Excerpt from The Express Messenger, and Other Tales of the Rail The roar and rumble of distant thunder had been heard in the hills all the morning, and along about noon a big black cloud came creeping up over the crest of the continent and listed a little, when a peak of one of the hills caught the lower corner, ripped it open, and let the water out. It didn't rain; the water simply fell out of the cloud, and went rushing down the side of the mountain as it rushes off the roof of a house in a hard April shower. The little fissures were filled first, then the gorges, gullies, and rough ravines, and when these emptied into the countless rills that ran away towards the foot of the range, every rill became a rushing river. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.