“‘He’s alive!’ shouts Tom, with a half-sob, catching the boy up in his arms, ‘he’s only stunned. The lightnin’ must have struck round here somewhere, just near enough to knock him over. He’s comin’ to now!’
“And Patsy comes. He soon as he can talk, he tells them about it.
“‘Why,’ he says, straightening up in Tom’s arms (Shock is sound asleep again, with her tousled head bobbing on Farmer Coburn’s shoulder at every step)—‘why, there’s the tree, sure—’
“The men looked, and turned away with a shudder. The noble elm would never again lift its green boughs toward the sky. Scorching, rending, shattering, the red lightning had torn its way down the huge trunk, throwing the fragments on every side, and leaving the twisted fibres thrust into the air, white and bare, in a way that told of the terrible force that had had the mastery of them.
“Patsy thought it all over very soberly. He remembered his prayer and his psalm.
“‘I dunno—’ he said.”
As uncle Will ceased, his auditors were very still; thinking, perhaps, how they too had been kept safely from the fury of the tempest on the lonely mountain-side.
Ruel now looked out and announced that the storm was over; and indeed there was hardly need of telling it, for the sunbeams came dancing down to the little birch camp with the same story. Out poured the young folks, the girls holding their skirts daintily from contact with the dripping undergrowth, of which, fortunately, there was not an abundance. The brook was much higher than before, and laughed and spoke in deeper tones; as if, like many a young human life, it had grown old during the storm, and was no longer a child.
The whole party now “broke camp” and turned their faces homeward. Their feet they could not keep dry, of course; but they were not far from The Pines, and they knew that aunt Puss was waiting for them with dry socks and a good supper.