As the evening wore on the heat grew more and more oppressive. The wilted audience passed languidly from freak to freak, mopping their red faces and tugging at tight collars. Children cried fretfully, monotonously; women reproved them with high, heat-maddened voices; Jan, the giant, fainted while Gus was ballyhooing him, and it took six “white hopes” to carry him to his tent. At eleven o’clock, when Gus had just started his last “spiel” of the evening, a terrified black man, with eyes rolling and sweat pouring down his face, staggered into the tent, bawling: “Awful storm’s blowin’ up, folks! Look lak a cyclone! Run for yo’ lives! Tents ain’t safe! Oh, mah Gawd!” The storm broke with such sudden and devastating fury that the performers in the Palace of Wonders tent had little time to obey the “white hope’s” frantic bellow of warning. The terrified audience milled like stampeded cattle, choking up both exits of the tent, that leading out into the midway, and the flap at the back of the tent through which performers passed in and out between shows. At each exit the fear-crazed carnival visitors were assaulted by a dazing impact of wind and hail and rain, driven back into the tent. Sally was fighting her way toward the “alley” exit, her frail, small body hurling itself futilely against men who had lost all thought of chivalry, knew only that death threatened. The region was notorious for its cyclones, and the horror of such a calamity was stamped on every pallid face. Children screamed; women shrilled for help, called frantically for their offspring separated from them in that mad rush for the exits. Sally had almost won to the alley exit when she remembered “Pitty Sing,” the midget, tiny, helpless Miss Tanner, who was paying her to carry her to and from the tent, who must even now be cowering in her baby-chair, unable even to reach the ground without assistance. It was not quite so hard to push her way back into the center of the tent; crazed men and women offered little resistance to anyone who was so foolish as to tempt death under a collapsed tent. She had almost reached the midget’s platform when she suddenly felt herself lifted into a pair of strong arms, swung high above the heads of the last of the crowd that was battling its way to the exits. Her cry was instinctive, unreasoning, direct from her heart: “David! Oh, David!” A mocking laugh answered her and she squirmed in the man’s arms so that she could see his face. It was not David at all, but the man whom “Enid” had called “Van.” His face was laughing, gay, mocking, untouched by the shameful pallor of fear; exultant, rather, in the excitement of the storm. His dark eyes were wide, shining even through the fitful darkness made by the flickering of the crazily swinging gas jets. “Isn’t it glorious?” he challenged her, above the uproar of wind, rain, hail and the frightened animal sounds of human beings in fear of death.