58 IN THE BIG HORN MOUNTAINS. 



I had put in an explosive ball. I picked up what was left of 

 the poor little teal, but all I could find was the head and tail, 

 held together by a narrow strip of skin along what had once 

 been its back. All the rest had vanished into thin air, as did 

 Huffman's dreams of broiled teal when I showed him the 

 wreck. 



About this time I noticed a black cloud approaching from 

 the west, and a few minutes later we heard distant mutterings 

 of thunder. I asked Huffman if we shouldn't put up a tent. 

 He said no, it wasn't going to rain ; that it rarely rained in 

 this country at this season of the year. I was the more will- 

 ing to believe him, for I remembered that General Hazen, 

 our present chief clerk of the weather department, had told us 

 some years ago that the Yellowstone valley was an arid, barren 

 desert and that no rains ever fell there except in the late fall 

 and early spring months. But all signs, or at least most of 

 them, fail in wet weather and just as we got dinner ready, the 

 sky became suddenly obscured with low, dense clouds of inky 

 blackness, that rapidly changed near the horizon to a light 

 colored, foamy, smoky looking mass, that whirled and rolled 

 as it approached like the column of steam from one of the 

 great geysers, indicating that it was accompanied with a high 

 wind. The lightning played through all parts of the heavens, 

 from dome to horizon, with such vivid fury as to almost blind 

 us. The artillery of heaven pealed forth in volumes that 

 almost shook the earth beneath our feet ; rolling, echoing and 

 reverberating among the neighboring hills and over the vast 

 prairies, as if sent to awaken the dead from their last sleep. 

 While we were watching and listening to these demonstra- 

 tions, transfixed with amazement at the unusual and almost 

 unnatural phenomenon of a thunder storm here in August, 

 the rain burst upon us with such violence and in such a dense 

 body as almost to prostrate us at the first shock. Huffman 



