of stone at the base of his rock, and awaited the oncoming storms. He watched their courses appraisingly.
"I bet on the Stratton one," he said. "I give it five minutes."
The strange light grew more and more eerie. Sunshine overhead for the sun still rode in the last unclouded bit of blue. The atmosphere became more deeply, malevolently purple. The whole sweep of the horizon was now lost in the blurring torrents of rain that came marching forward, with their vans still distinctly marked. The side of each storm was cut as if with a sharp knife. The immediate foreground still caught and flung defiantly the sunshine against the encroaching violet The air was deathly quiet with the hushed, affrighted silence of nature in the face of a storm; every small winged thing had vanished; not even a blade of mountain grass so much as stirred. Then suddenly up from the gorge north of Monte Rosa a slight motion just agitated the forest leaves which had been
