Nepeese shivered and rose to her feet.  For the first time Baree got up, and he stood close at her side.  Above them a flash of lightning cut the clouds like a knife of fire, followed in an instant by a terrific crash of thunder.  Baree shrank back as if struck a blow.  He would have slunk into the shelter of the brush wall of the wigwam, but there was something about the Willow as he looked at her which gave him confidence.  The thunder crashed again.  But he retreated no farther.  His eyes were fixed on Nepeese.

She stood straight and slim in that gathering gloom riven by the lightning, her beautiful head thrown back, her lips parted, and her eyes glowing with an almost eager anticipation—­a sculptured goddess welcoming with bated breath the onrushing forces of the heavens.  Perhaps it was because she was born during a night of storm.  Many times Pierrot and the dead princess mother had told her that—­how on the night she had come into the world the crash of thunder and the flare of lightning had made the hours an inferno, how the streams had burst over their banks and the stems of ten thousand forest trees had snapped in its fury—­and the beat of the deluge on their cabin roof had drowned the sound of her mother’s pain, and of her own first babyish cries.

On that night, it may be, the Spirit of Storm was born in Nepeese.  She loved to face it, as she was facing it now.  It made her forget all things but the splendid might of nature.  Her half-wild soul thrilled to the crash and fire of it.  Often she had reached up her bare arms and laughed with joy as the deluge burst about her.  Even now she might have stood there in the little open until the rain fell, if a whine from Baree had not caused her to turn.  As the first big drops struck with the dull thud of leaden bullets about them, she went with him into the balsam shelter.

Once before Baree had passed through a night of terrible storm—­the night he had hidden himself under a root and had seen the tree riven by lightning; but now he had company, and the warmth and soft pressure of the Willow’s hand on his head and neck filled him with a strange courage.  He growled softly at the crashing thunder.  He wanted to snap at the lightning flashes.  Under her hand Nepeese felt the stiffening of his body, and in a moment of uncanny stillness she heard the sharp, uneasy click of his teeth.  Then the rain fell.

It was not like other rains Baree had known.  It was an inundation sweeping down out of the blackness of the skies.  Within five minutes the interior of the balsam shelter was a shower bath.  After half an hour of that torrential downpour, Nepeese was soaked to the skin.  The water ran in little rivulets down her body.  It trickled in tiny streams from her drenched braids and dropped from her long lashes, and the blanket under her became wet as a mop.  To Baree it was almost as bad as his near-drowning in the stream after his fight with Papayuchisew, and he snuggled closer and closer under the sheltering arm of the Willow.  It seemed an interminable time before the thunder rolled far to the east, and the lightning died away into distant and intermittent flashings.  Even after that the rain fell for another hour.  Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.