densely wooded hollow. Here were already some of the wider spaced
vanguards of that wood; but here, too, a peculiar circumstance
struck him. He was already descending the slight declivity; but
the distance, instead of deepening in leafy shadow, was actually
growing lighter. Here were the outskirting sentinels of the wood--
but the wood itself was gone! He spurred his horse through the
tall arch between the opened columns, and pulled up in amazement.

The wood, indeed, was gone, and the whole hollow filled with the
already black and dead stumps of the utterly consumed forest! More
than that, from the indications before him, the catastrophe must
have almost immediately followed his retreat from the hollow on the
preceding night. It was evident that the fire had leaped the
intervening shoulder of the spur in one of the unaccountable, but
by no means rare, phenomena of this kind of disaster. The circling
heights around were yet untouched; only the hollow, and the ledge
of rock against which they had blundered with their horses when
they were seeking the mysterious window in last evening's darkness,
were calcined and destroyed. He dismounted and climbed the ledge,
still warm from the spent fire. A large mass of grayish outcrop
had evidently been the focus of the furnace blast of heat which
must have raged for hours in this spot. He was skirting its
crumbling debris when he started suddenly at a discovery which made
everything else fade into utter insignificance. Before him, in a
slight depression formed by a fault or lapse in the upheaved
strata, lay the charred and incinerated remains of a dwelling-house
leveled to the earth! Originally half hidden by a natural abattis
of growing myrtle and ceanothus which covered this counter-scarp of
rock towards the trail, it must have stood within a hundred feet of
them during their halt!