haking peal that
might have been the command to charge, for Chad saw the black hosts
start fiercely. Afar off, the wind was coming; the trees began to sway
above him, and the level sea of mist below began to swell, and the
wooded breakers seemed to pitch angrily.

Challenging tongues ran quivering up the east, and the lake of red
coals under them began to heave fiercely in answer. On either side the
lightning leaped upward and forward, striking straight and low,
sometimes, as though it were ripping up the horizon to let into the
conflict the host of dropping stars. Then the artillery of the thunder
crashed in earnest through the shaking heavens, and the mists below
pitched like smoke belched from gigantic unseen cannon. The coming sun
answered with upleaping swords of fire and, as the black thunder hosts
swept overhead, Chad saw, for one moment, the whole east in a writhing
storm of fire. A thick darkness rose from the first crash of battle
and, with the rush of wind and rain, the mighty conflict went on unseen.

Chad had seen other storms at sunrise, but something happened now and
he could never recall the others nor ever forget this. All it meant to
him, young as he was then, was unrolled slowly as the years came
on--more than the first great rebellion of the powers of darkness when,
in the beginning, the Master gave the first command that the seven
days' work of His hand should float through space, smitten with the
welcoming rays of a million suns; more than the beginning thus of
light--of life; more even than the first birth of a spirit in a living
thing: for, long afterward, he knew that it meant the dawn of a new
consciousness to him--the birth of a new spirit within him, and the
foreshadowed pain of its slow mastery over his passion-racked body and
heart. Never was there a crisis, bodily or spiritual, on the
battle-field or alone under the stars, that this storm did not come
back to him. And, always, through all doubt, and, indeed, in the end
when it came to him for the last time on his bed of death, the slow and
sullen dispersion of wind and rain on the mountain that morning far,
far back in his memory, and the quick coming of the Sun-king's
victorious light over the glad hills and trees held out to him the
promise of a final victory to the Sun-king's King over the darkness of
all death and the final coming to his own brave spirit of peace and
rest.

So Chad, with Jack drawn close to him, lay back, awe-strick