of the parson trembled with terror.

The three believed that something in the nature of a cyclone was
approaching, or it might be a cloudburst several miles away, whose
deluge had swollen the stream into a rushing torrent that would
overwhelm them where they stood, caught inextricably in a trap.

The terrifying roar, however, was neither in front nor at the rear,
but above them,--over their heads! From the first warning to the end
was but a few seconds. The sound increased with appalling power and
every eye was instinctively turned upward.

In the dim obscurity they saw a dark mass of rock, weighing hundreds
of tons, descending like a prodigious meteor, hurled from the heavens.
It had been loosened on the mountain crest a half mile above, and was
plunging downward with inconceivable momentum. Striking some
obstruction, it rebounded like a rubber ball against the opposite side
of the gorge, then recoiled, still diving downward, oscillating like a
pendulum from wall to wall, whirling with increasing speed until it
crashed to the bottom of the gorge with a shock so terrific that the
earth and mountain trembled.

Landing in the stream, the water was flung like bird shot right and
left, stinging the faces of the men fifty feet distant. They sat awed
and silent until Ruggles spoke:

"Now if that stone had hit one of us on the head it would have hurt."

"Probably it would," replied the captain, who had difficulty in
quieting his horse; "at any rate, I hope no more of them will fall
till we are out of the way."

"I wonder whether that could have been done on purpose," remarked the
parson.

"No," said Ruggles; "the leftenant couldn't know anything about our
being purty near the right spot to catch it."

"I alluded to Indians,--not to him."

But Ruggles and the captain did not deem such a thing credible. A
whole tribe of red men could not have loosened so enormous a mass of
stone, while, if poised as delicately as it must have been, they would
have known nothing of the fact. Sometimes an immense oak, sound and
apparently as firm as any in the forest around it, suddenly plunges
downward and crashes to the earth, from no imaginable cause. So, vast
masses of rock on the mountain side which have held their places for
centuries, seem to leap from their foundations and tear their way with
resistless force into the valley below. This was probably one of those
accidental displacements, liable to occur at any hour of the day o