CHAPTER XX
THE FALL OF A FOREST KING
"Thave me!" moaned the unhappy Tommy, but her voice was lost in the volume of sound that fairly overwhelmed the occupants of the tent.
Almost at the instant that the first alarm had reached her ears, Harriet Burrell recognized the nature of the sound. She had heard it before though in a lesser degree. A tree was falling. She remembered a tall aged pine that stood a short distance to the south of the tent. Between the tree and the tent was a fairly open space, that was filled principally with saplings and scrub undergrowth. Harriet in that moment understood, she thought, that the heavy downpour of rain had weakened the hold of the aged roots of the tree in the ground. The heavy wind blowing against the old pine had been too much for the weakened roots. The tree was falling with mighty crashings and reports that sounded like the explosions of firearms.
To run, Harriet believed might be attended with serious consequences to them, for the long limbs of the tree were penetrating the tent roof before she had fairly gotten her companions underneath the cots. The tent was swept down as Harriet was diving under the bed. She realized that if the full force of the trunk fell on the cots nothing could save the girls beneath them. Still, Harriet did not believe the tree could fall so flat as that. Its limbs, she thought, would support its trunk, keeping the latter from falling flat on the ground.
Her three companions screamed with terror. Harriet was silent. She was listening to the terrifying sounds, straining every nerve to the task, fully expecting to be blotted out of existence at any second. She felt the first result of the falling tent when a flood of water that had rained down on the tent floor splashed into her face and over her body. Everything seemed to cave in. Some of the larger limbs of the tree struck the floor of the tent so close to the cots that the girls under them were paralyzed with fear for a few awful seconds.
It seemed to them that the crashings and crunchings never would cease. But they finally did. The girls then realized that the air was close and that it was insufferably hot where they were.
"Is—is it all over?" gasped Cora.
"Yes, I hope so," answered Harriet in a matter of fact voice.
"Wha-at was it?" questioned Patricia in a smothered tone.