With the others I tugged and kicked at the oxen, getting the thongs off the _yoke-skeis_ as best I could, till at length all were loose and galloping away to seek shelter under overhanging rocks or where they could in accordance with their instincts. The last two, the pole oxen—valuable beasts—were particularly difficult to free, as they were trying to follow their brethren and strained at the yokes so much that in the end I had to cut the _rimpis,_ as I could not get them out of the notches of the _yoke-skeis._ Then they tore off after the others, but did not get far, poor brutes, for presently I saw both of them—they were running together—go down as though they were shot through the heart. A flash had caught them; one of them never stirred again; the other lay on its back kicking for a few seconds and then grew as still as its yoke-mate. “And what did you say?” inquired Good in a reflective voice. “What would you have said, Good?” asked Allan severely, “if you had lost your best two oxen in such a fashion, and happened not to have a sixpence with which to buy others? Well, we all know your command of strong language, so I do not think I need ask you to answer.” “I should have said——” began Good, bracing himself to the occasion, but Allan cut him short with a wave of his hand. “Something about _Jupiter Tonans,_ no doubt,” he said. Then he went on. Well, what I said was only overheard by the recording angel, though perhaps Hans guessed it, for he screamed at me, “It might have been _us,_ Baas. When the sky is angry, it will have _something;_ better the oxen than us, Baas.” “The cave, you idiot!” I roared. “Shut your mouth and take us to the cave, if there is one, for here comes the hail.” Hans grinned and nodded, then hastened by a large hailstone which hit him on the head, began to skip up the hill at a surprising rate, beckoning to the rest of us to follow. Presently we came to a tumbled pile of rocks through which we dodged and scrambled in the gloom that now, when the hail had begun to fall, was denser than ever between the flashes. At the back of the biggest of these rocks Hans dived among some bushes, dragging me after him between two stones that formed a kind of natural gateway to a cavity beyond. “This is the place, Baas,” he said, wiping the blood that ran down his forehead from a cut in the head made by the hailstone. As he spoke, a particularly vivid flash showed me that we were in the mouth of a cavern of unknown size. That it must be large, however, I guessed from the echoes of the thunder that followed the flash, which seemed to reverberate in that hollow place from unmeasured depths in the bowels of the mountain. CHAPTER II. THE PICTURE IN THE CAVE