ng through the cloud wrack spectral and ominous. A
toothed edge of rock above, then a belt of cloud cut by the darting
wings of the countless swallows.

The trees of the Ridge across the Valley seemed to bend and snap.
There was a funnelling roar, sucking up earth and air, trees and
brushwood; whips and lashes and splintering crashes of rain and wind
and jagged light-lines; the bronchos cowering against the inner wall of
the trail. Then the funnelling wind tore the pinnacled rock tops clear
of the billowing mist.

"There goes your hat, Sir," cried Wayland as the black felt went
sailing down the precipice.

"What's that!" demanded the old man, springing from the seat and
pointing upward with his whip.

Over the edge of the sky line, on the rimmed red battlements, jumping,
jumping, jumping; as sheep jump at shearing time from the hot center to
the cool outside, or over the backs of one another in winter cold, when
the outer line jumps to the huddled center; came the herd in a gray
woolly shapeless whirling mass! Shouts, cries, shrill bleatings, storm
muffled bang, bang and thud of guns! Just for an instant, emerged from
the mist on the skyline of the battlements the figure of a man in
sheep-skin chaps, a riderless white horse, shadows of other men, the
sheep in a living torrent pouring over into the nothingness of mist;
then a boy, a little boy, riding hatless, craning far forward over the
neck of his pinto pony, shouting, waving, screaming, trying to head the
sheep back from the precipice edge!

"The dastard coward, blackguard Hell-hatched hounds!" roared the old
man, shaking his impotent fist. Then he funnelled his hands and
shouted the lad's name.

It happened in the twinkling of an eye. The man in the
sheep-skin-chaps clubbed his rifle at the galloping pony. The pinto
reared, flung back, pitched over the edge of the Rim Rocks. Then the
cloud blot, earth and air sponged into the wet blur of a washed slate,
shrieking furies of peltering rain, a roar of the hurricane wind, a
blinding flash, the air torn to tatters! The cloud burst hurled down
in sheets, the red clay road runnelling flood torrents. Wayland had
caught her under shelter of the rock wall. The old man hurtled to the
heads of the shivering bronchos, gripping both bridles. A splintering
crash that rocketted from crag to crag and rumbled below their feet;
and the thing was over quick as it had come. The funnelling whirl of
clouds eddied ov