Suddenly a new and terrifying sound was borne to the ears of the four girls.

Tommy screamed with fright.  Cora uttered a terrified wail.  Harriet and Patricia, however, were silent.  At the first suggestion of the threatening sound Harriet had leaped from her cot.  She stood with one hand slightly raised, her head bent forward ever so little, her eyes tightly closed, every nerve in her body centred on listening to the disturbing sound, seeking to discover its meaning.  Then all at once it occurred to her what it was.

Harriet acted instantly.

“Down!” she cried sharply.  “Under the cots!  Quick!  Do as I tell you!  Tommy!  Are you under?”

“Yeth.  Oh, thave me!” came a muffled voice that seemed to be under the floor of the tent.

Patricia and Cora, recognizing that Harriet had some well defined plan in mind, obeyed her without the slightest hesitation.  They threw themselves on the floor hastily crawling under the cots.  Then Harriet Burrell made a sudden dive.  She was standing several feet from her own bed.  The dive sent her sliding underneath the nearest cot.  Her progress was stopped by the body of one of her companions.

She had sought cover none too soon.  The most terrific crashing that any of those girls ever had listened to, filled the air.  Above the uproar was heard faintly the scream of a girl somewhere outside the tent.  Then the blow fell, a mighty, crushing blow that seemed to set the universe all a tremble.

CHAPTER XX

THE FALL OF A FOREST KING

“Thave me!” moaned the unhappy Tommy, but her voice was lost in the volume of sound that fairly overwhelmed the occupants of the tent.

Almost at the instant that the first alarm had reached her ears, Harriet Burrell recognized the nature of the sound.  She had heard it before though in a lesser degree.  A tree was falling.  She remembered a tall aged pine that stood a short distance to the south of the tent.  Between the tree and the tent was a fairly open space, that was filled principally with saplings and scrub undergrowth.  Harriet in that moment understood, she thought, that the heavy downpour of rain had weakened the hold of the aged roots of the tree in the ground.  The heavy wind blowing against the old pine had been too much for the weakened roots.  The tree was falling with mighty crashings and reports that sounded like the explosions of firearms.

To run, Harriet believed might be attended with serious consequences to them, for the long limbs of the tree were penetrating the tent roof before she had fairly gotten her companions underneath the cots.  The tent was swept down as Harriet was diving under the bed.  She realized that if the full force of the trunk fell on the cots nothing could save the girls beneath them.  Still, Harriet did not believe the tree could fall so flat as that.  Its limbs, she thought, would support its trunk, keeping the latter from falling flat on the ground.