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A tall, sallow, emaciated man he was, with cheek-bones high and sharp as an American Indian's, and straight black hair. He looked like a wooden image of Mephistopheles, carved with a jack-knife. 'Who are you? The words seemed to come, not from the gravedigger's mouth, but from those piles of lamp-blacked coffins which were searing my eyes through four feet of graveyard earth.

Wake, Rose! Wake, pretty Rose! Queenly Rose, awake! Wake precious, virgin Rose! Squeal! scratch! bite! Claw those wicked hands descending into your pure bed! Spring like spotless maiden aroused to find ravisher at her couch! Spring, Rose, spring! Squawking news of outrage to all the house, bound wildly, Rose, about this room that else you shall not see until through searing perils you have passed!

Every cinch-ring was searing hot, even the wood and leather burned him, and as he threw on the packs he lifted one foot after the other in a devil's dance over the hot sands. It was hot even for Death Valley, the hottest place in North America, but there was no use in waiting for it to cool.

He stood wholly motionless for a space of almost a minute, as if listening. The heat back of his eyes was more intense now. The red coals were about to burst into flame. All the blood of his huge body seemed to be collecting there, searing his brain. The moon was no longer white in the sky. It had turned a fiery red. The stars were red too, all of them more red than the Star of War.

He recalled with an aching heart the swift look of fear that had leapt into her eyes during that long moment before she had lost consciousness, and the memory of it went with him, searing cruelly, as he tramped up and down in restless anxiety that would not allow him to keep still. To see that look in her eyes again would be more than he could endure.

"I may have." "Did she see him?" Lucas demanded again, the heavy lines of hatred and jealousy searing his face. "No credit to you if she did not. You accomplish singularly little to harass M. de Mar in his love-making. You deserve that she should have seen him. But, as a matter of fact, she did not. She was in the chapel with madame." "What happened?"

After a keen reconnoissance from the safe seclusion of a clump of young pines Searing ran lightly across a field and through an orchard to a small structure which stood apart from the other farm buildings, on a slight elevation. This he thought would enable him to overlook a large scope of country in the direction that he supposed the enemy to have taken in withdrawing.

Around it was one unbroken ring of boiling, exploding water water billowing upward with searing, blinding bursts of superheated steam, or being hurled bodily in all directions in solid masses by the cataclysmic forces being released by the embattled fishes of the greater deeps.

The stocks stood in the open under the full glare of the tropical sun, and its blistering rays streamed down upon that mangled, bleeding back until he felt as if flames of fire were searing it. And, soon, to this was added a torment still more unspeakable. Flies, the cruel flies of the Antilles, drawn by the scent of blood, descended in a cloud upon him.

When the first slanting rays of the new-risen sun reached him, they shed their light upon a man on whom physical hardship had laid its searing fingers heavily. His face had a ten days' growth of hair upon it, and was gaunt and haggard, like the rest of him. His clothes hung about him loosely, and were torn and soiled and ragged.