Joy, agony, terror in lightning-swift turns, paralyzed Slone.  But Wildfire lunged out on the run.

Sage King reared in fright, came down to plunge away, and with a magnificent leap cleared the line of fire.

Slone, more from habit than thought, sat close in the saddle.  A few of Wildfire’s lengthening strides, quickened Slone’s blood.  Then Creech moved, also awaking from a stupefying surprise, and he snatched up a gun and fired.  Slone saw the spurts of red, the puffs of white.  But he heard nothing.  The torrent of his changed blood, burning and terrible, filled his ears with hate and death.

He guided the running stallion.  In a few tremendous strides Wildfire struck Creech, and Slone had one glimpse of an awful face.  The impact was terrific.  Creech went hurtling through the air, limp and broken, to go down upon a rock, his skull cracking like a melon.

The horse leaped over the body and the stone, and beyond he leaped the line of burning grass.

Slone saw the King running into the forest.  He saw poor Lucy’s white body swinging with the horse’s motion.  One glance showed the great gray to be running wild.  Then the hate and passion cleared away, leaving suspense and terror.

Wildfire reached the pines.  There down the open aisles between the black trees ran the fleet gray racer.  Wildfire saw him and snorted.  The King was a hundred yards to the fore.

“Wildfire—­it’s come—­the race—­the race!” called Slone.  But he could not hear his own call.  There was a roar overhead, heavy, almost deafening.  The wind! the wind!  Yet that roar did not deaden a strange, shrieking crack somewhere behind.  Wildfire leaped in fright.  Slone turned.  Fire had run up a pine-tree, which exploded as if the trunk were powder!

“My god!  A race with fire! . . .  Lucy!  Lucy!”

In that poignant cry Slone uttered his realization of the strange fate that had waited for the inevitable race between Wildfire and the King; he uttered his despairing love for Lucy, and his acceptance of death for her and himself.  No horse could outrun wind-driven fire in a dry pine forest.  Slone had no hope of that.  How perfectly fate and time and place and horses, himself and his sweetheart, had met!  Slone damned Joel Creech’s insane soul to everlasting torment.  To think—­to think his idiotic and wild threat had come true—­and come true with a gale in the pine-tops!  Slone grew old at the thought, and the fact seemed to be a dream.  But the dry, pine-scented air made breathing hard; the gray racer, carrying that slender, half-naked form, white in the forest shade, lengthened into his fleet and beautiful stride; the motion of Wildfire, so easy, so smooth, so swift, and the fierce reach of his head shooting forward—­all these proved that it was no dream.

Tense questions pierced the dark chaos of Slone’s mind—­what could he do?  Run the King down!  Make ’him kill Lucy!  Save her from horrible death by fire!