Instead of mountains came a cloud. Soon the whole horizon was black. I knew what that meant. It meant "laying up" for a day or two and looking round for a good place to lay up at "right slick." But I was in the midst of nowhere. Not a house or a shack could be seen anywhere. Even as I scanned the country the rain came. The road was not sandy enough for it to soak through. Instead it absorbed it greedily and changed to mud. I rode as far as riding was practicable and then I pushed. In a few miles I came to a little wooden shack at the side of the road near a large dyke already swollen with rain. The shack looked as though it had recently been thrown together with matchboarding and liberal use had been made of tarpaulins as curtains instead of doors. I left Lizzie in the road and went to explore.
[CHAPTER XII]
THE ROYAL GORGE OF ARKANSAS
There were two huts. I drew aside the tarpaulin and peered in one of them. It was stuffy and dark and filled with beds, tables, cupboards and piles of odd furniture and miscellaneous clothing, boots, blankets and mattresses. In a clearing amongst the general debris sat a middle-aged woman on the top of a trunk before a sewing machine.
"Hope I'm not intruding, but is there anywhere I can get out of the rain until it goes off?"
From a heap of assorted oddments under my very nose came a voice, a man's voice.
"Sure; come right in, brother. You're welcome to any shelter we can give you. Guess you've gotten a little wet out there? Jim, go you into the kitchen and bring a chair for this gentleman."
A pile of musty books rocked on its foundations in another corner and a young lad of fifteen or sixteen rose as if from out of the earth.
We talked for an hour, but the storm showed no signs of abating. The wind whistled through the tarpaulin doorway and gloomy blobs of water dropped from the ceiling from time to time on all and sundry.