eemed to be dancing in their places. To seaward, a violet glow,
throbbing and pulsating, showed where the lightning was playing.

"I'm going out to see if all's safe," said the scientist. "Do you want
to come?"

Stuart would have rather not. But he dared not refuse. They had hardly
left the hurricane wing and got to the outside, when "Ol' Doc" sniffed.

"No," he said, "we'll go back. We're not full in the center. The edge
will catch us again."

He pointed.

Not slowly this time, but with a swiftness that made it seem unreal, a
shape like a large hand rose out of the night and blotted out the stars.
A distant clamor could be heard, at first faintly, and then with a
growing speed, like the oncoming of an express train.

"In with you, in!" cried the scientist.

They rushed through the low passage and bolted the heavy door.

Then with a crash which seemed enough to tear a world from its moorings,
the opposite side of the hurricane struck, all the worse in that it came
without even a preparatory breeze. The noise, the tumult, the sense of
the elements unchained in all their fury was so terrible that the boy
lost all sense of the passage of time. The negroes no longer moaned or
prayed. A stupor of paralysis seized them.

So passed the night.

Towards morning, the painful rarefaction of the air diminished. The
squalls of rain and all-devouring gusts of wind abated, and became less
and less frequent.

The sky turned gray. Upon the far horizon rose again the cirrus arc, but
with the dark above and the light below. Majestically it rose and
spanned the sky, and, under its rim of destruction, came the sunrise in
its most peaceful colors of rose and pearl-gray, sunrise upon a ravaged
island.

Over three hundred persons had been killed that night, and many millions
of dollars of damage done. Yet everyone in Barbados breathed relief.

The hurricane had passed.

CHAPTER X

THE LAKE OF PITCH

Still weak from his illness after the manchineel poisoning, and
exhausted as he was after a sleepless night in the grip of a hurricane,
yet Stuart's first thought on leaving the hurricane wing was to get a
news story to his paper. The spell of journalism was on him.

Around the "Ol' Doc's" place, the hurricane seemed to have done little
damage. Not a building had fallen. Trees were stripped bare of their
leaves, cane-fields laid low, but when the boy commented on this escape,
the old scientist shook his head.

"I bui