The noise grew amazingly, and coming in range of the opposite wall of the valley, a low and steadily increasing thunder poured into the ears of Bull.  It was a fascinating thing to watch, and at this distance to the side he was quite safe.  But at the very moment that he reached this decision, the front of the slide smashed with a noise like volleyed canyon against the side of a hill, tossed immense arms of white in the air, floundered, and then veered with the speed of an express train rounding a curve and rocked away down the slope straight for Bull.  Turned cold with dread, he saw it hit the timberline with a great crashing, and the dark forms of the trees were dashed up by the running mass of stones and then swallowed in the boiling front of the slide.

He waited to see no more, but dashed on for the saving cliff.  Once his back was turned it seemed that the slide gained speed.  The immense roaring literally leaped on him from behind, and in the roar, his senses were drowned.  He could feel his knees weaken and buckle, but the cliff, now just before him, gave him fresh strength.  But was the cliff high enough?  He hurried up to higher ground and flung himself prostrate.  The front of the slide was cutting down the heavily forested slope as though the trees were blades of grass before a keen scythe.  The noise passed all description.

Once he thought the mass was changing direction.  It put out a massive arm to the left, licked down five hundred trees at a gulp, and then, smashing its fist into a hillside, flung back into the valley floor, tossing the great trees in its top and poured straight at him.  He watched it in one of those dazes during which one sees everything.  The whole body came like water down a chute, but one part of the front wall spilled out ahead and then another, and then the top, overtaking the rest, toppled crashing to the bottom.  And so it rushed out of sight beneath the cliff.  But would it wash over the top?

The first answer was an impact that shook the ground under him, and then he heard a noise like a huge ripping explosion.  A dozen lofty geysers of snow streamed up into the air, dazzling against the sun, misty at the edges of each column, whose center was solid tons and tons of snow.  Old pines and spruces, their branches shaved away in the tumult of the slide, were picked up and hurled like javelins over the cliff; a shower of fragments beat on the body of Bull; and then the main mass of snow washed up over the edge of the cliff in a great mound, and the slide was ended.

He crawled slowly back to his feet.  Far up the mountainside, beginning in a point, the track of the slide swept down in a broadening scar, black and raw, across forest and snow.  Far down the valley the last echoes of thunder were passing away to a murmur, and the valley floor, beneath the cliff, was a mass of snow and tree trunks.

Bull took off the snowshoes and climbed along the valley wall until he could descend to the clear floor beneath him.  Then he headed down toward Johnstown.