It availed no more than the shooing. The hen not only refused to
advance, but turned and flew into the corn. When, after chasing her
around a dozen hills, the little girl once more had the leghorn held
tightly in her hands, she gave her a good shaking. But no matter how
hard the little girl jerked her body from side to side, Sassy, by
bending her neck, kept her head defiantly in one place.

The little girl was at her wits' end. The biggest brother had specified
that Sassy should be driven; but the leghorn would not drive. The little
girl had tried her best to carry out her instructions, and had only
discovered the truth of the old adage about leading a horse to water.
She could bring Sassy to the very spot where a cure could be
effected--and the hen would refuse treatment. Chagrined, warm, and
discouraged, she resolved to carry the chicken bodily to the stone-pile,
a bare half way, and there think over her failure. So, with Sassy under
her arm once more, she toiled up the grassy slope.

While she was lying beside the pile, worried and distraught, with the
leghorn at close quarters throwing up dirt and pebbles, the air became
so ominously and deathly still that the little girl and Sassy fairly
gasped for breath. Over the grass tops the heat halted and lay in long,
faintly visible waves, like a ghostly sea. And in the west there began
to arise, silently and swiftly, a vast mountain of peculiar, dense
arched clouds.

It bulged upward until its top seemed half way to the sun. Then, with
lightning rapidity, it closed in at its middle and assumed the shape of
a monster toad-stool, and traveled forward toward the Vermillion with a
mighty roar.

The little girl neither saw nor heard it as it came on. She was
thinking, with the hopefulness of youth, over Sassy's future
possibilities. "She'll surely start laying again some time," she mused,
"and I'll borrow a hen from mother to set on the eggs. So I'll have all
those chickens, and when they grow up I'll have all their eggs, and some
of them will set, and--" She lost herself in an endless chain of
computation.

The toad-stool, topped with angry, boiling clouds, was now but five or
six miles away. It swayed like the trunk of an elephant as it darted
forward, one second touching the ground, the next lifting itself into
the air, shifting and lowering as if it were picking spots upon which to
alight. A breeze sprang up and hurried to meet it, and all the grass and
corn-stalk