ud reverberation
awoke Calvin Gray and brought him up sitting. His room was lit by white
flickers, against which he saw that the rain still sheeted his windows;
he fumbled for his watch and found that it was two o'clock. This was a
storm, indeed, and he began to fear that this deluge might swell the
waters to a danger point; therefore he rose, struck a light, and
dressed himself. Sleep was out of the question, anyhow, amid such an
uproar. As he stepped out upon the front porch, his attention was
instantly drawn to a yellow glow in the west, a distant torch, the
flame of which illuminated the angry night. He stared at it for a
moment before he realized its meaning. A well was afire! Lightning had
wrecked a derrick and ignited the stream of oil. No wonder, he told
himself, for this field was dotted with towers well calculated to lead
lightning out of the skies, and amid a play of destructive forces such
as this nothing less than a miracle could have prevented something of
the sort. But it was a pity, for yonder a small-sized fortune was going
up in smoke.

By the next flare he saw that the waters had crept higher. They were
nearly up to the porch floor now, and, obviously, they were still
rising. That rabbit was crouched where he had last seen it, a wet ball
of fur with round, black eyes. The heavens echoed almost constantly,
now to a thick, distant rumble, again to an appalling din directly
overhead; for seconds at a time there was light enough to read by. The
house, Gray decided, was in no danger, except from a direct bolt, for
the valley was nothing more than a shallow lake; nevertheless--

A blinding, blue-white streak came, and he counted the seconds before
the sound reached him. Sound traveled something like a thousand feet a
second, he reflected; that bolt must have struck about a mile distant.
Nothing alarming about that, surely. A moment, then he blinked and
rubbed his eyes, for out of the murk was born another bonfire like that
to the westward.

Hearing an exclamation behind him, Gray turned to behold Allie
Briskow's dim figure in the door.

"Hello!" he cried, excitedly. "Did you see that? Yonder are two wells
afire."

"I know. I haven't closed my eyes. You can see another one from my
window." Allia snapped the light from a pocket flash upon Gray, and,
noting that he was only partly clad, she urged him to come into the
house. When he ignored the request she joined him, and together they
stared at the moun