t.

"Now all spring for your lives!" again cried Rachel; "and let everything
go, Frank, but your gun and some cartridges."

"Can we not save the canoes?" shouted Alec.

"No, no!" cried Rachel. "It is our lives here only that we must think
about, for the sake of those who even now, perhaps, are mourning us as
dead."

The shelter of the rocks was within a few flying bounds, and they were
safe. It was an enormous rock that towered up some scores of feet, and
on the lee side, where our young folks had found shelter, hung over for
perhaps twenty feet. Fortunate indeed were they to have reached such a
refuge.

A few seconds later, when, with backs against the mighty rock, they were
in a measure recovering from the violent exertion of that fearful
struggle, Winnie cried out, "O, where are the canoes?"

Not a vestige of them was ever after seen. They had been caught up in
that cyclone that came thundering on so close behind that in the brief
seconds in which the young people had run from them to the rock they had
been picked up and whirled into oblivion.

"It is well," said Alec, "I did not stop to try and save the one I was
in. But why, Rachel, did you ask Frank to bring along his gun and
ammunition?"

"You will soon see," said the brave, thoughtful girl, "that they will be
worth more to us and our anxious friends than the canoes."

In the meantime, the storm in passing the point had spread out over the
whole place, and the rain, which was now descending in torrents, began
to be very uncomfortable. A rim of light was still in the distance, and
with the now almost incessant flashings of the lightning it was possible
to grope around for a dry and more sheltered spot under the great rock.
Alec, who had volunteered to go out and try to find a drier place, and
who was now groping along in one direction as the lightning lit up his
path, was heard to suddenly let out a cry of alarm and then almost
immediately after burst into a hearty peal of laughter.

"What in the world have you found in such a place to cause you to act
like this?" said Frank, who was really annoyed at the merriment of Alec
after such a narrow escape.

"Come here and you will see," was the only reply they could secure from
Alec, who was acting in a manner so strange and unaccountable.

So, waiting for the lightning flashes to enable them to pick their way
over the rough stones under the sheltered place, they cautiously moved
toward him. As the