The time I had mentioned expired, and I awoke Raymond.  We saddled and set out again, but first we went in search of the lost rifle, and in the course of an hour Raymond was fortunate enough to find it.  Then we turned westward, and moved over the hills and hollows at a slow pace toward the Black Hills.  The heat no longer tormented us, for a cloud was before the sun.  Yet that day shall never be marked with white in my calendar.  The air began to grow fresh and cool, the distant mountains frowned more gloomily, there was a low muttering of thunder, and dense black masses of cloud rose heavily behind the broken peaks.  At first they were gayly fringed with silver by the afternoon sun, but soon the thick blackness overspread the whole sky, and the desert around us was wrapped in deep gloom.  I scarcely heeded it at the time, but now I cannot but feel that there was an awful sublimity in the hoarse murmuring of the thunder, in the somber shadows that involved the mountains and the plain.  The storm broke.  It came upon us with a zigzag blinding flash, with a terrific crash of thunder, and with a hurricane that howled over the prairie, dashing floods of water against us.  Raymond looked round, and cursed the merciless elements.  There seemed no shelter near, but we discerned at length a deep ravine gashed in the level prairie, and saw half way down its side an old pine tree, whose rough horizontal boughs formed a sort of penthouse against the tempest.  We found a practicable passage, and hastily descending, fastened our animals to some large loose stones at the bottom; then climbing up, we drew our blankets over our heads, and seated ourselves close beneath the old tree.  Perhaps I was no competent judge of time, but it seemed to me that we were sitting there a full hour, while around us poured a deluge of rain, through which the rocks on the opposite side of the gulf were barely visible.  The first burst of the tempest soon subsided, but the rain poured steadily.  At length Raymond grew impatient, and scrambling out of the ravine, he gained the level prairie above.

“What does the weather look like?” asked I, from my seat under the tree.

“It looks bad,” he answered; “dark all around,” and again he descended and sat down by my side.  Some ten minutes elapsed.

“Go up again,” said I, “and take another look;” and he clambered up the precipice.  “Well, how is it?”

“Just the same, only I see one little bright spot over the top of the mountain.”

The rain by this time had begun to abate; and going down to the bottom of the ravine, we loosened the animals, who were standing up to their knees in water.  Leading them up the rocky throat of the ravine, we reached the plain above.  “Am I,” I thought to myself, “the same man who a few months since, was seated, a quiet student of Belles-LETTRES, in a cushioned arm-chair by a sea-coal fire?”