By that time he noted that the sun had gone out.  Driving up from the west was a mass of storm clouds.  He unlocked a door from which he could look up the river, and the wind that was riding softly in advance of the storm ruffled his hair and cooled his face.  In it he caught again the old fancy—­the smells of the vast reaches of unpeopled prairie beyond the rim of the forest, and the luring chill of the distant mountain tops.  Always storm that came down with the river brought to him voice from the river’s end.  It came to him from the great mountains that were a passion with him; it seemed to thunder to him the old stories of the mightiest fastnesses of the Rockies and stirred in him the child-bred yearning to follow up his beloved river until he came at last to the mystery of its birthplace in the cradle of the western ranges.  And now, as he faced the storm, the grip of that desire held him like a strong hand.

The sky blackened swiftly, and with the rumbling of far-away thunder he saw the lightning slitting the dark heaven like bayonets, and the fire of the electrical charges galloped to him and filled his veins.  His heart all at once cried out words that his lips did not utter.  Why should he not answer the call that had come to him through all the years?  Now was the time—­and why should he not go?  Why tempt fate in the hazard of a great adventure where home and friends and even hope were dead to him, when off there beyond the storm was the place of his dreams?  He threw out his arms.  His voice broke at last in a cry of strange ecstasy.  Not everything was gone!  Not everything was dead!  Over the graveyard of his past there was sweeping a mighty force that called him, something that was no longer merely an urge and a demand but a thing that was irresistible.  He would go!  Tomorrow—­today—­tonight—­he would begin making plans!

He watched the deluge as it came on with a roar of wind, a beating, hissing wall under which the tree tops down in the edge of the plain bent their heads like a multitude of people in prayer.  He saw it sweeping up the slope in a mass of gray dragoons.  It caught him before he had closed the door, and his face dripped with wet as he forced the last inch of it against the wind with his shoulder.  It was the sort of storm Keith liked.  The thunder was the rumble of a million giant cartwheels rolling overhead.

Inside the bungalow it was growing dark as though evening had come.  He dropped on his knees before the pile of dry fuel in the fireplace and struck a match.  For a space the blaze smoldered; then the birch fired up like oil-soaked tinder, and a yellow flame crackled and roared up the flue.  Keith was sensitive in the matter of smoking other people’s pipes, so he drew out his own and filled it with Brady’s tobacco.  It was an English mixture, rich and aromatic, and as the fire burned brighter and the scent of the tobacco filled the room, he dropped into Brady’s big lounging chair and stretched out