Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/281

Rh force that almost sent her on her face. Her clothes clung to her, saturated and heavy, confining her limbs with their clammy hold. The water streamed off her hat and oozed out of her shoes. Once she was forced to take shelter on a door-step, under the jutting roof of a balcony. From this she crept onward, clinging close to the walls, down which water ran in wide rills, and where long strands of creepers struck her with their wet leaves. Once in the cottage, she threw her clothes out of the window on the balcony, and crept shivering to bed.

The storm wore itself away in the course of the week, to be followed by an interval of bright weather, and then by other storms. There were short ones, when the rain came and went with a sudden rolling up of clouds and breaks of blue, and the sun burst out hopefully and licked up the moisture. There were long ones, when the rain fell in warm, rustling floods, copious but gentle, that assuaged the earth's thirst and poured down in silvery lances from a low, swollen sky. There were blustering ones, that lashed the windows and threshed against the pavements, flooded the sewers, and tried to force an entrance through opened casements and doors left ajar. And then the great, conscientious, businesslike ones, which went on day after day, oblivious of anything but their duty to thoroughly saturate