Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/78

 "Tonight we'll have steak — thick, like that — " Mrs. Toomey measured with her thumb and finger as she went into the kitchen.

Toomey eyed the codfish darkly when his wife placed it on the table.

" Sit down, Jap," she urged. " The tea will be steeped in just a second. Don't wait — " A scream completed the sentence.

Toomey overturned his chair as he rushed to the kitchen. He arrived in time to see the lid of the priceless heirloom disappearing in a puddle of pewter. It seemed to the Toomcys that the Fates had singled them out as special objects for their malevolence.

The wind continued to blow as though it meant never to stop. It was a wind of which the people of the East who speak awesomely of their own " gales " and ** temp- est " wot not.

This wind which had kept Prouty indoors for close to a week came out of a cloudless sky, save for a few innocent looking streaks on the western horizon. It had blown away everything that would move. All the loosePapers had sailed through the air to an unknown destination - Nebraska, perhaps — while an endless procession of tumble weed had rolled in the same direction from anapparently inexhaustible supply in the west.

Housewives who had watched their pile of tin cans move on to the next lot found their satisfaction shortlived, for as quickly they acquired the rubbish that belonged to their neighbor on the other side. Shingles flew off and chimney bricks, and ends of corrugated iron roofing slapped and banged as though frantic to be loose. Houses shivered on their foundations, and lesser buildings lay on their sides. Clouds of dust obscured the sun at