It was a hot afternoon by this time, and looked like a stormy evening.  The clouds were rolling up in the north and west in lofty thunderheads, pearl-white in the hot sun, with great blue valleys and gorges below, filled with shadows.  Virginia, in a fever of terror, spent a part of her time looking out at the hind-end of the wagon-cover for Gowdy and Pinck Johnson, and a part of it leaning over the back of the seat pleading with me to leave the road and hide her.  Presently the clouds touched the sun, and in a moment the day grew dark.  Far down near the horizon I could see the black fringe of the falling rain under the tumbling clouds, and in a quarter of an hour the wind began to blow from the storm, which had been mounting the sky fast enough to startle one.  The storm-cloud was now ripped and torn by lightning, and deep rumbling peals of thunder came to our ears all the time louder and nearer.  The wind blew sharper, and whistled shrilly through the rigging of my prairie schooner, there came a few drops of rain, then a scud of finer spray:  and then the whole plain to the northwest turned white with a driving sheet of water which came on, swept over us, and blotted everything from sight in a great commingling of wind, water, fire and thunder.

Virginia cowered on the bed, throwing the quilt over her.  My cattle turned their rumps to the storm and stood heads down, the water running from their noses, tails and bellies, and from the bows and yokes.  I had stopped them in such a way as to keep us as dry as possible, and tried to cheer the girl up by saying that this wasn’t bad, and that it would soon be over.  In half an hour the rain ceased, and in an hour the sun was shining again, and across the eastern heavens there was displayed a beautiful double rainbow, and a faint trace of a third.

“That means hope,” I said.

She looked at the wonderful rainbow and smiled a little half-smile.

“It doesn’t mean hope,” said she, “unless you can think out some way of throwing that man off our track.”

“Oh,” I answered, with the brag that a man likes to use when a helpless woman throws herself on his resources, “I’ll find some way if I make up my mind I don’t want to fight them.”

“You mustn’t think of that,” said she.  “You are too smart to be so foolish.  See how well you answered the questions of that man and woman.”

“And I didn’t lie, either,” said I, after getting under way again.

“Wouldn’t you lie,” said she, “for me?”

It was, I suppose, only a little womanly probe into character; but it thrilled me in a way the poor girl could not have supposed possible.

“I would do anything for you,” said I boldly; “but I’d a lot rather fight than lie.”

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