“Her!” his father said contemptuously.  “She’ll never hear it.”  The wind suddenly ceased.  Not a breath stirred, only a continuous glare of lightning.  Then crack! crack! crack! on the roof, on the windows, everywhere, like bad boys throwing stones, heavier, harder, faster, until it was one beating, thundering roar.

It lasted but a few minutes, though it seemed longer to those who listened in terror in the kitchen.

The roar grew less and less and at last ceased altogether, and only a gentle rain was falling.

Sam Motherwell sat without speaking, “You have cheated the Lord all these years, and He has borne with you, trying to make you pay up without harsh proceedings”—­he found himself repeating the minister’s words.  Could this be what he meant by harsh proceedings?  Certainly it was harsh enough taking away a man’s crop after all his hard work.

Sam was full of self-pity.  There were very few men who had ever been treated as badly as he felt himself to be.

“Maybe there’ll only be a streak of it hailed out,” Tom said, breaking in on his father’s dismal thoughts.

“You’ll see in the mornin’,” his father growled, and Tom went back to bed.

When Pearl woke it was with the wind blowing in upon her; the morning breeze fragrant with the sweetness of the flowers and the ripening grain.  The musty odours had all gone, and she felt life and health in every breath.  The blackbirds were twittering in the oats behind the house, and the rising sun was throwing long shadows over the field.  Scattered glass lay on the floor.

“I knew the dear Lord would fix the gurms,” Pearl said as she dressed, laughing to herself.  But her face clouded in a moment.  What about the poppies?

Then she laughed again.  “There I go frettin’ again.  I guess the Lord knows they’re, there and He isn’t going to smash them if Polly really needs them.”

She dressed herself hastily and ran down the ladder and around behind the cookhouse, where a strange sight met her eyes.  The cookhouse roof had been blown off and placed over the poppies, where it had sheltered them from every hailstone.

Pearl looked under the roof.  The poppies stood there straight and beautiful, no doubt wondering what big thing it was that hid them from the sun.

When Tom and his father went out in the early dawn to investigate the damage done by the storm, they found that only a narrow strip through the field in front of the house had been touched.

The hail had played a strange trick; beating down the grain along this narrow path, just as if a mighty roller had come through it, until it reached the house, on the other side of which not one trace of damage could be found.

“Didn’t we get off lucky?” Tom exclaimed “and the rest of the grain is not even lodged.  Why, twenty-five dollars would cover the whole loss, cookhouse roof and all.”

His father was looking over the rippling field, green-gold in the rosy dawn.  He started uncomfortably at Tom’s words.