The weather was not unfavorable, but in the afternoon the older trail men began to look at the sky. There was a dull, lifeless feeling in the air. The wind had ceased. A bank of clouds lay black in the lower west.
“It may rain,” said Jim Nabours, coming over to Taisie’s near-by camp after the herd was turned off to bed down. “You and your women, Miss Taisie, had better sleep in the carts to-night. I hope to the Lord our little dogies won’t take a notion to run again to-night! This herd’s getting plumb spoiled. Before long they’ll run every time a feller lights a cigarrito.”
“Look as that lightning in west, Jim,” remarked Cal Dalhart. “It’s worse than cigarritos. I hope she’ll pass around.”
But the prairie storm did not intend to pass around them. They lay directly in the center of a low barometer. The air was oppressively hot, so still that a leaf would have fallen straight to the ground; yet the face of the western cloud was lit with continuous electrical discharges. An uneasiness came into the air that even the cattle felt. The greenhead flies had swarmed in the grass all day. Now clouds of mosquitoes made life a burden for men and beasts. It was hard to bed the cattle down.
“Set the wagon tongues on the North Star, boys, while you can see it,” said Jim Nabours. The dark cloud was steadily rising. “This is going to be one hell of a night. You’ll need your slickers. Look yonder! I’ve heard tell about that sort of a thing, but I’ve never saw it afore.”
He pointed toward the bed ground. In the strange electrical condition of the air the horns of each steer showed two little balls of flame, thousands of them in the total, a strange and awesome sight in the gloom. As the night watch rode later they saw electricity on the tips of their horses’ ears. It almost dripped from the air; the earth seemed bathed in it.
At midnight the stars passed away under a high vanguard of scurrying clouds. The strange tensity in the air increased as continuous rolls of thunder came closer.
“We’ve all got to get on the herd,” said Nabours finally. “There’s going to be trouble.”
The men all mounted their night horses and made ready. There came to them all a feeling of pygmylike incompetency as the edge of the storm extended itself as though with some inner propelling power. The wind had not yet begun. They knew they were in for one of the terrible electrical storms of the prairies.
The steady flashes of lightning along the cloud face broke into jagged forks. Intermittent among these came short bolts of the chain lightning. A smell of sulphur filled the air. A strange blue tint seemed to come into some of the lightning bolts. At times there seemed to be a continuous sheet of fire along the grass tops towards the west. This later was broken by balls of fire which rolled along the ground, exploding like bombshells. There seemed nothing in the air except light; sparks and whirls and wheels of light, like so many pin wheels. A strange, alarming, oppressive feel, as though of a settling fog, came upon them all. If a man reached a hand to his hat brim the electricity literally dripped from it.