about midnight, there suddenly swept through the air above
them one of those rare, for that time of the year, but often very
violent, mountain storms.

For an hour the water fell out of the skies, as if poured from an
enormous bucket. The wind blew, until it seemed almost to shake the
solid mountains themselves, while vivid glares of lightning blinded the
eyes and heavy peals of thunder deafened the ears. Then came a lull in
the violence of the storm, as if the elements had paused to gather
themselves for a last supreme effort, followed almost instantly by a
glare of lightning so vivid, that, for the moment, it seemed as if the
whole world was ablaze, and a shock of thunder, so appalling, that
everyone leaped from his blanket and stood staring with blanched face
and frightened eyes around him, not knowing what awful thing was
happening. For two or three minutes the dreadful sounds continued, as if
mountains were being torn up by the roots and thrown crashing to the
earth again, while the ground shook and trembled beneath their feet, as
if the earth had the ague. Then, only the roar of the falling rain and
the rushing of the wind through the limbs of the Big Tree above their
heads, was heard. Fifteen minutes later the rain had ceased, the wind
had died down, the clouds had swept by, and the stars were shining again
in a clear sky.

The next morning, when our friends, on their way to the Cave of Gold,
reached the narrow shelf of rock in Crooked Arm Gulch, from which they
had had their first view of the Golden Elbow, an astonishing sight met
their eyes.

The great arch, overhanging the entrance to the Cave of Gold, with its
millions of tons of superincumbent rocks, had given away, and the whole
of that side of the gulch, nearly a thousand feet high and for a couple
of hundred feet on either side, had split off and fallen in a great mass
of rocks, hundreds of feet high, where the day before had been the
entrance to the dead miner's marvelous Cave of Gold.

For a number of minutes all stood staring at this unexpected and
astounding sight in awed silence. No wonder it had sounded the night
before as if mountains were being torn up and thrown down again! No
wonder the ground beneath them had shook and trembled from the impact of
those millions of tons of rocks!

"Gosh! I'm glad I ain't in that Cave of Gold!" and Ham turned an awed
face to the others. "If that storm had comed up in th' daytime, some on
us might be in thar