Morgan stabled his horse and went to the square, where many of the town's inhabitants were gathered, all faces tilted to watch the storm. Judge Thayer was there, glorifying in the success of his undertaking, sparing none of those who had mocked him for a sucker and a fool. A cool breath of reviving wind was moving, fresh, sweet, rain-scented; as hopeful, as life-giving, as a reprieve to one chained among faggots at the stake of intolerance. "It looks like you're going to win, Judge," Morgan said. "Win? I've won! Look at it, pourin' rain over at Glenmore, the advance of it not three miles from here! It'll be here inside of five minutes, rainin' pitchforks." But it did not happen so. The rain appeared to have taken to dallying on the way, in spite of the thickening of clouds over Ascalon. Straining faces, green-tinted in the gloomy shadow of the overhanging cloud, waited uplifted for the first drops of rain; the dark outriders of the storm wheeled and mingled, turned and rolled, low over the dusty roofs; lightning rived the rain curtain that swept the famished earth, so near at hand that the sensitive could feel it in their hair; deep thunder sent its tremor through the ground, jarring the windows of Ascalon that had looked in their day upon storms of human passion which were but insect strife to this. Yet not a drop of rain fell on roof, on trampled way, on waiting face, on outstretched hand, in all of Ascalon. Judge Thayer was seen hurrying from the square, making for home and the weather doctor, who was about to let the rain escape. "He's goin' to head it off," said one of the scoffers to Morgan, beginning to feel a return of his exultation. "It's goin' to miss us," said Druggist Gray, his head thrown back, his Adam's apple like an elbow of stovepipe in his thin neck. "We may get a good shower out of one end of it," Conboy still hoped, pulling for the rain as he might have boosted for a losing horse. "Nothing more than a sprinkle, if that much," said the station agent, shaking his head, which he had bared to the cool wind. "He's got him firin' up like he was tryin' to hive a swarm of bees," one reported, coming from the seat of scientific labors. "It's breakin', it's passin' by us--we'll not get a drop of it!" So it appeared. Overhead the swirling clouds were passing on; in the distance the thunder was fainter. The wind began to freshen from the track of the rain, the pigeons came out of the courthouse tower for a look around, light broke through the thinning clouds. Not more than a mile or two southward of Ascalon the rain was falling in a torrent, the roar of it still quite plain in the ears of those whose thirst for its cooling balm was to be denied. The rain was going on, after soaking and reviving Glenmore, which place Judge Thayer would have given a quarter of his possessions to have had it miss.