Bill, driving the little car which he had named the Swallow, reached the quarters at the School of Fire in a rising cloud of dust. The wind had risen suddenly and the fine sand whipped around the long board buildings, driving in through every crack and crevice. All the rest of the afternoon it blew, and at six o’clock, when the Major came in, he was coated with the fine yellow dust. By nine o’clock, when Bill went to bed, a small gale was singing around, and about one o’clock he was awakened by the scream of the wind. It shrieked and howled, and the quarters rattled and quivered.

Bill remembered the Swallow and his dad’s car, both standing at the back door. He rose and went to his mother’s room. He found her curled up in a little ball on her quartermaster’s cot, looking out of the window.

“Come in, Billy,” she said as she saw him at the door. “You are missing a great sight.”

They cuddled close, their arms around each other, and pressed their faces close to the pane. The yellow sand was driven across the prairie like a sheet of rain. The Major’s big car shuddered with each fresh blast, and the little Swallow seemed to cower close to the ground. Continuous sheets of lightning made the night as bright as day. Over the whine and whistle of the wind they could hear the distant rumble of the thunder. The room was full of dust, driven through the cracks of the window. Their throats were choked with it. The wind blew harder and harder; the lightning grew brighter, slashing the black sky with great gashes of blinding light.

Bill looked sober. “Gee, it is fierce!” he said in an awed tone. “Where is dad all this time?”

“In his room sound asleep,” said Mrs. Sherman. “I suppose he is used to sights like this. Wasn’t it nice of Oklahoma to stage such a wonderful sight for us? I wouldnt have missed it for anything.”

“It is going to rain,” said Bill, again looking out. “The thunder is growing louder and louder. Did you ever see anything like the glare the lightning makes?”

All at once Mrs. Sherman clutched Bill and pointed out.

“Oh, look, look!” she cried.

Bill followed the direction of her finger, and saw a small rabbit running before the blast. He was going at a rate that caused his pop eyes to pop worse than ever. As he skimmed along, he made the mistake of trying to turn. In a second he was being rushed along sidewise, hopping frantically up and down in order to keep on his feet, but unable to turn back again or to stop. Bill and his mother laughed until they cried as the little rabbit was hustled out of sight around the end of the students’ quarters.

The lightning grew worse and occasionally balls of flame shot earthward. The thunder rolled in a deafening roar. Then suddenly the wind stopped stopped so suddenly and completely that Bill jumped and his mother said, “Goodness me!” in a small, scared voice.

There was a long pause as though Nature was calling attention to her freaks, and then down came the rain. It came in rivers, sheets, floods. The roads ran yellow mud; the creek over the bluff commenced to boil. The sparse dwarfed trees that clung to the sides of the gullies bent under the weight of falling water.

It poured and poured and poured.

Bill had seen rain before, if not in such quantities. He found himself growing sleepy, and kissing his mother twice, once for luck and once for love, as he told her, he went to bed and to sleep, while the downpour continued until almost morning.

The roads were impassable, although a hot, steamy, sunshiny day did its best to dry things up. Bill spent most of the day putting the poor half-drowned Swallow in shape.

Frank telephoned, but could not get over. He was excited about the damage that had been done at the Aviation Field. One of the great hangars had collapsed, ruining the machines inside. No planes were allowed to fly.

Frank wanted Bill to walk over and Bill suggested the same pastime for Frank; consequently neither one would go. The roads continued to be a gummy, sticky mass of clay, and after four or five days Frank started to walk across the prairie to the School of Fire.

Just before he reached the bridge crossing the glen between the New Post and the School, he heard a joyful whoop and there was Bill running to meet him.

“Hey there!” called Bill, as soon as he could possibly make himself heard. “I was just starting over to see you.”

“Come on back!” grinned Frank. “I am at home this morning.”

“Not as much as I am,” answered his friend. “Gee, it has been a long week! Did you ever see such a storm?”

“Oklahoma can beat that any time she wants to,” boasted Frank. “That was just a little one. You ought to see a real blizzard or ‘sly coon’ as we call the cyclones. They are bad medicine, as the Indians say.”

