In a flash the revolvers covered the cowering figure of the giant, who, prone upon his knees, was now raving, gibbering, praying, calling upon long-forgotten saints to save him from this sight, "_O Santa Maria! O Purissima! O Madre de Dios!_" he moaned, wringing his hands and shivering as though stricken with an ague.

He writhed among the leaves, his eyes fixed only upon that ghastly shape which lay before him.
There, in the ashes of the dead fire, as though embalmed, as though alive, as though lingering to accuse and to convict, lay the body of Greathouse, the missing man.

Not merely a charred, incinerated mass, the figure lay in the full appearance of life, a cast of the actual man, moulded with fineness from the white ashes of the fire! Not a feature, not a limb, not a fragment of clothing was left undestroyed; yet none the less here, stretched across the bed of the burned-out fire, with face upturned, with one arm doubled beneath the head and the other with clinched hand outflung, lay the image, the counterpart, nay, the identity of the man they sought! It was a death mask, wrought by the pity of the destroying flames.

These winds, this sky, the air, the rain, all had spared and left it here in accusation most terrible, in evidence unparalleled, incredibly yet irresistibly true! Franklin felt his heart stop as he looked upon this sight, and Curly's face grew pale beneath its tan.

They gazed for a moment quietly, then Curly sighed and stepped back.