"See here! You're not eating a bite."
"I'm not hungry. I couldn't eat, to-night. Please—I'm perfectly happy. I feel like a slave at the great lord's table; all I care to do is look on." After a moment she continued: "It couldn't have been so bad to be a slave—a girl slave. Somebody owned them, anyhow; they belonged to their masters, body and soul, and that's something. Women are like that. They've got to belong to somebody to be happy."
Gray was a talkative man, therefore he argued this point until he began to suspect that his companion was not heeding his words so much as the sound of his voice. More plainly than before he realized that there was something about Allie to-night utterly strange and quite contrary to his conception of her, but, because he believed her to be unlike other women, he did not try to understand it.
During the night an explosive crash followed by a loud reverberation awoke Calvin Gray and brought him up sitting. His room was lit by white flickers, against which he saw that the rain still sheeted his windows; he fumbled for his watch and found that it was two o'clock. This was a storm, indeed, and he began to fear that this deluge might swell the waters to a danger point; therefore he rose, struck a light, and dressed himself. Sleep was out of the question, anyhow, amid such an uproar. As he stepped out upon the front porch, his attention was instantly drawn to a yellow glow in the west, a distant torch, the flame of which illuminated the angry night. He stared at it for a moment before he realized its meaning. A well was afire! Lightning had wrecked a derrick and ignited the stream of oil. No wonder, he told himself, for this field was dotted with towers well calculated to lead lightning out of the skies, and amid a play of destructive forces such as this nothing less than a miracle could have prevented something of the sort. But it was a pity, for yonder a small-sized fortune was going up in smoke.
By the next flare he saw that the waters had crept higher. They were nearly up to the porch floor now, and, obviously, they were still rising. That rabbit was crouched where he had last seen it, a wet ball of fur with round, black eyes. The heavens echoed almost constantly, now to a thick, distant rumble, again to an appalling din directly overhead; for seconds at a time there was light enough to read by. The house, Gray decided, was in no danger, except from a direct bolt, for the valley was nothing more than a shallow lake; nevertheless—
A blinding, blue-white streak came, and he counted the seconds before the sound reached him. Sound traveled something like a thousand feet a second, he reflected; that bolt must have struck about a mile distant. Nothing alarming about that, surely. A moment, then he blinked and rubbed his eyes, for out of the murk was born another bonfire like that to the westward.
Hearing an exclamation behind him, Gray turned to behold Allie
Briskow's dim figure in the door.
"Hello!" he cried, excitedly. "Did you see that? Yonder are two wells afire."
"I know. I haven't closed my eyes. You can see another one from my window." Allia snapped the light from a pocket flash upon Gray, and, noting that he was only partly clad, she urged him to come into the house. When he ignored the request she joined him, and together they stared at the mounting flames.
"Jove! That's terrible!" he muttered.