Most of the party had now deserted the spectacle, in deference to a timely admonition as to the fate of the horses picketed on the "bald," and their peculiar susceptibility to the fear of lightning. When the progress of the surveying again brought its adherents to the verge of the mountain and an extended outlook over the valley, there remained only the two men from Panther Flats, Rodolphus Ross, Cap'n Lucy, the chain-bearers, the surveyor, Luther, and the owner of the tract at whose instance the processioning was made. As they looked out over the gray valley, distinct under the sombre sky, as though only color, and not light, were withdrawn,--Cap'n Lucy's cabin, the inclosures, the grim black crags beyond, the smouldering mass of the ruins of the burnt building, even the shanties of the workmen in the gorge at the foot of the cliffs, all perfectly distinguishable in their varied interpretation of gray and brown and blurring unnamed gradations of neutral tones, all overhung by the storm-cloud definitely and darkly purplish-black, with now and again, one knew not how, fleeting lurid green reflections,--Kenniston, brisk and dapper, lightly tapping his spurred boots with his riding-whip, smiling debonairly, but with a dangerous sarcastic gleam in his fiery eyes, stepped up to the surveyor. He carried his field-glass in one hand. "Now, if you will come a few paces this way,--and you, colonel," in parenthesis to poor Cap'n Lucy,--"and use your telescope, you are obliged to see that if you run out the line seventeen hundred poles to the north, according to the deed, you will go beyond the site of the hotel. I seem to have built my house on the colonel's land. It was _your_ house that was destroyed, colonel. Let me beg you to accept my condolences,--ha, ha, ha!" A flash brighter than all that had preceded it, and his satiric laughter was lost in the roll and the reverberation of the thunder. A sudden darkening overspread the landscape, like a visible thickening of the clouds; the form of a horse darted along the verge of the precipice, so swift, so gigantic, defined against the green suffusions of that purple-black storm-cloud, that it seemed like the materialization of the hero of some equine fable. A wild cry went up that the horses had broken loose, and were stampeding through the woods. A terrible wrenching, riving sound followed another flash, and they could see a stricken tree on the slope below, in the instant before the blinding descent of the torrents. The wind rose with a wild, screaming cry; the forests bent and writhed; no one of the party could discern his neighbor's face; and, despite the pluck of the surveyor, the processioning of the Kenniston tract remained unfinished. XIII.