“This was big enough to start with,” said Bill. “I thought the Swallow was going to fly away. And dad’s big car reeled around. And you should have seen our bath tub! It was full of sand.”

“Clear up to the top?” asked Frank teasingly.

“There was a good inch in it,” retorted Bill, “and it looks to me as though that was a good deal of sand to trickle through the windows when they all have screens and were closed besides.”

“It surely does get in,” granted Frank. “Hello, there comes Lee! Where is he going, I wonder, without his fatigue suit on?”

“I suppose you mean those overall things he works in, don’t you?” said Bill. “I know that much now. Lee doesn’t wear them any more. He was so crazy over mother and so good to her and to me that dad got him transferred to his Battery, and now he is our orderly.”

“How did he manage to do that?” said Frank.

“Why, there was some fellow who wanted to leave the guns and work around the quarters as janitor. They have an idea that it is an easy job. So dad let him make the exchange, and I can tell you we were all about as pleased as we could be.”

“Good work!” commended Frank, but without enthusiasm. He did not want Bill to have the fun of having Lee for orderly. He had been trying to think up some scheme whereby the soldier would be sent over to fill that position with his own father.

“Lee is a peach,” said Bill warmly. “Look what he made me.”

He fished in his pocket and drew forth a length of chain. The small, delicate links were carved from a single piece of wood, and at the end, like an ornamentation, hung a carved cage in which rolled a little wooden ball. It was all very curious and delicate.

“My, but that’s a peach,” said Frank.

“You ought to see the one he did for mother,” said Bill. “Small enough for a bracelet almost, and the little ball smaller than a pea. The links are all carved on the outside, and there is a sort of rose on the end of this cage thing, and Lee painted it all up pink and green where it ought to be like that.

“He knows all about a car too. This week he has been going over dad’s car and the Swallow, and they run like grease.”

Frank fiddled with the chain. He had nothing to say. On account of his Indian blood, his silent ways and mischievous nature, Lee had always filled him with interest. He could tell wonderful stories too of his own times and the times that lay long behind him, as he heard of them from his father and grandfather.

Lee’s grandfather knew a great many things that he never did tell, but once in awhile he was willing to open his close-set old mouth and talk. He wore black broadcloth clothes, a long coat, and a white shirt, but never a collar. A wide black, soft-brimmed hat was set squarely on his coal black hair. Under the hat, smooth as a piece of satin, his hair hung in two tight braids close to each ear. They were always wound with bright colored worsted. Grandfather Lee, the old chieftain, liked bright colors, so he usually had red and yellow on his braids. They hung nearly to his waist, down in front, over each coat lapel. Small gold rings hung in his ears, and under his eyes and across each cheek bone was a faint streak of yellow paint.

His Indian name was Bird that Flies by Night, and he lived about a hundred miles away, on a farm given him by the Government. He had lived there quite contentedly for many years, tilling the ground when he had to. But now everything was changed. Oklahoma had given up her treasure, the hidden millions that lay under her sandy stretches. Oil derricks rose thickly everywhere, and Bird that Flies by Night found that all he had to do was to sit on his back porch and look at the derrick that had been raised over the well dug where his three pigs used to root. Two hundred dollars a day that well was bringing to the old Bird and, as Lee said, was “still going strong.”

“And here I am,” said Lee grimly, “enlisted for three years!”

Lee’s father was an Indian of a later day. He had gone through an eastern college and had been in business in a small town when the oil excitement broke out. He went into oil at once, and was far down in the oil fields, Lee did not know where.

As a boy, Lee himself had refused to accept the schooling urged by his mother and college-bred father, and had led a restless, roaming life, filled with hairbreadth escapes, until the beginning of the war, when he had enlisted in the hope of being sent across where the danger lay. But like many another man as brave and as willing, he had been caught in one of the war’s backwaters, and had been stationed at Fort Sill.

Sauntering up to the quarters, the boys found Lee staring moodily at the small and racy Swallow, now standing clean and glistening in the bright sunlight.

