Of course, I could not refuse. We started on a run for Camp Cunningham, a mile or so down the river. Yet, though the distance was so small, we had reason to doubt that we could cover it. Half-way, a hailstone the size of a child’s fist went whistling over our heads, ricocheted along the sod in great bounds; then came another and another--the skirmish fire of the storm. The suggestive “thwuck” of these missiles as they took the ground made me draw in my head as far as possible--like a turtle. I was just wondering what effect one of them would have on the human body, when a big fellow smashed fairly against the side of Billy’s head--a sounding blow which knocked the sturdy little man staggering. “We’ve got to get out of this,” he said, grinding his teeth in pain, “or we’ll be slaughtered!” A trickle of blood from a cut in his head bore witness that this was not a figure of speech. Let any one who doubts the Lethal quality of a Dakota hail-storm stand out in the open while a dozen or so expert ball-pitchers open fire on him with pieces of ice, weighing up to half a pound (the actual conditions of the storms are sometimes a worse matter than this comes to), and I fancy he will soon be changed from a skeptic to a fanatic. If I had any doubts they were instantly removed by a rap on the arm which numbed it to the finger-tips. For a moment we hesitated, but it was too far back to the ranch, so we broke for the scant cover of some bullberry bushes on the hitherside of Cunningham’s coulée. As we flattened ourselves behind these the real storm was on us in a breath. We were stunned by the uproar; the all-pervading heavy drumming of rain and hail, and the hiss of their passage; the yelling and booming of the wind, and the thunder that smote the earth, crash upon crash, like the blows of a hammer. We did not think--we held on tight and waited. One could not see ten feet into the gray of falling ice and water, and the rush of it nearly took one’s senses away. It all but turned the level prairie into a seething lake, and the slopes into rapids. Suddenly the downpour ceased almost as abruptly as it began, and nothing remained but the wind. I say “nothing,” because that is our idiom. I do not use the word in a depreciatory sense, for we had full realization of what force there is in mere air in motion that morning. It swept across the prairie in one great tide of power. There was not a flutter nor break in it. It jammed us down in the mud, and then held us there. At first it seemed as if our heads would be whipped off our shoulders if we dared lift them up into the full swing of it. But this acme of energy passed at last, and we turned our eyes down the coulée to see how our friend had fared. Tent Cunningham had so far fulfilled its architect’s expectations. A swollen yellow river from the coulée washed its edge and it was plastered with mud by the hailstones, but otherwise uninjured.