ey
were, they could make no counter battle against the storm.

The air grew supercharged with electricity. It dripped, literally, from
the barrel of Banion's pistol when he took it from its holster to carry
it to the wagon. He fastened the reins of his horse to a wheel and
hastened with other work. A pair of trail ropes lay in the wagon. He
netted them over the wagon top and lashed the ends to the wheels to make
the top securer, working rapidly, eyes on the advancing storm.

There came a puff, then a gust of wind. The sky blackened. The storm
caught the wagon train first. There was no interval at all between the
rip of the lightning and the crash of thunder as it rolled down on the
clustered wagons. The electricity at times came not in a sheet or a
ragged bolt, but in a ball of fire, low down, close to the ground,
exploding with giant detonations.

Then came the rain, with a blanketing rush of level wind, sweeping away
the last vestige of the wastrel fires of the emigrant encampment. An
instant and every human being in the train, most of them ill defended by
their clothing, was drenched by the icy flood. One moment and the
battering of hail made climax of it all. The groaning animals plunged
and fell at their picket ropes, or broke and fled into the open. The
remaining cattle caught terror, and since there was no corral, most of
the cows and oxen stampeded down the wind.

The canvas of the covered wagons made ill defense. Many of them were
stripped off, others leaked like sieves. Mothers sat huddled in their
calicoes, bending over their tow-shirted young, some of them babes in
arms. The single jeans garments of the boys gave them no comfort. Under
the wagons and carts, wrapped in blankets or patched quilts whose colors
dripped, they crawled and sat as the air grew strangely chill. Only
wreckage remained when they saw the storm muttering its way across the
prairies, having done what it could in its elemental wrath to bar the
road to the white man.

As for Banion and Molly, they sat it out in the light wagon, the girl
wrapped in blankets, Banion much of the time out in the storm, swinging
on the ropes to keep the wagon from overturning. He had no apparent
fear. His calm assuaged her own new terrors. In spite of her bitter
arraignment, she was glad that he was here, though he hardly spoke to
her at all.

"Look!" he exclaimed at last, drawing back the flap of the wagon cover.
"Look at the rainbow!"

Over the cloud