Beyond the house, at the edge of the knoll-top, a corral with open sides and a heavy-thatched roof housed the saddle and workhorses. The Cains' one concession to modernity--the garage, and a small hangar for Dan's sport plane--stood well beyond the foot of the knoll. In the evening, lolling in the wicker chairs of the veranda, one could not see the garage, and if the traffic on the main road chanced to be dull, one might go back in fancy half a century, to when this magic land must have been at its best. It was still very beautiful. Sunlight and color and warmth. But the blight, here as everywhere else in the northern hemisphere, was already at hand. "To-morrow," said Dan, "we'll ride over to Arecibo. Want to, Hulda?" "On horseback?" "Yes," he said. "Of course. You don't think, knowing you as I do, I'd insult you with a car or a plane?" Hulda can drive a car or handle a plane as well as any one. But for all our Dutch stolidity, there is a strain of romance in us. Hulda's greatest pleasure was riding astride the little Porto Rican horses; and though there seems nothing hotter on earth than a white sand road at noon in the cane fields, Hulda would always ride through them with delight. "Good," she said, and laughed. "Señor Dan, that will please me much." But her mocking laugh was forced, for this was February 10th of that fateful winter. An unknown fear lay upon Hulda, as on us all; and the cane fields on the way to Arecibo might have been hot other years, but they certainly were not hot now. This evening, for instance, as Mr. and Mrs. Cain and their son Dan, and Hulda, sat in the living room of the bungalow, the shutters were all closed and a huge brazier of charcoal burned beside them for warmth. Already it had smoked up the ceiling; and Mr. Cain, despairing that the cool spell would soon moderate, promised his wife for the tenth time that he would get a stove from San Juan and rig it up all shipshape with a pipe--"Like in Vermont, eh, Ellen? Hulda, I'm going to radio your father to-morrow. This local weather bureau's too dumb to tell me anything. Your father ought to know--he's a scientist; they're supposed to know everything." The Cains were what, a decade or so ago, were called plain folks. New Englanders, Cain had made his money on a Vermont farm. Their only son Dan had grown to manhood; graduated from college with one of the new agricultural degrees; and partly because of Mrs. Cain's frail health they had taken Dan and established themselves in Porto Rico. Dan now was the brains and the energy of the business. I had gone to school with Dan Cain. A big, rangy, husky six-footer, with crisp, curly brown hair, blue eyes and a laughing boyish sun-tanned face.