Lightning only galvanized the bond. When the rains came, a crew of cowboys traced the edge of the river as dark gray clouds marched west across southern Florida. In no time, the river spilled into the pasture, and as the seams came apart, purple rivulets cut across the sky. All the men in the cow crew threw on their jackets, tipped the brims of their hats down, and let the rain beat them as they drew a line toward home. Then came the blast.
“I was the first one who woke up,” Jim Strickland says.
With a purple glow hanging over the prairie, Strickland saw a string of horses with men pinned under them, dogs howling, some lifeless. And before he could place where he was, thunder blanketed the valley.
“Everybody was laid out,” he remembers. “We’d been struck.”
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