ripping up the horizon to let into the conflict the host of dropping stars.
Then the artillery of the thunder crashed in earnest through the shaking
heavens, and the mists below pitched like smoke belched from gigantic unseen
cannon. The coming sun answered with upleaping swords of fire and, as the
black thunder hosts swept overhead, Chad saw, for one moment, the whole east
in a writhing storm of fire. A thick darkness rose from the first crash of
battle and, with the rush of wind and rain, the mighty conflict went on
unseen.

Chad had seen other storms at sunrise, but something happened now and he could
never recall the others nor ever forget this. All it meant to him, young as he
was then, was unrolled slowly as the years came on--more than the first great
rebellion of the powers of darkness when, in the beginning, the Master gave
the first command that the seven days' work of His hand should float through
space, smitten with the welcoming rays of a million suns; more than the
beginning thus of light--of life; more even than the first birth of a spirit
in a living thing: for, long afterward, he knew that it meant the dawn of a
new consciousness to him--the birth of a new spirit within him, and the
foreshadowed pain of its slow mastery over his passion-racked body and heart.
Never was there a crisis, bodily or spiritual, on the battle-field or alone
under the stars, that this storm did not come back to him. And, always,
through all doubt, and, indeed, in the end when it came to him for the last
time on his bed of death, the slow and sullen dispersion of wind and rain on
the mountain that morning far, far back in his memory, and the quick coming of
the Sun-king's victorious light over the glad hills and trees held out to him
the promise of a final victory to the Sun-king's King over the darkness of all
death and the final coming to his own brave spirit of peace and rest.

So Chad, with Jack drawn close to him, lay back, awe-stricken and with his
face wet from mysterious tears. The comfort of the childish self-pity that