Slone untied his lasso and coiled the noose.  Almost within reach of the King!  One throw—­one sudden swerve—­and the King would go down.  Lucy would know only a stunning shock.  Slone’s heart broke.  Could he kill her—­crush that dear golden head?  He could not, yet he must!  He saw a long, curved, red welt on Lucy’s white shoulders.  What was that?  Had a branch lashed her?  Slone could not see her face.  She could not have been dead or in a faint, for she was riding the King, bound as she was!

Closer and closer drew Wildfire.  He seemed to go faster and faster as that wind of flame gained upon them.  The air was too thick to breathe.  It had an irresistible weight.  It pushed horses and riders onward in their flight—­straws on the crest of a cyclone.

Again Slone looked back and again the spectacle was different.  There was a white and golden fury of flame above, beautiful and blinding; and below, farther back, an inferno of glowing fire, black-streaked, with trembling, exploding puffs and streams of yellow smoke.  The aisles between the burning pines were smoky, murky caverns, moving and weird.  Slone saw fire shoot from the tree-tops down the trunks, and he saw fire shoot up the trunks, like trains of powder.  They exploded like huge rockets.  And along the forest floor leaped the little flames.  His eyes burned and blurred till all merged into a wide, pursuing storm too awful for the gaze of man.

Wildfire was running down the King.  The great gray had not lessened his speed, but he was breaking.  Slone felt a ghastly triumph when he began to whirl the noose of the lasso round his head.  Already he was within range.  But he held back his throw which meant the end of all.  And as he hesitated Wildfire suddenly whistled one shrieking blast.

Slone looked.  Ahead there was light through the forest!  Slone saw a white, open space of grass.  A park?  No—­the end of the forest!  Wildfire, like a demon, hurtled onward, with his smoothness of action gone, beginning to break, within a length of the King.

A cry escaped Slone—­a cry as silent as if there had been no deafening roar—­as wild as the race, and as terrible as the ruthless fire.  It was the cry of life—­instead of death.  Both Sage King and Wildfire would beat the flame.

Then, with the open just ahead, Slone felt a wave of hot wind rolling over him.  He saw the lashing tongues of flame above him in the pines.  The storm had caught him.  It forged ahead.  He was riding under a canopy of fire.  Burning pine cones, like torches, dropped all around him.  He had a terrible blank sense of weight, of suffocation, of the air turning to fire.

Then Wildfire, with his nose at Sage King’s flank, flashed out of the pines into the open.  Slone saw a grassy wide reach inclining gently toward a dark break in the ground with crags rising sheer above it, and to the right a great open space.

Slone felt that clear air as the breath of deliverance.  His reeling sense righted.  There—­the King ran, blindly going to his death.  Wildfire was breaking fast.  His momentum carried him.  He was almost done.