"Just one minute and I will have it fixed!" I said, and she smiled
bravely but said nothing.

Still not a breath of air! The spires of the pine trees stood rigid as
if cast in bronze!

This is the time when a storm strikes terror to my soul. With the first
patter of the rain and the onrushing of the wind I experience a
sensation of relief, but it is nerve-racking to stand in that frightful
calm and await the mighty charge of unknown forces.

As I bolted the displaced part into its proper adjustment I reflected
that had it not been for the ten minutes thus lost we would have been in
Oak Cliff. My calculations had been accurate, but again Fate had
introduced an unexpected factor. I started the engine and leaped into
the car.

"Only a mile to shelter!" I exclaimed. "I think we can make it. Where
are the storm aprons?"

"We forgot them," she said.

"I forgot them, you mean," I declared. "Hold fast! It is a rough road!"

The red car leaped forward. I remembered that there was a farmhouse a
mile or so ahead.

Never have I witnessed anything like the vivid continuity of that
lightning. With a crash which sounded as if the gods had shattered the
vault of the heavens a bolt streamed into a tree not a hundred yards
ahead, and one of its limbs fell to the roadway. It was impossible to
stop. She saw it and crouched behind the shield. With a lurch and a leap
we passed over it.

I felt a drop of rain on my face. The trees swayed with the first gust
of the tempest. We were going down hill with full speed on. A few
hundred yards ahead was a stone culvert spanning the bed of a creek
whose waters years before had been diverted to a reservoir a mile or so
to the east. Save at rare intervals, the bed of this creek was dry.

As the recollection of this old culvert came to me I raised my eyes and
saw something which drove the blood from my heart! A quarter of a mile
ahead was a gray wall of rain, and dim through it I saw huge trees mount
into the air and twist and gyrate like leaves caught up in an air eddy.

Holding our speed for a few seconds, which seemed like minutes, we
surged toward the old culvert. Jamming on the brakes, I swung to one
side of the embankment and stopped almost on the edge of the dry bed of
the creek.

Miss Harding leaped to the ground and stood for an instant dazed. I
stumbled as I jumped, but was on my feet like a flash. The arch of the
culvert was not thirty feet away, but had we not been protecte