"I think I hear something like it, right now," came Trench's
irrepressible voice from the shadows in the edge of the circle.
But nobody heeded it.

And all the while from far across the west prairie the stormcloud
was rolling in, black and angry, blowing its hot breath before it,
while from a cloudburst upstream an hour before a great surge of water
was rushing down the Walnut, turning the quiet river to a murderous flood.
But the high walls hid all this from the valley and the heedless young
folk took the full time limit of their holiday in the sheltering gloom
of the old Kickapoo Corral.



CHAPTER V

THE STORM

_Rock and moan, and roar alone,
And the dread of some nameless thing unknown_.
--LOWELL

THE silence following Dennie's story was broken by a sudden
peal of thunder overhead. At the same instant the blackness
of midnight lifted itself above the stone ledges and dropped
down upon the Corral, smothering everything in darkness.
A rushing whirlwind, a lurid blaze of lightning, and a second
peal of thunder threw the camp into blind disorder.
In the minute's lull following the first storm herald,
there was a wild scrambling for wraps and lunch baskets.