hat that meant,
and braced himself for the struggle. But it was useless; he had not yet
acquired the knack of staying on the back of a bucking bronco, and the
next moment he was on the ground, and around him whirled that saffron
chaos of dust. The temperature lowered every moment. Henderson
instinctively felt that this was but the beginning of the storm. He
picked himself up without useless regrets for his pony, and made his way
on.

The saffron hue turned to blackness, and then out of the murk shot a
living green ball of fire, and ploughed into the earth. Then sheets of
water, that seemed to come simultaneously from earth and sky, swept the
prairie, and in the midst of it struggled Henderson, weak as a little
child, half bereft of sense by the strange numbness of head and dullness
of eye. Another of those green balls fell and burst, as it actually
appeared to him, before his horrified eyes, and the bellow and blare of
the explosion made him cry out in a madness of fright and physical pain.
In the illumination he had seen a cabin only a few feet in front of him,
and toward it he made frantically, with an animal's instinctive desire
for shelter.

The door did not yield at once to his pressure, and in the panic of
his fear he threw his weight against it. There was a cry from within, a
fall, and Henderson flung himself in the cabin and closed the door.

In the dusk of the storm he saw a woman half prostrate. It was she
whom he had pushed from the door. He caught the hook in its staple,
and turned to raise her. She was not trembling as much as he, but, like
himself, she was dizzy with the shock of the lightning. In the midst of
all the clamor Henderson heard a shrill crying, and looking toward the
side of the room, he dimly perceived three tiny forms crouched in one of
the bunks. The woman took the smallest of the children in her arms, and
kissed and soothed it; and Henderson, after he had thrown a blanket at
the bottom of the door to keep out the drifting rain, sat with his back
to it, bracing it against the wind, lest the frail staple should give
way. He managed some way to reach out and lay hold of the other little
ones, and got them in his arms,--a boy, so tiny he seemed hardly human,
and a girl somewhat sturdier. They cuddled in his arms, and clutched his
clothes with their frantic little hands, and the three sat so while the
earth and the heavens seemed to be meeting in angry combat.

And back and forth, back and