“Don’t waste a minute. It’s coming right on us. Ask God to keep us safe. It’s going to be an awful storm!”
These words, panted out in gasping fashion, awoke in Squib’s heart a sense of personal peril which he had never before experienced in his short and protected life.
“Is it dangerous?” he asked in a low voice; and Seppi squeezed his arm as he said,—
“Men and beasts are killed on the mountains every year when these storms come. Oh, I ought not to have slept! I promised mother not to get into danger. Little Herr, do run on and get into shelter. It doesn’t matter what happens t—”
The sentence was not finished; for so terrible a flash of lightning smote across their vision that both children started, clung together, and shut their eyes. Then just overhead, as it seemed, came that terrible crackling and crashing and roaring, echoed back from the mountains till the sound seemed more than human ears could bear. Squib involuntarily covered his, and hid his face till the violence of the explosion had passed, and when he looked up again it was to find himself enveloped in wreaths of suffocating vapour.
Seppi’s white face seemed to be looking out of a strange halo, and he caught the gasping words,—
“O little Herr! your dog—your dog!”
Squib started, dashed his hand across his eyes and looked round him. A few yards from them stood Czar, upright, motionless, in a strange posture. And even as the boy looked, wondering at Seppi’s cry, the huge creature dropped suddenly over on his side as if he had been shot, and lay motionless and rigid.
“Czar! Czar!” cried Squib, making a quick step forward. “Seppi! what is it?”
“He was struck by the lightning,” answered the little peasant, “I saw it. I once saw a goat killed that way. It seemed as if fire was all round him for a moment, and the ground seemed to shake. Didn’t you feel it? He was dead in a moment. I know how lightning kills. O little Herr, don’t cry. It couldn’t have had time to hurt him. And it might have been you—or me. It might have been both of us.”