When the magnificent red-and-gold "Cheriot" was uncovered, that its glories might shine upon the waiting world, the door opened, and a huddle of painted Indians tumbled out, ready to lead the procession, or, if so disposed, to scalp the neighborhood.
Little Jim gave one panic-stricken look as they leaped over the chariot steps, and then fled to the barn chamber, whence he had to be dragged by his mother, and cuffed into willingness to attend the spectacle that had once so dazzled his imagination.
On the eventful afternoon of the performance the road was gay with teams. David and Samantha Milliken drove by in Miss Cummin's neat carryall, two children on the back seat, a will-o'-the-wisp baby girl held down by a serious boy.
Steve Webster was driving Doxy Morton in his mother's buggy.
Jabe Slocum, Pitt Packard, Brad Gibson, Cyse Higgins, and scores of others were riding "shank's mare," as they would have said.
It had been a close, warm day, and as the afternoon wore away it grew hotter and closer. There was a dead calm in the air, a threatening blackness in the west that made the farmers think anxiously of their hay. Presently the thunderheads ran together into big black clouds, which melted in turn into molten masses of smoky orange, so that the heavens were like burnished brass.
Drivers whipped up their horses, and pedestrians hastened their steps.
Steve Webster decided not to run even the smallest risk of injuring so precious a commodity as Doxy Morton by a shower of rain, so he drove into a friend's yard, put up his horse, and waited till the storm should pass by.
Brad Gibson stooped to drink at a wayside brook, and as he bent over the water he heard a low, murmuring, muttering sound that seemed to make the earth tremble.
Then from hill to hill "leapt the live thunder."
Even the distant mountains seemed to have "found a tongue."
A zigzag chain of lightning flashed in the lurid sky, and after an appreciable interval another peal, louder than the first, and nearer.
The rain began to fall, the forked flashes of flame darted hither and thither in the clouds, and the boom of heaven's artillery grew heavier and heavier. The blinding sheets of light and the tumultuous roar of sound now followed each other so quickly that they seemed almost simultaneous.
Flash--crash--flash--crash--flash--crash; blinding and deafening eye and ear at once. Everybody who could find a shelter of any sort hastened to it.
The women at home set their children in the midst of feather beds, and some of them even huddled there themselves, their babies clinging to them in sympathetic fear, as the livid shafts of light illuminated the dark rooms with more than noonday glare.
The air was full of gloom; a nameless terror lurked within it; the elements seemed at war with each other.
Horses whinnied in the stables, and colts dashed about the pastures.
The cattle sought sheltered places; the cows ambling clumsily towards some refuge, their full bags dripping milk as they swung heavily to and fro. The birds flew towards the orchards and the deep woods; the swallows swooped restlessly round the barns, and hid themselves under the eaves or in the shadow of deserted nests.
The rain now fell in sheets.
"Hurry up 'n' git under cover, Jabe," said Brad Gibson;
"you're jest the kind of a pole to draw lightnin'!"
"You hain't, then!" retorted Jabe. "There ain't enough o' you fer lightnin' to ketch holt of!"
Suddenly a ghastly streak of light leaped out of a cloud, and then another, till the sky seemed lit up by cataracts of flame. A breath of wind sprang into the still air.
Then a deafening crash, clap, crack, roar, peal! and as Jabe Slocum looked out of a protecting shed door, he saw a fiery ball burst from the clouds, shooting brazen arrows as it fell.
Within the instant the meeting-house steeple broke into a tongue of flame, and then, looking towards home, he fancied that the fireball dropped to earth in Squire Bean's meadow.
The wind blew more fiercely now. There was a sudden crackling of wood, falling of old timers, and breaking of glass.
The deadly fluid ran in a winding course down a great maple by the shed, leaving a narrow charred channel through the bark to tell how it passed to earth. A sombre pine stood up, black and burned, its heart gaping through a ghastly wound in the split trunk.
The rain now subsided; there was only an occasional faint rumbling of thunder, as if it were murmuring over the distant sea; the clouds broke away in the west; the sun peeped out, as if to see what had been going on in the world since he hid himself an hour before.
A delicate rainbow bridge stretched from the blackened church steeple to the glittering weathercock on the squire's barn; and there, in the centre of the fair green meadows from which it had risen in glorious strength and beauty for a century or more, lay the nooning tree.
The fireball, if ball of fire indeed there were, had struck in the very centre of its splendid dome, and ploughed its way from feather tip to sturdy root, riving the tree in twain, cleaving its great boughs left and right, laying one majestic half level with the earth, and bending the other till the proud head almost touched the grass.
The rainbow was reflected in the million drops glittering upon the bowed branches, turning each into a tear of liquid opal.
The birds hopped on the prone magnificence, and eyed timorously a strange object underneath.
There had been one swift, pitiless, merciful stroke!
The monarch of the meadow would never again feel the magic thrill of the sap in its veins, nor the bursting of brown bud into green leaf.
The birds would build their nests and sing their idyls in other boughs.
The "time of pleasure and love" was over with the nooning tree; over too, with him who slept beneath; for under its fallen branches, with the light of a great peace in his upturned face, lay the man from Tennessee.