“She knocks,” he said, knitting his fierce black brows. “All morning I have been working over that car, and I can’t find that knock.”

The boys came close and listened.

“I don’t hear any knock,” said Frank.

They all listened.

“Don’t you hear it now?” said Lee, speeding the engine.

“Seems as though I hear something,” said Bill, partly to please Lee.

They all listened closely.

Lee commenced to pry about in the engine. “I have it, I think,” he exclaimed triumphantly as he took out a small piece of the machinery. Frank motioned Bill one side, and they wandered around the end of the building.

“Don’t you feel sort of afraid to let Lee tinker with your car?” he asked with a show of carelessness.

“Not a bit! Dad says he is a born mechanic and he trusts him with all the care of his car. If dad thinks he can fix that, why, I guess it is safe to let him do anything he wants to do with the Swallow.”

“Do you ever let anybody else drive the Swallow?” asked Frank. “I wouldn’t mind taking it some day if you don’t care.”

Bill looked embarrassed.

“I would let you take her in a minute,” He said, “but dad made me promise that I would never loan the Swallow to anyone. It is not that he wants me to be selfish, but he says if anything should happen, if the car should be broken, or if there should be an accident and some other boy hurt, I would sort of feel that it was my fault.”

“I don’t see it that way at all,” said Frank, who was crazy to get hold of the pretty car and show it off to some boys and girls he knew in Lawton. He didn’t want to drive with Bill. He was the sort of a boy who always wants all the glory for himself. That car was quite the most perfect thing; the sort a fellow sees in his dreams. Frank knew that he could never hope to own such a car, and the fact that Bill was always willing to take him wherever he wanted to go was not enough. Bill had never driven to Lawton, the town nearest the Post. He had told Frank that he would take him with him the first time. Frank had thought it would be pretty fine to go humming up the main street past all the people from the Post and the ranches, and the old Indians and the crowds of Indian boys his own age who always came in on Saturday from the Indian school near by. He had been anticipating that trip ever since Bill had appeared with the Swallow; but now he felt that it would be far nicer if Bill would or could be made to loan him the car. Of course he couldn’t run it, but he could run an airplane engine, and he was perfectly willing to try running the little Swallow.

Frank had a great trick of getting his own way about things, and he reflected with satisfaction that as long as the roads to Lawton were almost impossible for traffic after the rainfall, there would be a few days in which to scheme for his plan. Nothing of this, however, appeared in his face. He turned and shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, if you and your dad think Lee can handle a car all right, it’s all the same to me,” he laughed. “My father says you never can trust an Indian anyhow.”

“Well, we would trust Lee with anything in the world,” reiterated Bill.

“That’s all right, too, if you think so,” said Frank, trying slyly to breed distrust in Bill’s heart. “I guess you never heard my father tell some of his Indian stories. You would feel different if you had.”

“But anybody would just have to trust Lee,” said Bill. “Why, he is as good as gold! And he hates a lie, and he has such nice people two of the prettiest little sisters. One of them plays the harp. It’s one of those big gold ones, and she is so little that Lee says she has to trot clear round the harp to play some of the notes, because her arms are too short to reach.”

“He’s half Indian just the same,” insisted Frank. He warmed to the subject as he went on. He couldn’t forgive Lee, quite the most thrilling and amusing soldier he knew, for letting himself be made Major Sherman’s orderly.

“Well, I am for Lee every time,” said Bill, “and I would wager anything I have that he is just as true blue as as well, as my dad!” Bill could pay no greater compliment, and the words rang out clear and honest. The boys stood beside the quarters, staring idly across the bluff as they talked. They were so interested in their conversation that they were not aware of a listener. Lee, with a part of the Swallow in his hand to show Bill, had followed them in time to overhear the conversation concerning himself, but he quickly drew back and returned to the automobile.

“Good boy, Billy!” he said softly to himself. Then with a dark look coming into his face, “So you can’t trust an Indian, can you? Ha ha! I wonder what we had better do about that?”