The air grew supercharged with electricity.  It dripped, literally, from the barrel of Banion’s pistol when he took it from its holster to carry it to the wagon.  He fastened the reins of his horse to a wheel and hastened with other work.  A pair of trail ropes lay in the wagon.  He netted them over the wagon top and lashed the ends to the wheels to make the top securer, working rapidly, eyes on the advancing storm.

There came a puff, then a gust of wind.  The sky blackened.  The storm caught the wagon train first.  There was no interval at all between the rip of the lightning and the crash of thunder as it rolled down on the clustered wagons.  The electricity at times came not in a sheet or a ragged bolt, but in a ball of fire, low down, close to the ground, exploding with giant detonations.

Then came the rain, with a blanketing rush of level wind, sweeping away the last vestige of the wastrel fires of the emigrant encampment.  An instant and every human being in the train, most of them ill defended by their clothing, was drenched by the icy flood.  One moment and the battering of hail made climax of it all.  The groaning animals plunged and fell at their picket ropes, or broke and fled into the open.  The remaining cattle caught terror, and since there was no corral, most of the cows and oxen stampeded down the wind.

The canvas of the covered wagons made ill defense.  Many of them were stripped off, others leaked like sieves.  Mothers sat huddled in their calicoes, bending over their tow-shirted young, some of them babes in arms.  The single jeans garments of the boys gave them no comfort.  Under the wagons and carts, wrapped in blankets or patched quilts whose colors dripped, they crawled and sat as the air grew strangely chill.  Only wreckage remained when they saw the storm muttering its way across the prairies, having done what it could in its elemental wrath to bar the road to the white man.

As for Banion and Molly, they sat it out in the light wagon, the girl wrapped in blankets, Banion much of the time out in the storm, swinging on the ropes to keep the wagon from overturning.  He had no apparent fear.  His calm assuaged her own new terrors.  In spite of her bitter arraignment, she was glad that he was here, though he hardly spoke to her at all.

“Look!” he exclaimed at last, drawing back the flap of the wagon cover.  “Look at the rainbow!”

Over the cloud banks of the rain-wet sky there indeed now was flung the bow of promise.  But this titanic land did all things gigantically.  This was no mere prismatic arch bridging the clouds.  The colors all were there, yes, and of an unspeakable brilliance and individual distinctness in the scale; but they lay like a vast painted mist, a mural of some celestial artist flung en masse against the curtain of the night.  The entire clouded sky, miles on untold miles, was afire.  All the opals of the universe were melted and cast into a tremendous picture painted by the Great Spirit of the Plains.