Presently a breeze sprang up and moaned its way through the trees, and Nealie decided, with nervous haste, that it was time to be moving on. She had a great horror of thunderstorms, although she mostly kept it to herself, and to-day she was vaguely oppressed by a brooding sense of coming disaster, which was doubtless the effect of the electricity in the air.
The way at this part was very solitary. Once they passed a bark-roofed hut standing close to the road; but when they knocked at the door they found that no one was at home, and so went on their way, by no means certain that they were taking the right direction, for although the route lay clear enough before them on paper, in actual fact it was very hard to find, especially here, where there were so many roads and beginnings of roads that did not show upon the map.
After some consultation they took the road which seemed the best and the most used, and, following it, arrived in time on very high ground, from whence they had a fine view over a great stretch of country, dotted here and there with little townships and solitary stations, a rich and fertile land apparently, most of it being under close cultivation.
Thunder grumbled in the west, and the lightning played fitfully along the distant horizon.
"There is Hammerville!" cried Sylvia, flinging out her hand in the direction where tall chimneys stood outlined against a copper-hued sky.
"What a long way off!" cried Nealie, with a new note of dismay in her voice. She had thought that it would be possible to reach the goal of their journeying before the storm broke, but those chimneys were at least eight or ten miles away, and Rocky was showing signs of being nearly done up, for the hills had been heavier than usual, and the heat had been enough to try the mettle of the strongest horse.
"We had better camp for the night in the first convenient place, and then to-morrow we can arrive in style," said Sylvia, who was quite pink with excitement at the thought that when those distant chimneys were reached she would see her father again.
"I suppose that will be better; but, oh, I had so hoped that we should have reached home to-night, so that Rupert would not have to sleep on the ground any more! I am so worried about him," said Nealie, who had jumped down from the wagon, and was standing in the road trying to make up her mind which was the best pitch for a camp, always a time of anxiety for her since that night when the stampeding cattle had bowled the wagon over in their mad rush down the steep hillside.
"Let the boys have the wagon to-night, and we will sleep underneath. I should love it!" cried Sylvia, clapping her hands and whirling round on the tips of her toes, bowing to an imaginary audience, then giving a sideway skip to show the lightness of her poise.
But at that moment there was a crackle of thunder right above their heads, a blaze of lightning, and then a downpour of rain, as if the roll of the thunder had opened the floodgates of the clouds. It was no longer a question of where to camp or where to sleep. They just had to crowd into the wagon and stay there until the tempest had spent itself.