“Let’s go and get some now,” said Pierrette.  “We can take the clothes-basket and bring back enough to last all day.”

Pierre went for the basket, and the two children started down the road which ran beside the meadow toward the camp.  It was so early that not another soul in the village was up.  Even the rooster had gone to sleep again after his misguided crowing.  One pale little star still winked in the morning sky, but the birds were already winging and singing, as the children, carrying the basket between them, set forth upon their quest.

When they reached the brook, they set down the basket, took off their wooden shoes, and, wading into the stream, began gathering great bunches of the cress.  They were so busy filling their basket that they did not notice the sun had gone out of sight behind a cloud-bank, and that the air was still with that strange breathless stillness that precedes a storm.  It was not until a loud clap of thunder, accompanied by a flash of light ning, suddenly broke the silence, that they knew the storm was upon them.  When they looked up, the meadow grasses were bend ing low before a sudden wind, and the trees were swaying to and fro as if in terror, against the background of an angry sky.

“Wow!” said Pierre.  “I guess we’re in for it!  We can’t possibly get home before it breaks.”

“Oh,” gasped Pierrette, as another peal of thunder shook the air, “I don’t want to stay out in it.  What shall we do?”

Pierre looked about him.  A little distance beyond the brook, toward the camp, there was a straw-stack with a rough straw-thatched shed beside it, half hidden under a group of small trees.  Pierre pointed to it.  “We’ll leave the basket here,” he said, “and hide under the straw until the storm is over.  Then we can come back again, get it, and go home.”

Another clap of thunder, louder still, sent them flying on their way, and they did not speak again until they were under the shelter of the shed.  The first big drops fell as they reached it, and then the storm broke in a fury of wind and water.  The children cowered against the stack itself as far as possible out of reach of the driving rain.

They had been there but a few moments, when they heard a new sound in addition to the roar of the wind and the patter of the rain upon the leaves.  It was the dull tread of heavy footsteps, and they were surprised to see a man running toward the straw-stack, his head bent to shield his face from the rain, under the brim of an old hat.  His clothes were rough and unkempt, and altogether his appearance was so forbidding that the children instinctively dived under the straw at the edge of the stack like frightened mice, and burrowed backward until they were completely hidden, though they could still peep out through the loose straw.