“Don’t know but it is,” acquiesced Pusey. “Heat don’t bother me much, though.”
The sky was black overhead, not a star was to be seen. In the west, now and then, a glare of heat lightning trembled over all the sky, photographing for them instantly the strange roofs, the strange chimneys, the black outline of strange trees, beginning to lurch slowly like elephants, in the little wind that stirred.
“I believe there’s a breeze,” Garwood said. He was still sniffing the night air like an animal. “Rain, too, in that air, eh?”
Pusey tapped along on the old brick sidewalk with his little stick and said nothing.
“Have a cigar?” said Garwood presently.
“Don’t care if I do,” said Pusey, throwing away the one he was smoking. They paused, a match scratched on a heel threw the ruddier lightning of its own tiny flame upon their faces and then their cigars glowed in the darkness, and left behind them a fragrance that no other cigar in Pekin could exhale, nor any perhaps, outside a certain cigar store in Pennsylvania Avenue, where Garwood owed a bill.
“Let’s go toward the river, Pusey,” said Garwood. “I fancy it’ll be cooler there.”
“Don’t care if I do,” said Pusey.
The storm had come at last; the long heat was broken. Overhead the thunder pealed up and down its whole wide diapason, booming now and then with new explosions, then rolling away in awful melody into some distant quarter of the broken heavens. The lightning crackled in long streams of fire that zigzagged down the black sky, reaching from heaven to earth, and in its after-glare the clouds that flew so low showed their gray scud. The rain fell with a dead incessant drumming on the earth, warm as new milk, and all green things stirred rapturously as they drank it in.