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.
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.”
“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”--
“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?”
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.
Six hours the storm raged, and, before it ended, he had recovered nearly his whole past, except his voyage with Captain Dodd--that, indeed, he never recovered--and the things that happened to him in the hospital before he met Phoebe Falcon and her brother: and as soon as he had recovered his lost memory, his body began to shiver at the hail and rain. He tried to find his way home, but missed it; not so much, however, but that he recovered it as soon as it began to clear, and just as they were coming out to look for him, he appeared before them, dripping, shivering, very pale and worn, with the handkerchief still about his head.