“Is it early enough?” asked Ethel Blue.

Ethel Brown thought it was.

“But we’ll have to hurry,” she warned; “there’s an awfully black cloud over there.  It looks like a thunder storm.”

They scampered as fast as their legs would carry them and reached the farm in the increasing darkness, but before any rain had fallen.  They found all the bows and arrows standing in a trash basket which Roger had made for the dining room.

“Mr. Roger stood them up in that so the children wouldn’t be apt to touch ’em,” explained Moya.

Dicky sat down on the hearth and set to work on the arrow which he recognized as his because of its greater length.

“You’ll have to hurry or we’ll get caught,” warned his sister.

“We ought to start right off,” urged Ethel Blue.  “We’ll have to run for it even if we go now.”

Mrs. Schuler brought in the cape of her storm coat.

“Take this for Dicky,” she said.  “If it does break before you get home it will rain hard and his rompers won’t be any protection at all.”

“Put it on now, Dicky,” commanded Ethel Brown.  “Stand up.”

Dicky rose reluctantly.

“Why do you fill up your pocket with such stuff,” inquired Ethel impatiently.  “There, throw it into the fireplace—­gravel, toadstools, old brass,” she catalogued contemptuously, and Dicky, swept on by her eagerness, obediently cast his treasures among the soft pine boughs that filled the wide, old fireplace.

“I’ll clear them away,” promised Mrs. Schuler.  “Hurry,” and she fairly turned them out of the house.

“You made me throw away my shiny things,” complained Dicky as they ran down the lane as fast as they could go.

“Never mind; you’d have jounced them out of your pocket anyway, running like this,” and Dicky, taking giant strides as his sister and his cousin held a hand on each side, was inclined to think that he would be lucky if he were not jounced put of his clothes before he got home.

CHAPTER XIV

THE STORM

After all, they need not have jerked poor Dicky over the ground at such a rapid pace for the storm, though it grumbled and roared at a distance, did not break until a late hour in the night.  Then it came with a vengeance and made up for its indecision by behaving with real ferocity.

To the women at Rose House, accustomed to the city, where Nature’s sights and sounds are deadened by the number of the buildings and the narrowness of the streets, the uproar was terrifying.  Flash after flash lit up their rooms so that the roosters and puppies and pigs and cows on the curtains stood out clearly in the white light.  Crash after crash sent them cowering under the covers of their beds.  The children woke and added their cries to the tumult.

As the electric storm swept away into the distance the wind rose and howled about the house.  Shutters slammed; chairs were over-turned on the porch; a brick fell with a thud from the top of the chimney to the roof; another fell down the chimney into the fireplace where its arrival was followed by a roar that seemed to shake the old building on its foundation.