He watched the circled sweep of the clouds rushing from mountain ridge to mountain ridge.

Straight off Claremont they came, and tangled themselves in the treetops of the higher slopes.

The wind howled over the mountain so fiercely that he could scarcely force his way against it to the spring for water.

And when he filled his bucket the wind sloshed half of it out before he could reach the puny shelter of his station.

If he had ever wondered why that station was banked solid to the window-sills with rocks, he wondered no more when he felt that gale pushing and tugging at it and shrieking as if it were enraged because it could not pick the station up bodily and fling it down into the lake below.
"Gee! I'm glad I've got a cave the wind can't monkey with, to winter in," he congratulated himself fatuously once, when the little boxlike building shook in the blast.
That night the wind slept, and the mountain lay hushed after the tumult.