“It is the Carib and the girl.” He realized that the aged black giant had seized the girl in his arms and was battling his way straight into the teeth of the storm.
“What can he hope to do?” he asked himself as, first on hands and knees, then crouching low, on his feet, he struggled forward in their wake.
Dimly, he became conscious of the thing that had happened. A great sapodilla tree, uprooted by the storm, had pitched straight at them.
“Ten feet nearer and we would have been killed,” he thought. “That’s the black bulk that leaped at us.”
The thing the Carib was doing puzzled him. He was fighting his way over broken branches and beneath threatening trees. At last, finding himself at a branchless trunk, and seeing his way blocked by a tangled mass of vegetation, he held the girl in one arm while, apelike, he climbed to the prostrate trunk, then against the terrific force of the gale battled his way to the shelter of the roots of the giant tree.
“What strength!” thought Johnny. “What magnificent power!”
He was content to creep the length of the log, to come up panting beside them. Not a word was said. The din about them was deafening. The howl of the wind, the crash of breaking, falling limbs, the groan of tortured trees, all this was enough to inspire silent awe.
A moment they rested here. A moment only. Then, at the Carib’s sign, they slid off the log to battle their way around the up-ended roots.
Johnny saw the Carib suddenly disappear. He saw a chasm yawning before him; saw the girl leap. He followed her, landing with a shock that set his teeth rattling, then became conscious of the fact that the storm was not cracking about his ears.
“Storm cellar provided by nature,” he thought. It was true. The chasm left by the tree roots was ten feet deep.