One day he had to ask Falcon the meaning of “spendthrift.”  Falcon told him briefly.  He could have illustrated the word by a striking example; but he did not.  He added, in his polite way, “No fellow can understand all the words in a newspaper.  Now, here’s a word in mine—­’Anemometer;’ who the deuce can understand such a word?”

“Oh, that is a common word enough,” said poor Christopher.  “It means a machine for measuring the force of the wind.”

“Oh, indeed,” said Falcon; but did not believe a word of it.

One sultry day Christopher had a violent headache, and complained to Ucatella.  She told Phoebe, and they bound his brows with a wet handkerchief, and advised him to keep in-doors.  He sat down in the coolest part of the house, and held his head with his hands, for it seemed as if it would explode into two great fragments.

All in a moment the sky was overcast with angry clouds, whirling this way and that.  Huge drops of hail pattered down, and the next minute came a tremendous flash of lightning, accompanied, rather than followed, by a crash of thunder close over their heads.

This was the opening.  Down came a deluge out of clouds that looked mountains of pitch, and made the day night but for the fast and furious strokes of lightning that fired the air.  The scream of wind and awful peals of thunder completed the horrors of the scene.

In the midst of this, by what agency I know no more than science or a sheep does, something went off inside Christopher’s head, like a pistol-shot.  He gave a sort of scream, and dashed out into the weather.

Phoebe heard his scream and his flying footstep, and uttered an ejaculation of fear.  The whole household was alarmed, and, under other circumstances, would have followed him; but you could not see ten yards.

A chill sense of impending misfortune settled on the house.  Phoebe threw her apron over her head, and rocked in her chair.

Dick himself looked very grave.

Ucatella would have tried to follow him; but Dick forbade her. “’Tis no use,” said he.  “When it clears, we that be men will go for him.”

“Pray Heaven you may find him alive!”

“I don’t think but what we shall.  There’s nowhere he can fall down to hurt himself, nor yet drown himself, but our dam; and he has not gone that way.  But”—­

“But what?”

“If we do find him, we must take him back to Cape Town, before he does himself, or some one, a mischief.  Why, Phoebe, don’t you see the man has gone raving mad?”

CHAPTER XIX.

The electrified man rushed out into the storm, but he scarcely felt it in his body; the effect on his mind overpowered hail-stones.  The lightning seemed to light up the past; the mighty explosions of thunder seemed cannon strokes knocking down a wall, and letting in his whole life.