Sunset Ranch: A Story of a Boy's Adventures in the West — page 28: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

22 Chased by a Prairie Fire. What Karl had told him so graphically had in reality fired his imagination and killed the desire for sleep which his tired body demanded. It must have been long after midnight. Cuthbert sat up with more or less impatience be- cause sleep refused him the sweet boon he craved. He rubbed his hot eyes, and looked around. The fire had gone out, and yet it was not dark as before. | This surprised him at first, but he quickly decided that the old battered moon must be rising. Had he stopped to reason a moment it must have struck him as a little incongruous that for once this steady, heavenly luminary had taken a notion to rise in the west. The moaning of the wind had increased to a dull roar, and yet the cottonwoods did not appear to be lashing with its violence. Karl’s horse was stamping and whinnying at his tether. “Seems to me,” said Cuthbert, ‘‘there is some- thing out of the ordinary in the general condition of things—the very atmosphere is lacking in the chill that this hour of the night always brings—or I’m dreaming.” He shook Karl, glad to have some one whose fa- miliarity with the signs of the prairie would master the situation. | Apparently Karl had not yet entirely overcome the boyish propensity of deep-seated reluctance to leave the land of dreams. “What is it?’ he muttered, drowsily. “The moon’s risen, and I reckon we’re going to have a storm,” said Cuthbert. Then Karl sat up. : Sleep was gone from his eyes in a twinkling. He heard the uneasy actions of his horse, caught the peculiar roaring, hollow sound away off to windward, comclooolkks.€©