"Give me your hand, Bastion," cried Larry. "I'll bring your child back, if I find her, though, of course, to serve some selfish end!"
Remorsefully Bastion looked at the man he felt he had wronged, and was silent.
In a moment Larry, dashing spurs to his horse, was making straight for the roaring furnace. Women screamed.
"It's madness! It's certain death!" declared selectors standing by, who knew all that lay beyond that flaming cordon. "If he gets through that wall of fire, the smoke 'll smother him."
Yellow-haired Saxon and gleaming chestnut were in an instant lost to sight. One wild leap! and the impenetrable wall of smoke closed, as though a thick curtain had fallen behind them.
With lips compressed, eyes half-shut, peering through the resinous canopy, the daring rider dashed. The smell of fire was on him and his horse. On all sides trees crashed, boughs were falling from blazing tree-tops. Horribly, as here and there they found vent at the top, the fires roared through the hollow funnels of the trees.
Now reining horse on haunches, the rider escaped destruction from the six-foot trunk hurled across his path, then, dashing spur at critical moment, he leaped a tree-head ere the dust of its fall had arisen. Here to right to round the base of the gum that was falling to left, there to left to escape the forked tree-top descending upon him.
Blinded, gasping, smothering, he reels in the saddle. His legs mechanically hold him in his seat, as, when life is extinct, the ring-tailed 'possum clings by its tail to the bough.
"Into the jaws of death,
Into the mouth of hell,"
rode the O'Lochlan.
