CHAPTER V.


The long, parched summer had drawn to its dusty close. Much of it was
already blown abroad and dissipated on trail and turnpike, or crackled
in harsh, unelastic fibres on hillside and meadow. Some of it had
disappeared in the palpable smoke by day and fiery crests by night of
burning forests. The besieging fogs on the Coast Range daily thinned
their hosts, and at last vanished. The wind changed from northwest to
southwest. The salt breath of the sea was on the summit. And then
one day the staring, unchanged sky was faintly touched with remote
mysterious clouds, and grew tremulous in expression. The next morning
dawned upon a newer face in the heavens, on changed woods, on altered
outlines, on vanished crests, on forgotten distances. It was raining!

Four weeks of this change, with broken spaces of sunlight and intense
blue aerial islands, and then a storm set in. All day the summit pines
and redwoods rocked in the blast. At times the onset of the rain seemed
to be held back by the fury of the gale, or was visibly seen in sharp
waves on the hillside. Unknown and concealed watercourses suddenly
overflowed the trails, pools became lakes and brooks rivers. Hidden from
the storm, the sylvan silence of sheltered valleys was broken by the
impetuous rush of waters; even the tiny streamlet that traversed Flip's
retreat in the Gin and Ginger Woods became a cascade.

The storm drove Fairley from his couch early. The falling of a large
tree across the trail, and the sudden overflow of a small stream beside
it, hastened his steps. But he was doomed to encounter what was to him a