Delbert crawled halfway out of his collapsed tent. He yawned and scratched his behind. He squinted against the slanting light. His mouth felt as if it were stuffed with cotton. He needed a drink. He reached back in the folds of his fallen canvas tent and pulled out an empty bottle. With a grunt of disgust he tossed it aside.

A gurgling noise caught his attention. He looked over his right shoulder and saw to his surprise, a rushing stream down where there had previously been a dry gully. It must've rained during the night, he thought.

He decided that water was better than nothing. He wriggled free of the tent, and stood up groggily in his dingy union suit. He tip-toed over to the edge and gingerly picked his way down the steep sides of the ravine. He knelt on a flat rock at the bottom and scooped water to his mouth. He splashed his face.

As he finished wiping the water from his eyes, he noticed that a few yards downstream the water had dammed up against the carcass of a dead horse, a horse with a gruesomely broken neck!

"What the hell?"

He stood and looked out over the embankment. Where he expected to see the tents and fires of his comrades he saw instead a vast field of destruction. He clambered up the slippery bank, and from a higher vantage beheld the grim spectacle. His flattened tent was the only one remaining of the scores he should have seen. Scattered remnants of his cohorts' belongings were everywhere, but he saw no sign of any living presence in the camp. Chaos was everywhere. Everywhere that is except for the Gilded Lily, which stood alone, unscathed amid the ruins of Gray Gulch.

Numb with shock, he began to trudge toward the Lily.

Sitting in the fork of an uprooted cottonwood he saw a man he recognized as Jethro, a miner who was known as a practical-joker. As he approached, he saw the familiar gap-toothed grin and the thinning fringe of red hair. Jethro seemed about to speak, about to make some kind of wise-crack, until a black fly crawled out of his unblinking eye. Closer examination revealed that the freak storm had driven a piece of straw clean through his temple. Delbert shuddered, and continued on.

"Holy shit!!" Carrion crows took flight at the sound of Velvet's shrill, abrasive cry. There was a stirring among the survivors who had slept on the Guilded Lily's portico.

"C'mere Darlin’," said Brewster, clumsily grabbing at her garters.

"Let go of me you idiot!" she rasped, knocking his hands away,"Take a look out there!"

Brewster muttered something under his breath as he rose to his stocking feet, and adjusted his bent spectacles, but he fell silent when he beheld ruin and carnage all around the hotel and drinking establishment. Others soon joined him in surveying the grisly spectacle the storm had left in its wake.

The livery stable was gone, so was the smithy (even its pig iron anvil!), vanished except for the occasional horseshoe or bit of bridlery scattered about. The general store was in ruins, with no sign of Lank Edwards, the shopkeeper. By some whimsy of the storm, a pyramid of oranges stood undisturbed amid the wreckage. The jail was a pile of rubble except for the barred iron cell door, which remained in place without supporting walls. There was no sign of the sheriff or his wife. Not one building had escaped destruction but for the Gilded Lily. An assortment of mining tools, metal pots, and sundry personal items littered the campgrounds north of town. There was little left of the tents but a few shreds of canvas and rope trailing from protruding pegs. A solitary figure approached in the desolate landscape, silhouetted against the pink and yellow dawn, throwing a long shadow.

Most of those who slept on the porch were now awake. The hotel residents were joining them as well. Bloody Jim and Miss Fifi emerged through the swinging saloon doors, followed by a some who had remained awake in the barroom all night. They stood as a group, dumbfounded by the wrath of the storm as a man in a baggy union suit staggered toward them, boots heavy with mud.

"Delbert!" cried out Brandi, "It's Delbert!"

"Delbert! Delbert!" They called out to the lone straggler.

Delbert skirted a large dead fish in the street, and stepped over a smashed cuckoo clock, looking blankly at Jeff's empty boots as he made his way to the portico steps. Miss Fifi halted him as he was about to step up on the porch.

"Hold it right there Delbert. I am truly glad you're alive Hon, but don't you dare track that mud into the Lily!"

It seemed an oddly inappropriate concern in view of the disaster all around them, but Delbert found a stick, and sat on the stairs, scraping the mud from his boots. The early morning air had already begun to warm as the clouds dwindled.

Brandi squatted beside Delbert as he scraped off clumps of mud, placing a hand on his shoulder."I was worried about you Del."

He was quietly moved by her gesture. Brandi was his favorite. She wasn't the prettiest girl in Gray Gulch, he judged, and if she took a notion, she had a way of joking that could make a man feel like a darned fool, but she was mostly nice to him, and fun to be with. She also had a wide, shapely behind that Delbert found quite attractive. On those occasions when he had managed to bring a little bit of gold dust into the assayer's office, it was Brandi that he sought out. And it was Brandi who always showed him a good time. Now here he was, sitting here with nothing but his union suit, and his muddy boots. And here she was. He didn't speak for a moment, just scraped.

"Y'was, eh." Was all he could come up with to say.

"I'm hungry." Said Danni. The smell of bacon frying drifted from the hotel dining room.

"C'mon everybody, breakfast on the table." said Miss Fifi to the group. The assembled refugees filed into the hotel.