The sunlight, gleaming through the crystal, made a halo of light around the negro's head.
"Don't!" said Ross, laying his hand on Anton's shoulder. "There's mighty few of us that'll ever get the chance to die like Dan'l."
CHAPTER IX
THE TRAIL OF THE HURRICANE
"Two o'clock, Tuesday morning, August the seventeenth, Nineteen Hundred and Fifteen!
"Slowly down and across the white, faintly ruled paper wrapped about the revolving drum, I watched the long-shanked, awkward pen of the barograph in our Weather Bureau station at Galveston. In the jerky, scrawling fashion of a child writing his first copy on a slate, I saw the pen gradually draw what looked like a rough profile map—a long declining plateau, a steep and then a steeper slope, a jagged ugly valley—
"The valley of the shadow of death!"
The boys clustered closer round the speaker, the man who had seen and lived through, the Galveston hurricane.
"We knew well, the three of us in the Weather Bureau," he went on, "that descending zig-zag line meant that the hurricane, then beginning to rage over our heads, would increase in fury and in ruin, until the other wall of that strangely-drawn valley should begin to form under the halting pen. Thus we watched and waited.