great banging and clanging of
swinging signs and a few loose shutters. All the sidewalk displays of
vegetables and other goods had been taken in, and the doors, customarily
wide open, were now shut fast. This alone lent to the street quite a
deserted air, which was emphasised by the fact that actually not a rig
of any sort stood at the curbs. Up the empty roadway whirled one after
the other clouds of dust hurried by the wind.

"I wonder where all the farmers' wagons are?" marvelled the practical
Mina. "Surely they would not stay home Saturday afternoon just for this
wind!"

Opposite Randall's hardware store her curiosity quite mastered her.

"Do stop!" she urged Carroll. "I want to run in and see what's the
matter."

She was gone but a moment, and returned, her eyes shining with
excitement.

"Oh, Carroll!" she cried, "there are three vessels gone ashore off the
piers. Everybody's gone to see."

"Jump in!" said Carroll. "We'll drive out. Perhaps they'll get out the
life-saving crew."

They drove up the plank road over the sand-hill, through the beech
woods, to the bluff above the shore. In the woods they were somewhat
sheltered from the wind, although even there the crash of falling
branches and the whirl of twigs and dead leaves advertised that the
powers of the air were abroad; but when they topped the last rise, the
unobstructed blast from the open Lake hit them square between the eyes.

Probably a hundred vehicles of all descriptions were hitched to trees
just within the fringe of woods. Carroll, however, drove straight ahead
until Prince stood at the top of the plank road that led down to the
bath houses. Here she pulled up.

Carroll saw the lake, slate blue and angry, with white-capped billows
to the limit of vision. Along the shore were rows and rows of breakers,
leaping, breaking, and gathering again, until they were lost in a tumble
of white foam that rushed and receded on the sands. These did not look
to be very large until she noticed the twin piers reaching out from the
river's mouth. Each billow, as it came in, rose sullenly above them,
broke tempestuously to overwhelm the entire structure of their ends, and
ripped inshore along their lengths, the crest submerging as it ran every
foot of the massive structures. The piers and the light-houses at their
ends looked like little toys, and the compact black crowd of people on
the shore below were as small as Bobby's tin soldiers.

"Look there--out far