he stars.
They hung low, they pressed heavily, beneath them a sulphur-tainted and
breathless air. Lightnings began to flash, thunder to mutter. "Yah!"
whimpered Steve. "I'm going to get wet again! It's true. Everything's
agin me."

He came again upon the swampy margin of the Chickahominy. It was wide,
threaded by motionless waters, barred and banded with low-growing swamp
shrubs, set with enormously tall and solemn trees. Steve, creeping
between protruding roots, heard a screech owl in the distance. It cried
and cried, but then the thunder rolled more loudly and drowned its
hooting. He came flush with the dark stretch of the river. "Gawd, do I
want to get across, or do I want to stay here? I wish I was dead--no, I
don't!" He faced the lightning. "Gawd, that was jes' a mistake--don't
take any notice of it, please.--Yaaah!" He had set his foot on a log,
which gave beneath it and sank into deep water. With a screech like the
owl's he drew back and squeezed himself, trembling, between the roots of
a live-oak. He concluded that he would stay here until the dawn.

The storm drew nearer, with long lightnings and thunder that crashed and
rolled through the swamp. A vivid flash, holding a second or more,
showed the stretch of the river, and several hundred yards above Steve's
nook a part of a high railroad bridge. The gaunt trestle ran out past
midstream, then stopped, all the portion toward the northern shore
burned away. It stood against the intensely lit sky and stream like the
skeleton of some antediluvian monster, then vanished into Stygian
darkness. The thunder crashed at once, an ear-splitting clap followed by
long reverberations. As these died, in the span of silence before should
come the next flash and crash, Steve became conscious of another sound,
dull and distant at first, then nearer and rushingly loud. "Train on the
track down there! What in hell--It can't cross!" He stood up, held by a
sapling, and craned his neck to look up the river. A great flash showed
the bridge again. "Must be Yankees still about here--last of the
rearguard we've been fighting. What they doing with the train? They must
have burned the bridge themselves! Gawd!"

A wildly vivid orange flash lit water, wood and sky, and the gaunt half
of a bridge, stopping dead short in the middle of the Chickahominy. The
thunder crashed and rolled, then out of that sound grew another--the
noise of a rushing train. Something huge and dark roared from the woo