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.
Dick himself looked very grave.
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."
"Pray Heaven you may find him alive!"
"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"--
"But what?"
"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?"
CHAPTER XIX.
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.
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