Listening to satellite radio, Outlaw Country. Switched over to jazz, rotated into hard rock, and then back to country.

THINKING ABOUT IT LATER, he didn't really know when he first became aware of the spark.

The spark started as a mote in his eye, above the right headlight, deep in the rain. Then it took on a more graphic quality, and he noticed it, and noticed at the same time that it had been out there for a while. The spark was a bright, golden hue, and unmoving. Another three miles and he identified it: a fire. A big one. He'd seen a few of them at night, but this was up in the sky.

How could it be up in the sky, and not move?

He flashed by an overpass, then caught, a half mile to his right, the red lights of the Jesus Christ radio station: a five-hundred-foot tower-they build them low on the prairie-with red lights that blinked Jesus, then went black, then Christ, and then black, and then quickly, JesusChrist-JesusChrist-JesusChrist.

If he was at Jesus Christ radio, Virgil thought, the spark wasn't in the sky-it was six miles ahead, north of Bluestem on Buffalo Ridge. There was only one thing that could make a spark that big, from this far away, on Buffalo Ridge: Bill Judd's house. The most expensive house for a hundred and fifty miles around, and it was burning like a barn full of hay.

"That's not something you see every night," he said to Marta Gomez, who was singing "The Circle" on the satellite radio.

He got off at the Highway 75 exit, the rain still pounding down, and went straight past the Holiday Inn, following the line of the highway toward the fire up on the ridge.

BUFFALO RIDGE was a geological curiosity, a rock-strewn quartzite plateau rising three hundred feet above the surrounding landscape. Too rocky to farm, the mound had kept its mantle of virgin prairie, the last wild ground in Stark County.