The booming thunder, first only the sullen menace of the approaching storm, rolled nearer and nearer, and the fierce light came in blinding sheets of flame. A ceaseless, pauseless murmur sprang up out of the distance, and the trees rocked with a mighty crashing of branches, while here and there a big drop of rain fell. Then the murmur swelled into a roar as the low clouds disgorged themselves. Drenched to the skin on the instant, the two men and the boy stumbled forward through the gray wake of the storm.

"What's come of our trail now?" shouted the judge, but the sound of his voice was lost in the rush of the hurrying winds and the roar of the airy cascades that fell about them.

An hour passed. There was light under the trees, faint, impalpable without visible cause, but they caught the first sparkle of the rain drops on leaf and branch; they saw the silvery rivulets coursing down the mossy trunks of old trees; last of all through a narrow rift in the clouds, the sun showed them its golden rim, and day broke in the steaming woods. With the sun, with a final rush of the hurrying wind, a final torrent, the storm spent itself, and there was only the drip from bough and leaf, or pearly opalescent points of moisture on the drenched black trunks of maple and oak; a sapphire sky, high arched, remote overhead; and the June day all about.

"What's come of they trail now?" cried the judge again. "He'll be a good dog that follows it through, these woods!"

They had paused on a thickly wooded hillside.

"We've come eight or ten miles if we have come a rod, Price," said Mahaffy, "and I am in favor of lying by for the day. When it comes dark we can go on again."

The judge readily acquiesced in this, and they presently found a dense thicket which they cautiously entered. Reaching the center of the tangled growth, they beat down the briers and bushes, or cut them away with their knives, until they had a little cleared space where they could build a fire. Then from the pack which Mahaffy carried, the rudiments of a simple but filling meal were produced.

"Your parents took no chances when they named you Solomon!" said the judge approvingly.

CHAPTER XIV

BELLE PLAIN

Now, Tom," said Betty, with a bustling little air of excitement as she rose from the breakfast table that first morning at Belle Plain, "I am ready if you are. I want you to show me everything!"

"I reckon you'll notice some changes," remarked Tom.

He went from the room and down the hall a step or two in advance of her. On the wide porch Betty paused, breathing deep. The house stood on an eminence; directly before it at the bottom of the slight descent was a small bayou, beyond this the forest stretched away in one unbroken mass to the Mississippi. Here and there, gleaming in the brilliant morning light, some great bend of the river was visible through the trees, while the Arkansas coast, blue and distant, piled up against the far horizon.

"What is it you want to see, anyhow, Betty?" Tom demanded, turning on her.