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 cafions 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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