The Call of the South

by Robert Lee Durham

From that bed of horrors he sprang with relief before the first light in the east. He was glad just to be awake and he felt as if he wished never to close his eyes again.

CHAPTER XXVIII

"You will have Shortman and the landau at the door at ten o'clock," said Mrs. Phillips to Hayward when he appeared for duty that morning. Shortman was the coachman.

When the servants appeared at ten for orders they were told that they should proceed to Cahudaga and bring back with them in the afternoon Miss Helen and two friends.... Shortman, stolid and indifferent as he usually was, was yet interested to note that he could not understand some of the things the footman said and did on that ride to Cahudaga.

Alice Rhinelander's sudden indisposition forbade her to attempt the long drive to Hill-Top, and Lucile Hammersley, of course, could not leave her guest. As Helen was to have but one day at home, however, she decided to go alone, and leave the two others to follow her on the morrow. As it was, she deferred starting till the latest possible moment. A threatening sky, splashed with sunshine but brushed with the fleeting clouds and winds of the close-coming equinox, was Mr. Hammersley's pretext for insisting that she also remain over night; but a childish desire to go home now that she was near it impelled her to tear herself away at the last minute for the solitary drive.

She spoke pleasantly to Shortman and Hayward when she came out to get in the carriage, and Hayward thought that her perfect composure in what seemed to him a tense situation was marvellous to behold. At the first sight of her glorious beauty he had an impulse to prostrate himself in adoration, but that something of the grand lady which she had unconsciously taken on held him stiffly to his character, if nothing else had done so. He held open the door for her, pushed her skirt clear—his pulses gone wild at the touch of it—shut her in securely, climbed to his seat beside Shortman and faced steadily to the front. He was afraid to seek a personal look from Helen's eyes. She, looking upon his broad back, erect and flat, strong in every line, did not guess the storm that was shaking him within. She was no little surprised at the grip he had on himself, and really indulged in some admiration of his indifferent air in what had been to her notion, also, a rather tense situation—for him. Her father's daughter, she had never met or imagined the situation to which she would not be equal...

While Hayward's spirit was being storm-swept, a literal tempest was driving down upon them. They were less than half-way home and on a lonely and unpeopled part of their road when the storm fell. The men and Helen, too, had ascribed the increasing darkness to the fast-coming nightfall, for the air about them was still and warm, and the sun had gone some time before behind a bank of low-lying clouds. A lightning-flash was the first herald of danger; and drive then as Shortman might, it was a losing race.

The storm seemed disposed to play cat-and-mouse with them. Hurrying over them in scurrying clouds darker and blacker growing, it only watched the hard-driven horses, nor so much as blew a breath upon them.... Mocking them now, it blew a puff, puff—and again was silence. As if to incite them to more amusing endeavours, along with another puff it threw at them a capful of giant rain-drops: and again drew off from the game to watch them run with fright.... Next came a brilliant sheet of lightning, revealing the cavernous furrows and writhing convulsions on the storm-god's front—but not the sound of thunder nor the jarring shock of the riving bolt—that would be carrying the joke with these scared and fleeing pigmies too far.... Another awful, mocking grimace of the storm, and then another. After each, the darkness coming like a down-flung blanket closer and closer to envelop the earth. And through it all, that awful silent stillness, broken so far only by the clatter of those sportive raindrops and the rustle of the contemptuous puffs.... But the giant hadn't time to play with children: Crash, ROAR—the hurricane struck the hapless carriage!

Shortman was driving wildly to reach a little farmhouse two miles yet ahead, the first hope of shelter. In the sheets of light his eyes swept the ill-kept road to fix his course, and in the inky blackness following he held to it in desperate and unslacking haste till another flash revealed it further to him.

The thundering wind mauled and pummelled them. It shook and tore them. It shook and tore the very earth as they plunged fearfully forward through the terrible light and the awful darkness. In the deafening, blinding roar and rush, sight and hearing were pounded almost into insensibility and Helen tried to cry out to the swaying figures on the driver's seat—but screamed instead in terror as calamity caught them. Crack! Crash! CRUSH!—and woman, men, horses and carriage were buried under a down-coming treetop.