CHAPTER IX 



LIGHTNING AND THUNDER 



I TOOK shelter from a thunder storm in a pros- 

 pector's cabin, far up a mountain slope. 

 Jerry Sullivan and I stood in the open door, 

 watching the breaking clouds over us and the drift- 

 ing clouds in the canons below, when out of an al- 

 most clear sky came a bolt of lightning. It struck 

 an aged fir tree within sixty feet of the cabin and 

 blew it as completely to fragments as though dyna- 

 mited from top to bottom. Splinters and chunks 

 of wood were showered around us. A shattered 

 stump two feet in diameter and not more than a 

 foot high was all that remained of the eighty-foot 

 fir. Booming and broken echoes of the crash re- 

 sounded among the canons. 



To camouflage my feelings, I turned to Sullivan 

 and in a matter-of-fact manner asked, "Why is it 

 that lightning never strikes twice in the same 

 place?" 



Like lightning came the reply, "It don't need to." 

 But lightning does strike twice and even re- 

 peatedly in the same place. Within one mile of 

 my mountain home was a western yellow pine 

 that during thirty years was struck fourteen times. 



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