"Acts like it's going to be a bad one," Old Heck observed, studying the cloud they all were watching.
"Wicked," Skinny said, "one of them mutterin' kind until it breaks and then all hell tears loose."
"If th' Ramblin' Kid is out in the sand-hills to-night he'll--"
A withering stream of fire poured from the cloud almost over their heads; it was accompanied by a crashing peal of thunder that rocked the earth under their feet and stopped the words on Old Heck's lips. The flame lighted the whole valley. They had an instant's glimpse of a writhing, overhanging curtain of dust and rain sweeping toward them. In the glare they saw a giant cottonwood that stood alone in the meadow west of the house reel and sway like a drunken thing and pitch to the earth.
"It's here! It struck that tree!" Old Heck yelled. "Run for the bunk-house, Skinny, maybe we can make it! You women go inside and shut the door!"
Carolyn June and Ophelia sprang--were blown almost--inside the house and slammed the door as another bolt fell, flooding the room with a blaze that made the light from the lamp on the reading table seem faint and dim. Old Heck and Skinny darted around the corner as the tempest pulled and tugged at the buildings of the Quarter Circle KT.
For an hour Ophelia and Carolyn June sat and listened to the storm and while it still raged went to bed.
Carolyn June fell asleep watching the incessant glare of the lightning as flash after flash filled the room with light and illumined the world outside, while the rain and wind lashed the trees in the garden near her window. Above the tumult the words of Old Heck: "If the Ramblin' Kid is out in the sand-hills to-night"--kept repeating themselves over and over in her mind. Try as she would, she could not shut out the picture of a slender young rider, alone, far out on the range in the storm-mad night, unsheltered from the fury and wrath of the elements.
When the storm broke over the Quarter Circle KT the Ramblin' Kid was twenty miles away following the Gold Dust maverick. Old Heck's surmise that he had gone in search of the outlaw filly was but half correct. It was not with the definite purpose of trying for the renegade mare that he had mounted Captain Jack and headed him toward the Narrows at the moment Carolyn June Dixon and Ophelia Cobb arrived at the ranch. Nor was it to escape meeting the women. Their coming meant nothing to the Ramblin' Kid.