"It's just like some live thing," remarked Mary after a while. "I feel as if some terrible demon lived up in a cave in the mountain, and when he is angry he comes down and lashes the earth and shakes the mountain."
Mary's poetic notion of storms in that region was not so far removed from the Japanese legends.
"You struck the nail on the head that time, Miss Price," said Nicholas. "There is an extinct volcano over here in the northeast and in its side is a huge cavern. People around here used to believe that all these frightful storms issued from the cavern. Every spring and every fall there was a perfectly corking one that tore up the whole place, and they called the mountain 'Ni-Ko San,' or Two-Storm Mountain. Then an old party who was a saint, I believe, and very wise, placed a curse on the storm demon and named the place 'Nikko San,' Mountain of the Sun's Brightness."
"The demon seems to have returned," remarked Billie.
"Oh, he did. That was the point. The magic curse had to be repeated every year, and the saint gave the receipt to a priest and it was handed down from one generation to another in the priest's family for nearly nine hundred years, but the demon still pursued, as you have probably observed."
They were all silent for a while. Mary was making a picture in her mind of the aged priest in his white robes standing like a midget on the side of the vast mountain exorcising the storm king. That personage, she imagined, was a gigantic figure formed principally of black clouds with a terrifying human countenance. Every breath was a whirlwind or a hailstorm and when he struck the side of the mountain with his staff the lightning flashed—
Here Mary's thoughts were interrupted by just such a flash uncomfortably near.
Billie leaped to her feet.
"Oh, Nicholas," she cried, "do you think Papa could still be looking for me? Suppose he should be out now in all this frightful wind! I hadn't thought of it until this moment."
"He'll be all right, Miss Billie," answered Nicholas soothingly. "Don't you worry."