It was early dawn but such dark clouds obscured everything that the scouts thought it still was night.
“Bad storm blowin’, Mees’r Gilloy. Us hurry down f’om here,” said Tally, anxiously.
“All right—all up, and hurry away!” shouted Mr. Gilroy, running for the horses, to help Omney saddle them for the ride.
Soon thereafter, without stopping to attend to any of their customary toilets, the scouts were in the saddles and quickly following the guides down the trail on the opposite side from that they had mounted the day before.
The blackness was now so thick that it was difficult to see any one ten feet ahead, and the girls could not see the trail at all. Then Tally suddenly shouted a warning to those behind him.
“Huddle togedder—blizzer comin’ down now!”
And in a few seconds, an unexpected breaking of the clouds drove thick smothery, enveloping snow across the plateau. Even the heavy clouds seemed to choke everything in their folds. The wind, which blew a gale, uprooted trees and flicked them out of the way as if they were snips of paper. Gusts of the mad tornado tore off great masses of the dark clouds and, eddying them about, whirled the vapor out of them, away down the sides of the mountain. Trees, rocks, clods of earth, everything movable that presented an obstacle to the gale, was carried away like thistledown.
The poor horses and pack-mules crouched close together, with heads low, making of their bodies as scant a resistance as possible against the storm, and at the same time providing shelter, with their steaming bodies, for the human beings who huddled under them.
Then, as suddenly as the storm broke, it ceased. A weird light played over the plateau for a time, and Mr. Gilroy noted the worried expressions of the Indians.
“What now, Tally?”