She hated the desolation, the space, the silence, the arid stretches;
she had made grimaces at the "cactuses" with their forbidding
pricklers--though she could not help admiring them, they seemed to be
the only growing thing in the country capable of defying the heat and
the sun. Most of all she hated the alkali dust. All afternoon she had
kept brushing it off her clothing and clearing it out of her throat, and
only within the last half hour she had begun to realize that her efforts
had been without result--it lay thick all over her; her throat was dry
and parched with it, and her eyes burned.

She sat erect, flushed and indignant, to look around at the country. A
premonitory calm had succeeded the warning rumble. Ominous black clouds
were scurrying, wind-whipped, spreading fan-like through the sky, blotting
out the colors of the sunset, darkening the plains, creating weird
shadows. Objects that Sheila had been able to see quite distinctly when
she had reined in her pony were no longer visible. She stirred uneasily.

"We'll go somewhere," she said aloud to the pony, as she urged the animal
down the slope. "If it rains we'll get just as wet here as we would
anywhere else." She was surprised at the queer quiver in her voice. She
was going to be brave, of course, but somehow there seemed to be little
consolation in the logic of her remark.

The pony shambled forward, carefully picking its way, and Sheila mentally
thanked the station agent for providing her with so reliable a beast.
There was one consoling fact at any rate, and she retracted many hard
things she had said in the early part of her ride about the agent.

Shuffling down the slope the pony struck a level. After traveling over
this for a quarter of an hour Sheila became aware of an odd silence;
looking upward she saw that the clouds were no longer in motion; that they
were hovering, low and black, directly overhead. A flash of lightning
suddenly illuminated the sky, showing Sheila a great waste of world that
stretched to four horizons. It revealed, in the distance, the naked peaks
of some hills; a few frowning buttes that seemed to fringe a river; some
gullies in which lurked forbidding shadows; clumps of desert growth--the
cactus--now seeming grotesque and mocking; the snaky octilla; the filmy,
rustling mesquite; the dust-laden sage-brush; the soap weed; the sentinel
lance of the yucca. Then the light was gone and darkness came again.

Sheila shuddered and va