A large part of the herd was lying down. Although stars flecked the sky quite thickly the whole valley in which the cattle fed seemed over-mantled with a pall of blackness. Shapes loomed through this with sudden, uncertain outline.
“My! it’s shivery, isn’t it?” whispered Ruth.
“There won’t nothing bite us,” chuckled the Western girl. “Huh! what’s that?”
The sudden change in her voice made Ruth giggle nervously. “That’s somebody riding ahead of us. You’re not afraid, Nita?”
“Well, I should say not!” cried the other, very boldly. “It’s one of the boys. Hello, Darcy! I thought you were a ghost.”
“You gals better git back to the camp,” grunted the cowboy. “We’re going to have a shower later. I feel it in the air.”
“We’re neither sugar nor salt,” declared Jane Ann. “We’ve both got slickers on our saddles.”
“Ridin’ herd at night ain’t no job for gals,” said Darcy. “And that cloud yander is goin’ ter spit lightnin’.”
“He’s always got a grouch about something. I never did like old Darcy,” Jane Ann confided to her friend.
But there was a general movement and confusion in the herd before the girls had ridden two miles. The cattle smelled the storm coming and, now and then, a faint flash of lightning penciled the upper edge of the cloud that masked the Western horizon.