She began to laugh, and then stopped, looking at him half-incredulously.
“You don’t appear to mind it much, at least.”
“No? Well, you see it’s happened so often before that I’m used to it. Good Lord! it seems to me that I’ve left a trail of ineffectual dollars all over the West!”
“You do mind it—a great deal!” exclaimed Margaret, impulsively putting a hand upon his bridle. “Please tell me all about it. We’re good friends—the very best, aren’t we?—but you’ve told me hardly anything about your life.”
“There’s nothing interesting about it; nothing but looking for easy money and not finding it,” replied Elliott. He was scrutinizing the sky ahead. “Don’t you think we had better turn back? Look at those clouds.”
The firmament had darkened to the zenith with a livid purple tinge low in the west, and the wind was blowing in jerky, powerful gusts. A growl of thunder rumbled overhead.
“It’s too early for a twister, and I don’t mind rain. I’ve nothing on that will spoil,” said Margaret, almost abstractedly. She had scarcely spoken when there was a sharp patter, and then a blast of drops driven by the wind. A vivid flash split the clouds, and with the instantaneous thunder the patter of the rain changed to a rattle, and the black road whitened with hail. The horses plunged as the hard pellets rebounded from hide and saddle.
“We must get shelter. The beasts won’t stand this,” cried Elliott, reining round. The lumps of ice drove in cutting gusts, and the frightened horses broke into a gallop toward the city. For a few moments the storm slackened; then a second explosion of thunder seemed to bring a second fusilade, driving almost horizontally under the violent wind, stinging like shot.
Across an unfenced strip of pasture Elliott’s eye fell upon the Salt Lake spur of the Union Pacific tracks, where a mile of rails is used for the storage of empty freight-cars. He pulled his horse round and galloped across the intervening space, with Margaret at his heels, and in half a minute they had reached the lee of the line of cars, where there was shelter. He hooked the bridles over the iron handle of a box-car door that stood open, and scrambled into the car, swinging Margaret from her saddle to the doorway.
It was a perfect refuge. The storm rattled like buckshot on the roof and swept in cloudy pillars across the Salt Lake, where the wild ducks flew to and fro, quacking from sheer joy, but the car was clean and dry, slightly dusted with flour. They sat down in the door with their feet dangling out beside the horses, that shivered and stamped at the stroke of chance pellets of hail.