The clearing was transformed into an oscillating arena of lurid light that eclipsed the stars and drove the moon pallid. The front wall supporting the belfry was last to go. Its superstructure half devoured, the belfry itself clung on fearfully askew, like a man skidded from a high cliff, hanging by a single root awaiting his strength to ebb. The pitiless flames duelled, raged and fought ferociously over their prey of fire-bitten logs that strove vainly to rise, only to be stricken, again to fall back, casting groans to the spectral night. They turned and stirred and crawled in agony, like the maimed half dead.
Suddenly the sheet of flame scathing the front wall fell back again for another assault and, taking it thrice with blasting, mighty tongues, took the key-log to the belfry for its own. And as it went the belfry trembled and quaked on the threshold of its doom. For a minute it hung there like a mortal thing, having eyes to see down into the white-hot pit--fearing something there that this grim-hell clasped to its red breast, vauntingly and gloatingly. Something more scathing, more horrifying, more contaminating than the mere scourge of molten annihilation.
The fire gnawed its trembling support away, and the belfry staggered, tottered and succumbed.
As it hurtled headlong downward, the bell shrieked out across the night,--a throttled, frenzied medley of fear-stricken mad utterances, and tumbled over and over, and went screaming into the ghost-man's casket of destruction. And roundabout them fluted leaves of flame grew. And the fire made flowers that covered them over.
Incessantly the lurid lustre of the embers died down, only to leap pulsing up anew, like the rhyming flush of heat lightning playing behind pearly clouds. As the dull red flung its cycle outward from the vermilion pyre of the doomed church, it caught in bold, startling relief, the mask of a human visage. The russet of the dancing, dying flames touched this pale, marcid face with a florid, sanguine flush. Only his peaked, lupine features were visible against the purple green of the laurel. He was there in the beginning, and he meant to stay there to the end. He meant to keep his adder-like eyes charm-fixed and unmoved upon this death pile, until its face was gray and cold. He meant to see that no treacherous, human skeleton pushed up out of the yielding ashes and stalked abroad. There was reverence and infinite tenderness in his fondling of the rifle Buddy now hugged in his lap.