In another minute the storm was upon them, rending the air with its thunderous clamor, brightening the troubled woods with its appalling, momentary light. Peal after peal of thunder shook the earth.
The whole woods were agitated by the rising wind. Twigs and leaves flew wild, and a great branch nearby crashed in a tree and hung limp among the swaying branches. Split and torn, with its long, fibrous area of white showing, it looked like a suffering, stricken thing.
What happened, happened quickly. Tom’s cheery bravado could not persist long in such a frenzy of the elements, and pushing back his streaming hair from his face he laughingly surrendered to the storm and called that he had had enough. Whalen could not hear him, his voice was belittled and lost in the uproar.
He was just starting to run when there came a quick, deafening report followed by a tremor beneath him as if he were in a rocking boat. And then a prolonged, sharp peal, and a flash that blinded him. The whole of creation seemed to shake. He had a curious conviction that a chipmunk was running up his arm, and half-consciously he tried to catch it.
He was in the borderland of consciousness, vaguely aware of movement nearby. And he had an appalling sensation of sinking. The earth seemed to be falling away under him. In that brief movement of lapsing consciousness he thought he was in the ocean and that some frightful creature of the deep had caught his foot. Instinctively he wrenched and tugged but all in vain.
Then his senses returned and he was tingling all over. But he knew that he was not at sea for there was the odor of burning wood and of soaked foliage, and fresh wet earth. He could not see but he knew that he was on land.
Yet still something did hold his foot—held it fast. Held it as the jaws of a tiger hold. He tugged and pulled and became panic-stricken. But the merciless jaws held fast. He was lying in a very welter of oozy mud. He wriggled, squirmed, but only an excruciating pain in his ankle followed these frantic efforts.
“Where am I?” he called. “What—”
And then again his wounded hearing was stricken by a tearing, rending tumult very close by and he seemed to be tossed at the mercy of some terrible upheaval. And still those unseen jaws closed tighter on his foot and held it as the relentless jaws of a tiger hold....