About mid-day Nighthawk danced back out of the storm ahead and dropped in beside Cameron's pony.
“A chinook coming,” said Raven. “Getting warmer, don't you notice?”
“No, I didn't notice, but now that you call attention to it I do feel a little more comfortable,” replied Cameron.
“Sure thing. Rain in an hour.”
“An hour? In six perhaps.”
“In less than an hour,” replied Raven, “the chinook will be here. We're riding into it. It blows down through the pass before us and it will lick up this snow in no time. You'll see the grass all about you before three hours are passed.”
The event proved the truth of Raven's prediction. With incredible rapidity the temperature continued to rise. In half an hour Cameron discarded his mitts and unbuttoned his skin-lined jacket. The wind dropped to a gentle breeze, swinging more and more into the southwest, and before the hour was gone the sun was shining fitfully again and the snow had changed into a drizzling rain.
The extraordinary suddenness of these atmospheric changes only increased the sense of phantasmic unreality with which Cameron had been struggling during the past thirty-six hours. As the afternoon wore on the air became sensibly warmer. The moisture rose in steaming clouds from the mountainsides, the snow ran everywhere in gurgling rivulets, the rivulets became streams, the streams rivers, and the mountain torrents which they had easily forded earlier in the day threatened to sweep them away.
The trader's spirits appeared to rise with the temperature. He was in high glee. It was as if he had escaped some imminent peril.
“We will make it all right!” he shouted to Little Thunder as they paused for a few moments in a grassy glade. “Can we make the Forks before dark?”