Stewart waited for Madeline under the lee of a shelving cliff, where the cowboys had halted the pack-train.  Majesty was sensitive to the flashes of lightning.  Madeline patted his neck and softly called to him.  The weary burros nodded; the Mexican women covered their heads with their mantles.  Stewart untied the slicker at the back of Madeline’s saddle and helped her on with it.  Then he put on his own.  The other cowboys followed suit.  Presently Madeline saw Monty and Dorothy rounding the cliff, and hoped the others would come soon.

A blue-white, knotted rope of lightning burned down out of the clouds, and instantly a thunder-clap crashed, seeming to shake the foundations of the earth.  Then it rolled, as if banging from cloud to cloud, and boomed along the peaks, and reverberated from deep to low, at last to rumble away into silence.  Madeline felt the electricity in Majesty’s mane, and it seemed to tingle through her nerves.  The air had a weird, bright cast.  The ponderous clouds swallowed more and more of the eastern domes.  This moment of the breaking of the storm, with the strange growing roar of wind, like a moaning monster, was pregnant with a heart-disturbing emotion for Madeline Hammond.  Glorious it was to be free, healthy, out in the open, under the shadow of the mountain and cloud, in the teeth of the wind and rain and storm.

Another dazzling blue blaze showed the bold mountain-side and the storm-driven clouds.  In the flare of light Madeline saw Stewart’s face.

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied, simply.

Then the thunderbolt racked the heavens, and as it boomed away in lessening power Madeline reflected with surprise upon Stewart’s answer.  Something in his face had made her ask him what she considered a foolish question.  His reply amazed her.  She loved a storm.  Why should he fear it—­he, with whom she could not associate fear?

“How strange!  Have you not been out in many storms?”

A smile that was only a gleam flitted over his dark face.

“In hundreds of them.  By day, with the cattle stampeding.  At night, alone on the mountain, with the pines crashing and the rocks rolling—­in flood on the desert.”

“It’s not only the lightning, then?” she asked.

“No.  All the storm.”

Madeline felt that henceforth she would have less faith in what she had imagined was her love of the elements.  What little she knew!  If this iron-nerved man feared a storm, then there was something about a storm to fear.

And suddenly, as the ground quaked under her horse’s feet, and all the sky grew black and crisscrossed by flaming streaks, and between thunderous reports there was a strange hollow roar sweeping down upon her, she realized how small was her knowledge and experience of the mighty forces of nature.  Then, with that perversity of character of which she was wholly conscious, she was humble, submissive, reverent, and fearful even while she gloried in the grandeur of the dark, cloud-shadowed crags and canyons, the stupendous strife of sound, the wonderful driving lances of white fire.