“Wait then.  Wait till after the storms.”

The purple cloud-bank darkened the lower edge of the setting sun, crept up and up, obscuring its fiery red heart, and finally passed over the last ruddy crescent of its upper rim.

The intense dead silence awakened to a long, low, rumbling roll of thunder.

“Oh!” cried Bess, nervously.

“We’ve had big black clouds before this without rain,” said Venters.  “But there’s no doubt about that thunder.  The storms are coming.  I’m glad.  Every rider on the sage will hear that thunder with glad ears.”

Venters and Bess finished their simple meal and the few tasks around the camp, then faced the open terrace, the valley, and the west, to watch and await the approaching storm.

It required keen vision to see any movement whatever in the purple clouds.  By infinitesimal degrees the dark cloud-line merged upward into the golden-red haze of the afterglow of sunset.  A shadow lengthened from under the western wall across the valley.  As straight and rigid as steel rose the delicate spear-pointed silver spruces; the aspen leaves, by nature pendant and quivering, hung limp and heavy; no slender blade of grass moved.  A gentle splashing of water came from the ravine.  Then again from out of the west sounded the low, dull, and rumbling roll of thunder.

A wave, a ripple of light, a trembling and turning of the aspen leaves, like the approach of a breeze on the water, crossed the valley from the west; and the lull and the deadly stillness and the sultry air passed away on a cool wind.

The night bird of the canyon, with clear and melancholy notes announced the twilight.  And from all along the cliffs rose the faint murmur and moan and mourn of the wind singing in the caves.  The bank of clouds now swept hugely out of the western sky.  Its front was purple and black, with gray between, a bulging, mushrooming, vast thing instinct with storm.  It had a dark, angry, threatening aspect.  As if all the power of the winds were pushing and piling behind, it rolled ponderously across the sky.  A red flare burned out instantaneously, flashed from the west to east, and died.  Then from the deepest black of the purple cloud burst a boom.  It was like the bowling of a huge boulder along the crags and ramparts, and seemed to roll on and fall into the valley to bound and bang and boom from cliff to cliff.

“Oh!” cried Bess, with her hands over her ears.  “What did I tell you?”

“Why, Bess, be reasonable!” said Venters.

“I’m a coward.”

“Not quite that, I hope.  It’s strange you’re afraid.  I love a storm.”

“I tell you a storm down in these canyons is an awful thing.  I know Oldring hated storms.  His men were afraid of them.  There was one who went deaf in a bad storm, and never could hear again.”

“Maybe I’ve lots to learn, Bess.  I’ll lose my guess if this storm isn’t bad enough.  We’re going to have heavy wind first, then lightning and thunder, then the rain.  Let’s stay out as long as we can.”