Fragments of it fell in the streets full two hundred yards away.

Nearly a third of the shed roof over our heads was destroyed, and one of the stove lids, after cutting a small stanchion half in two in front of the Indian, whizzed between us and drove partly through the weather-boarding beyond.

I was as white as a sheet and as weak as a kitten and speechless.

But the Indian betrayed no trepidation, no distress, not even discomfort.

He simply stopped washing, leaned forward and surveyed the clean, blank ground a moment, and then remarked: "Mph! Dam stove heap gone!"-- and resumed his scrubbing as placidly as if it were an entirely customary thing for a stove to do.