Then came the rain. It fell in great drops whose sheer weight and size carried them, at the moment of impact, through the ragged shirts to the warm flesh beneath. In a second, it seemed, a waterspout was upon them and was pouring its tide into the roofless hut.
With the deluge, the elemental battle began in desperate earnest. Peal after peal of thunder crashed directly overhead, and with it came such a display of heavenly pyrotechnics that in their wildest moments these men had never dreamed of. Their eyes were blinded, and their ear-drums were bursting with the incessant hammering of the thunder.
But the wind had passed on, shrieking and tearing its way into the dim distance until its voice was utterly drowned in the sterner detonations of the battle.
Drenched to the skin, knee-deep in water, the men stood herded together like sheep in a pen. Their blankets were awash and floated about, tangling their legs in the miniature lake that could not find rapid enough exit through the doorway. They could only stand there stupidly. To go outside was to find no other shelter, and only the more openly to expose themselves to the savage forks of lightning playing across the heavens in such blinding streaks. Nor could they help the women even if they needed help in the other huts. The roofs and doors would or would not hold, and, in the latter case, until the force of the storm abated no help could serve them.
The storm showed no signs of abatement. The black sky was the sky of an unlit night. There was no lightening in any direction, and the blinding flashes amidst the din of thunder only helped to further intensify the pitchy vault. The splitting of trees amidst the chaos reached the straining ears, and it was plain that every flash of light was finding a billet for its forked tongue in the adjacent forests.
The time dragged on. How long or how short was the period of the storm none of the men wondered or cared. The rapidity of the thunder crashes, the swift successions of lightning entirely held them, and, strong as they were, these things kept their nerves jumping.
Once in the midst of it all a man suddenly cried out. His cry came with a more than usually brilliant flash of purplish, steel-blue fire. The intensity of it carried pain to the now supersensitive nerves of his vision, and he turned and flung himself with his face buried upon his arm against the dripping wall. It was Beasley Melford. He stood there cowering, a dreadful terror shaking his every nerve.