like a ghostly pathway of peril. Before us loomed that grim rock
bluff, behind whose crest lay the sleeping band of Kiowas. It was only
because they slept that Little Blue Flower could steal away in hope of
rescue.

Hotter grew the air and darker the swiftly rolling clouds; black and
awful stood old Pawnee Rock with the silent menace of its sleeping
enemy. In the stillness of the pause before the storm burst we heard
Jondo's voice commanding us. With our first care for the frightened
stock, we grouped ourselves together as he ordered close under the
bluff.

Suddenly an angry wind leaped out of the sky, beating back the hot dead
air with gigantic flails of fury. Then the storm broke with tornado rage
and cloudburst floods, and in its track terror reigned. Beverly and I
clung together, and, holding a hand of each, Mat Nivers crouched beside
us, herself strong in this second test of courage as she had been in the
camp that night at Council Grove.

I have never been afraid of storms and I can never understand why timid
folk should speak of them as of a living, self-directing force bent
purposely on human destruction. I love the splendor of the lightning and
the thunder's peal. From our earliest years, Beverly and Mat and I had
watched the flood-waters of the Missouri sweep over the bottomlands, and
we had heard the winds rave, and the cannonading of the angry heavens.
But this mad blast of the prairie storm was like nothing we had ever
seen or heard before. A yellow glare filled the sky, a half-illumined,
evil glow, as if to hide what lay beyond it. One breathed in fine sand,
and tasted the desert dust. Behind it, all copper-green, a broad, lurid
band swept up toward the zenith. Under its weird, unearthly light, the
prairies, and everything upon them, took on a ghastly hue. Then came the
inky-black storm-cloud--long, funnel-shaped, pendulous--and in its
deafening roar and the thick darkness that could be felt, and the awful
sweep of its all-engulfing embrace, the senses failed and the very
breath of life seemed beaten away. The floods fell in streams, hot, then
suddenly cold. And then a fusillade of hail bombarded the flat prairies,
defenseless beneath the munitions of the heavens. But in all the wild,
mad blackness, in the shriek and crash of maniac winds, in the swirl of
many waters, and chill and fury of the threshing hail, the law of the
trail failed not: "Hold fast." And with our hands gripped in one
another's, we c