head, and
when a rumble like the deepest notes of a pipe organ began to fill all
the air, Lorraine thrust her grip under a bush and began to run, her
soggy shoes squashing unpleasantly on the rough places in the road.

Lorraine had seen many stage storms and had thrilled ecstatically to the
mimic lightning, knowing just how it was made. But when that huge
blackness behind and to the left of her began to open and show a
terrible brilliance within, and to close abruptly, leaving the world ink
black, she was terrified. She wanted to hide as she had hidden from
those two men; but from that stupendous monster, a real thunderstorm,
sagebrush formed no protection whatever. She must reach the substantial
shelter of buildings, the comforting presence of men and women.

She ran, and as she ran she wept aloud like a child and called for her
father. The deep rumble grew louder, nearer. The revealed brilliance
became swift sword-thrusts of blinding light that seemed to stab deep
the earth. Lorraine ran awkwardly, her hands over her ears, crying out
at each lightning flash, her voice drowned in the thunder that followed
it close. Then, as she neared the somber group of buildings, the clouds
above them split with a terrific, rending crash, and the whole place
stood pitilessly revealed to her, as if a spotlight had been turned on.
Lorraine stood aghast. The buildings were not buildings at all. They
were rocks, great, black, forbidding boulders standing there on a narrow
ridge, having a diabolic likeness to houses.

The human mind is wonderfully resilient, but readjustment comes slowly
after a shock. Dumbly, refusing to admit the significance of what she
had seen, Lorraine went forward. Not until she had reached and had
touched the first grotesque caricature of habitation did she wholly
grasp the fact that she was lost, and that shelter might be miles away.
She stood and looked at the orderly group of boulders as the lightning
intermittently revealed them. She saw where the road ran on, between
two square-faced rocks. She would have to follow the road, for after all
it must lead _somewhere_,--to her father's ranch, probably. She wondered
irrelevantly why her mother had never mentioned these queer rocks, and
she wondered vaguely if any of them had caves or ledges where she could
be safe from the lightning.

She was on the point of stepping out into the road again when a horseman
rode into sight between the two rocks. In the same insta