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Rh bungalow to hear one another speak. The girl cast a piteous look of appeal toward Keith, and he put a protecting arm round her.

Then the great wind swept over them. The house literally bent before the blast, and rocked on its foundations. Keith fully expected to see it lifted up bodily and hurled, lightly as an empty eggshell, across the compound, but by some freakish chance the place was spared that fate. The inferno outside lasted several minutes, the rush of the hurricane being indistinguishable from the rattle of the thunder. At last it passed, leaving in its trail only the heavy electrical discharges and the torrential tropic rain.

"This just about settles things for me, I fancy," Chester declared between the crashes of thunder. Two years' work, pretty nearly, must have been wiped out by that wind. I'll bet there isn't a tree left standing in the one-year and two-year patches."

Keith nodded lugubriously. He knew that not only the young trees must have suffered in such a tearing, sweeping onslaught.

"I wonder what the dickens ever made me come to this hole—and stay here when I'd arrived!" said the planter savagely. "Swollen head and obstinacy, I suppose! D'you know, I actually fancied I knew more about plantation work than that old nigger whom Isa murdered. Time after time he warned me the place was no good, but I couldn't