breathlessly below. He rose to lay on more fuel, and while he was in the
act the tornado broke upon him. The wind, as he had forecast, came out of
the southeast. In an instant it was roaring and hurtling against the
farther side of his island rampart like the charge of a hundred thousand
horse and tossing the sand of the dunes like blown hair into the
northwest, while the rain in one wild deluge lashed the frantic sea and
weltering lagoon as with the whips of the Furies.

He had kept the sail on the beach for a protection from the storm, but
before he could crawl under it he was as wet as though he had been tossed
up by the deep, and yet was glad to gain its cover from the blinding
floods and stinging sand. Here he lay for more than an hour, the rage of
the tempest continually growing, the heavens in a constant pulsing glare
of lightnings, their terrific thunders smiting and bellowing round and
round its echoing vault, and the very island seeming at times to stagger
back and recover again as it braced itself against the fearful onsets of
the wind. Snuggling in his sailcloth burrow, he complacently recalled an
earlier storm like this, which he and Sweetheart, the only other time they
ever were here, had tranquilly weathered in this same lagoon. On the
mainland, in that storm, cane- and rice-fields had been laid low and half
destroyed, houses had been unroofed, men had been killed. A woman and a
boy, under a pecan tree, were struck by lightning; and three men who had
covered themselves with a tarpaulin on one of the wharves in New Orleans
were blown with it into the Mississippi, poor fellows, and were drowned; a
fact worthy of second consideration in the present juncture.

This second thought had hardly been given it before he crept hastily from
his refuge and confronted the gale in quick alarm. The hurricane was
veering to southward. Let it shift but a point or two more, and its entire
force would sweep the lagoon and its beach. Before long the change came.