r. Barton!" she
called listlessly over the other, and started on, stumblingly,
clatteringly, up the abruptly steep and precipitous mountain trail--a
little dust-colored gnome on a dust-colored horse, with the dutiful
gray pinking cautiously along behind her.

By some odd twist of his bridle-rein the gray's chunky neck arched
slightly askew, and he pranced now and then from side to side of the
trail as if guided thus by an invisible hand.

With an uncanny pucker along his spine as if he found himself suddenly
deserting two women instead of one, Barton went fumbling and squinting
out through the dusty green shade into the expected glare of the open
pasture, and discovered, to his further disconcerting, that there was
no glare left.

Before his astonished eyes he saw sun-scorched mountain-top,
sun-scorched granite, sun-scorched field stubble turned suddenly to
shade--no cool, translucent miracle of fluctuant greens, but a horrid,
plushy, purple dusk under a horrid, plushy, purple sky, with a rip of
lightning along the horizon, a galloping gasp of furiously oncoming
wind, an almost strangling stench of dust-scented rain.

But before he could whirl his horse about, the storm broke! Heaven
fell! Hell rose! The sides of the earth caved in! Chaos unspeakable
tore north, east, south, west!

Snortingly for one single instant the roan's panic-stricken nostrils
went blooming up into the cloud-burst like two parched scarlet
poinsettias. Then man and beast as one flesh, as one mind, went
bolting back through the rain-drenched, wind-ravished thicket to find
their mates.

Up, up, up, everlastingly up, the mountain trail twisted and scrambled
through the unholy darkness. Now and again a slippery stone tripped
the roan's fumbling feet. Now and again a swaying branch slapped
Barton stingingly across his straining eyes. All around and about them
tortured forest trees moaned and writhed in the gale. Through every
cavernous vista gray sheets of rain went flapping madly by them. The
lightning was incredible. The thunder like the snarl of a glass sky
shivering into inestimable fragments.

With every gasping breath beginning to rip from his poor lungs like a
knifed stitch, the roan still faltered on each new ledge to whinny
desperately to his mate. Equally futilely from time to time, Barton,
with his hands cupped to his mouth, holloed--holloed--holloed--into
the thunderous darkness.

Then at a sharp turn in the trail, magically, in a