ot
to be a nice day, either. Mists were floating around among the hills,
which was a pretty certain sign of rain.

We hiked on. I had the message, hanging inside my shirt. It felt good. I
suspected that Fitz ought to be the one to carry it; he was my superior.
But he didn't ask for it, and I tried to believe that my carrying it
made no difference to him. I was thinking about offering it to him, but
I didn't. He had his camera, and the flag wrapped about his waist like a
sash. We'd left Sally and our other stuff at the ranch, and were
traveling light for this last spurt.

It was a wagon trail right down the valley, and we could travel fast.
The sun grew hotter, and a hole in my boot-sole began to raise a blister
on my foot. Those fourteen days of steady trailing had been hard on
leather, and on clothes, too.

We passed several ranches. Along in the middle of the morning thunder
began to growl in the hills, and we knew that we were liable to be wet.

The valley grew narrower, as if it was to pinch out, and the thunder
grew louder. The storm was rising black over the hills ahead of us.

"That's going to be a big one," said Fitz.

It looked so. The clouds were the rolling, tumbling kind, where drab and
black are mixed. And they came fast, to eat the sun.

It was raining hard on the hills ahead. We could see the lightning every
second, awful zigzags and splits and bursting bombs, and the thunder was
one long bellow.

The valley pinched to not much more than a gulch, with aspens and pines
and willows, and now and then little grassy places, and the stream
rippling down through the middle. Half the sky was gone, now, and the
sun was swallowed, and it was time that Fitz and I found cover. We did
not hunt a tree; not much! Trees are lightning attracters, and they
leak, besides. But we saw where a ledge of shelf-rock cropped out,
making a little cave.

"We'd better get in here and cache till the worst is over," proposed
Fitz. "We'll eat our lunch while we're waiting."

That sounded like sense. So we snuggled under. We could just sit up,
with our feet inside the edge.

"Boom-oom-oom!" roared the thunder, shaking the ground.

"Boom-oom-oom! Oom! Oom! Boom!"

We could feel a chill, the breeze stopped, as if scared, drops began to
patter, a few, and then more, faster and faster, hard and swift as hail,
the world got dark, and suddenly with roar and slash down she came,
while we were eating our first sandwich put up by