its messages ... the hotel was on fire.  He could not imagine what had started it.  He remembered Sheila.