But that was premature. Far from missing her, the blow had at last got a shoulder under the bottom of my poor little skiff and over she came! By Thor's grace she hung there, instead of going on rolling; but those fifteen or twenty gallons of slightly liquefied hail seemed to drain straight from the base of the North Pole. I tried to continue registering nonchalance and _sang froid_, but accomplished an only too literal rendition of the latter. I was still spitting sand and quavering "_There goes Thor's own Hammer_" when the walls of my hail-hole began to brighten and recede--and presently it was a warm, soft summer afternoon again. That three-mile-wide Juggernaut of Primal Chaos was rolling away straight across those verdant irrigated farms of the Yellowstone Project and leaving desolation in its wake. I only hope that it chastened the mendacious ferryman at Riverview and made a sharp right-angle bend round the Patterson farm above Savage. It was a considerably altered world that met the owl-like blink of my still somewhat sand-filled eyes. The big red barn and the silo still loomed against the sky-line above the bluff, and most of the other houses and barns were still standing. All of the windmills had slipped out of the picture, however, and many lesser wooden structures. Trees were broken off or uprooted in all directions. But the strangest effect was from the practical disappearance of the thousands of acres of standing crops--beaten into the earth by the hail. There, I knew, lay the real tragedy of Thor's little field-day. Quite likely no human beings had been killed--but how many human hopes? The American public like to think and talk in millions. Very well. There went a natural mill that was grinding up corn and alfalfa and clover and wheat at the rate of a million dollar's worth a minute. Who said the mills of the gods grind slowly? Much as I was longing for the cheering propinquity of fellow creatures just at that moment, I hated the thought of intruding upon the blank despair that I knew had preceded me as a guest in the farmhouse beyond the big red barn.