so rich, but it meant all the world to grandpa and me. It would have paid the debt and the taxes, and have left us enough to live on for several months!"

"Have I acted as if it seemed a silly trifle to me?" "Indeed you have not. Forgive me. You have frozen yourself and stayed awake all night to help," she sobbed on brokenly, "but what has been the use? The crop is killed. There's nothing else to be done but let it go on and die. I have fought and lost-lost everything."

"Did your grandfather hoe the fire line?" he abruptly asked.

"Yes," she answered, looking up at him dispiritedly, wondering how he could think of so foreign a thing at such a time.

"On both sides of your fences? Be sure of your answer, dead sure, Laurie."

"Both sides. Sat on a soap box and hoed everything he could reach."

"Stay here, please. Do just as I tell you now. Stay here."

"Where are you going?" she asked anxiously, for he was leaving her.

"Going to see," he called back.

When he was gone, she sat down literally in the dust with her hands clenched in her lap. She was thinking, thinking. How she had pruned, and worked and sprayed and raked and tended, all to no end but this last tragic consummation of ruin! And the bitter irony of the thought that if the pickers had only come two days before, as they so easily might have done, all would have been saved! On such grotesquely small And what was to happen about the furniture? Now that the mortgage could not

things do futures hinge.

possibly be paid, Selig owned it. She remembered the greedy glitter of his eyes when they had appraised the Chippendale table, and when he had gouged his thumb testingly into the ebony frame of the mirror. And, oh, her poor, poor grandfather! To one so old, so unbusiness-like, so frantically proud, foreclosure would mean disgrace and death. She well knew it.

It was at this juncture in her frenzied musings that there arrestingly came to her nostrils the pungently aromatic odor of a new substance burning, not dead wood and dead grasses, but wood with sap in it, grass and weeds with live juices in it-a smarting, contraband smell of something burning that had no business to burn!

Next, she scrambled to her feet in an access of terror, for the whole heavens leaped into blaze, and the devastating roar of a general conflagration was all around her. There was fire on every side. Her little grove lay in two huge arms of it, lay unharmed, like a kitten basking before a raging hearth.

And now Roycroft came running up to her from an entirely different point of the compass to the one at which he had disappeared.

"It is your fields that have caught!" she cried, anguished for him.

"That is what they have," he answered, his breath coming in jerks.

"Your fields, your pasture grass, your young trees, your big pines! But never from my fires. Someone must have done it!"

"Undoubtedly. Someone must have done it!" he

answered.

In that unpoliced district it was no unheard-of thing for cattlemen illicitly to fire a tract in order to start

new grass. And this criminal vandalism usually occurred by night. It was no safe trick to risk by day.

"How can you take it so calmly?" she raged. “Get after him. Do something. Identify him. Be able to have him arrested. It is a state's prison offense."

"But no one saw him do it," pointed out Roycroft imperturbably.

"Oh, look! How terrible!" Laurie shuddered, seeing snakes of fire writhe up several pines and turn them into blazing torches. "Your grove will go! Your lovely, lovely house will go!"

"No," answered he, laughing excitedly. "I figured on that. You see the fires are burning towards each other. They will meet in the middle and put each other out."

"You figured on that?" she echoed, astounded. "Then it was you who-you who—"

"Come, have a look at the mercury," he cheerfully advised. He jubilantly took her elbow and piloted her to the thermometer. "There! Good work, by Jove! Twenty-eight and going up!"

"What have you done! What have you done!" she disconsolately wailed, not able to take her mind from the sacrificial holocaust.

"Warmed things," he replied, comfortably. "Come, sit down with me on the porch steps, Miss Laurie, while we watch Rome burn. My fires have not half started, my word for it!"

And he was right. Each moment the heat and roar increased. Had not The McAllister had his head swathed in woolens, and possessed a private glare in his open grate, he most certainly would have been routed out. As it was he slept serenely.

Roycroft took off his mackinaw as superflous. As

for the thermometer, he no longer bothered about it. He and the girl sat and watched silently. Talking would have been too much of a bellowing task to undertake, anyhow.

Worn out by opposing conflicts, dulled by the noise and smoke, the girl finally dropped asleep, unaware of it, knowing only that the wide fire seemed to narrow to a dancing thread and then blow out in the peaceful darkness of unremembered dreams.

When she awoke it was to a consciousness first of buttons and a watch chain surprisingly near her face; next she realized that her pillow, though warm and comfortable, was not of the usual downy consistency; finally she saw a gray sky above her in lieu of a bedroom roof. That made her sit up with a remembering haste.

"Have I been asleep?" she confusedly asked.

"Very probably," he answered with extreme courtesy of doubt, considering that he had held her for an hour and that his mackinaw was still folded around her.

"Oh, my goodness!" she murmured, swaying to her feet and backing to a correct conventional distance. "I am sure I am very much obliged to you for-" but the real indebtedness was too heavy and awful to mention-"obliged to you for your coat," she ended, red but polite.

"You are entirely welcome," he answered, snatching after his watch which in the scramble had been jerked from his pocket.

"I hope I didn't hurt it," she mentioned, trying to tuck her hair neatly away under her cap again. If it was going to play sneak thief it had better be confined.

"You cannot hurt this turnip," he replied. His

limber language proved that it had humanized him considerably to be up all night. He at once examined the miniature. "The only valuable thing about it is this picture of my mother."

"Your mother," exclaimed the girl, craftily covering up her vehemence by adding composedly, "is very young looking."

"Young looking? My word!" he exclaimed, surveying the picture with all of a son's utter disbelief in a parent's youth.

While he was engaged in winding and otherwise cosseting his timepiece, she took a step forward and examined the surrounding landscape, living over again the battle of the night. Through the gray of the dawn she saw that her fruit hung practically uninjured. Down the rows where the woodpiles so long had stood there were now but a hundred heaps of ashes. She forced her gaze to travel farther, her soul shrinking from what she knew she would see. And she saw itRoycroft's fields lying in black waste, the tender nursery stock charred to death, some pine stumps still smoldering and burning to tell the tale.

In mute anguish she turned and looked at the man who had done so much for her. Her eyes filled with tears.

"What now, Miss Laurie?" he asked, rising and coming towards her. "Believe me, you ought to be smiling, for your crop is safe as the Bank of England." "I was thinking of the cost," she answered. "How can I ever thank you?"

"By letting me be present when that fox of a Selig tries to underpay you," he answered, unceremoniously departing to his boat.

He was brave enough to face anything but gratitude.