The next minute she was gone and as Champers closed and locked his doors he said to himself, "She does her work like a hero and never will have any credit for it, 'cause she's not a pioneer nor a soldier. But she has saved more than one poor fellow snared into that joint I winked at for years." Then, obedient to her urging, he followed the longer, hotter road toward the Jacobs' stock ranch bordering on Little Wolf Creek. Meantime, John Jacobs inspected his property, forgetful of the intense heat and the coming storm, his mind full of a strange foreboding. At the top of the hill above where the road wound down through deep shadows he sat a long while on his horse. "I wonder what makes me so lonely this evening," he mused. "I'm not of a lonely nature, nor morose, thank the Lord! There's no telling why we do or don't want to do things. I wonder where Champers is. He ought to be coming up pretty soon. I wonder if I hadn't had that dream two nights ago about that picture I saw in a book, when I was a little chap, if I'd had this fool's cowardice about being out here alone today. And what was it that made me look over all those papers in my vault box last night? I have helped Careyville some, and the library I built will have a good endowment when I'm gone, and so will the children's park, and the Temperance Societies. Maybe I've not lived in vain, if I have been an exacting Jew. I never asked for the blood in my pound of flesh, anyhow. I wonder where Champers can be." He listened intently and thought he heard someone coming around the bend down the darkening way. "That's he, I guess, now," he said. Then he turned his face toward the wide prairie unrolling to the westward. Overhanging it were writhing clouds, hurled hither and thither, twisted, frayed, and burst asunder by the titanic forces of the upper air, and all converging with centripetal violence toward one vast maelstrom. Its long, funnel-shaped form dipped and lifted, trailing back and forth like some sensate thing. With it came an increasing roar from the clashing of timber up the valley. The vivid shafts of lightning and the blackness that followed them made the scene terrific with Nature's majestic madness. "I must get shelter somewhere," Jacobs said. "I am sorry Champers failed me. I wanted his counsel before I slipped up on Wyker tonight. I thought I heard him coming just now. Maybe he's waiting for me under cover. I'll go down and see." The roar of the cyclone grew louder and the long swinging funnel lifted and dipped and lifted again, as the awful forces of the air hurled it onward. Down at the sharp bend in the road Thomas Smith was crouching, just where the rift in the bank opened to the creek, and the face of the man was not good to look upon nor to remember.