And there they were, in the darkness. No more flashes of lightning came and it began to rain. It poured. The rain came in torrents and the wind blew so that the trees seemed to be shouting to each other, calling to each other like friends lost in some dark pit.
There was plenty of shouting after that but neither May nor her father was afraid. They were perhaps too excited for fear to take hold of them. May didn’t know exactly how she felt. No words could describe how she felt.
Followed by her father she ran, down the little hill back of the kitchen, got across the creek, stumbled and fell several times, picked herself up and ran on again. They came to the fence at the edge of the field. Well, they got over somehow. It was strange how the field, across which they had both walked so many times in the daytime (as a child May had always played there) and she thought she knew every blade of grass, every little pond, and hillock,—it was strange how it had changed. It was exactly as though she and her father had run out upon a wide treeless plain. They ran, it seemed for hours and hours, and still they were in the field. Later when May thought of the experiences of that night she understood how men came to write fairy tales. Why, the ground in the field might have been made of rubber that stretched out as they ran.
They could see no trees, no buildings—nothing. For a time she and her father kept close together, running desperately, into nothingness, into a wall of darkness.
Then her father got lost from her, was swallowed up in the darkness.
What a roaring of voices went on. Trees somewhere, away off in the distance, were shouting to each other. The very blades of grass seemed to be talking—in excited whispers, you understand.
It was terrible! Now and then May could hear her father’s voice. He just swore. “Gol darn you,” he shouted over and over. The words were grunted forth.
Then there was another and terrible voice—it must have been the voice of the black, intent upon murder. May could not understand what he said. He, of course, just shouted words in some strange foreign language—a gibberish of words.
Then May stopped running. She was too exhausted to run any more and sat down on the ground at the edge of one of the little ponds. Her hair had all fallen about her face. Well, she wasn’t afraid. The thing that had happened was too big to be afraid of. It was like being in the presence of God and one couldn’t be afraid. How could one? A blade of grass isn’t afraid in the presence of the sun, coming up. That’s the way May felt—little you see—a tiny thing in the vast night—nothing.
How wet she was! Her clothes clung to her. All about the voices went on and on and the storm raged. She sat with her feet in a puddle of water and things seemed to fly past her, dark figures running, screaming, swearing, saying strange words. She herself did not doubt—when she thought of it all after it was over—that the giant black and her father had both run past her a dozen times, had passed so close to her that she might have put out her hand and touched them.