The men were making a circle in the Widow Buzzell's field, in the same
place where the old one had been,--the old one, viewed with awe for five
years by all the village small boys.
The forerunners, outriders, proprietors, whatever they might be, had
arrived and gone to the tavern.
An elephant was quartered in the tavern shed!
The elephant had stepped through the floor!!
The advance guard of performers and part of the show itself had come!
And the “Cheriot”!!
This far-famed vehicle had paused on top of Deacon Chute's hill, to
prepare for the street parade. Little Jim Chute had been gloating over
the fact that it must pass by his house, and when it stopped short under
the elms in the dooryard his heart almost broke for joy. He pinched the
twenty-five-cent piece in his pocket to assure himself that he was alive
and in his right mind. The precious coin had been the result of careful
saving, and his hot, excited hands had almost worn it thin. But alas for
the vanity of human hopes! 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.