ather doctor, who was about to let the rain escape.

"He's goin' to head it off," said one of the scoffers to Morgan,
beginning to feel a return of his exultation.

"It's goin' to miss us," said Druggist Gray, his head thrown back, his
Adam's apple like an elbow of stovepipe in his thin neck.

"We may get a good shower out of one end of it," Conboy still hoped,
pulling for the rain as he might have boosted for a losing horse.

"Nothing more than a sprinkle, if that much," said the station agent,
shaking his head, which he had bared to the cool wind.

"He's got him firin' up like he was tryin' to hive a swarm of bees," one
reported, coming from the seat of scientific labors.

"It's breakin', it's passin' by us--we'll not get a drop of it!"

So it appeared. Overhead the swirling clouds were passing on; in the
distance the thunder was fainter. The wind began to freshen from the
track of the rain, the pigeons came out of the courthouse tower for a
look around, light broke through the thinning clouds.

Not more than a mile or two southward of Ascalon the rain was falling in
a torrent, the roar of it still quite plain in the ears of those whose
thirst for its cooling balm was to be denied. The rain was going on,
after soaking and reviving Glenmore, which place Judge Thayer would have
given a quarter of his possessions to have had it miss.

A mockery, it seemed, a rebuke, a chastisement, the way nature conducted
that rain storm. Judge Thayer urged the rainmaker to his greatest
efforts to stop it, turn it, bring it back; smoke green and black went
up in volumes, to stream away on the cool, refreshing wind. Sulphur and
rosin and pitch were identified in that smoke as surely as the spectrum
reveals the composition of the sun. But the wind was against the
rainmaker; nature conspired to mock him before men as the quack that he
was.

The gloom of storm cleared from the streets of Ascalon, the worn and
tired look came back into faces that had been illumined for a little
while with hope. Farther away, fainter, the thunder sounded, dimmer the
murmur of the withdrawing rain.

The cool wind still blew like whispered consolation for a great, a
pangful loss, but it could not soften the hard hearts of those who had
stood with lips to the fountain of life and been denied. The people
turned again to their pursuits, their planning, their gathering of
courage to hold them up against the blaze of sun which soon must break
upon them f