Meantime the aspect of the heavens had materially changed. The black, opaque mass of vapors had extended its dark and jagged front a third of the way around the horizon, piling its frowning steeps high up toward the zenith. Here and there overhead, the sky was blotted with isolated black clouds, which were fast increasing in size and joining into one. The thunder, which had been occasionally muttering on high, now rattled incessantly, and the forked lightning rushed down in sheets of lurid flame. Ere long, the huge mass of sweeping clouds had reached the zenith, and were rolling darkly onward toward the opposite horizon. Directly the wild uproar died nearly altogether away, and intense darkness shrouded the skies and earth in its folds. The air grew heavy, and seemed to be forcibly pressed toward the ground. This was that strange pause in the strife of the elements, apparently as if the combatants were gathering all their strength for the fearful contest that was to follow. But this pause was only momentary, and soon was at an end. Then a distant, sullen, bellowing murmur came surging up from the depths of the forest, followed by the sorrowful moaning of the trees along the road-side. David White grew pale, and could almost hear the beating of his own heart as he bent forward in the saddle, and listened to the approaching rush and roar of the lashed winds. He had not expected such a wild fierceness in the storm, but now he had gone too far to recede; he was in the very midst of the forest, and the danger was the same either way, so he spurred on the plunging animal beneath him with a desperate energy. At that instant a blinding flash shot down from a cloud almost directly overhead, drank up the thick darkness, and wrapped the air in sheets of lurid flame, while the tall trees stood out like a spectral throng in its supernatural glare. Before a clock could tick, the report followed with a roar, deafening and tremendous, rattling and echoing along the sky like the simultaneous discharge of a thousand deeply freighted cannon. Terrified at the unearthly glare and stunning thunder-bolt, the horse plunged aside with a fierce impetuosity, that would have flung the rider to the earth had he not clung to the mane with his utmost strength; and even for minutes after "the jaws of darkness" had devoured up the scene, and the fearful report had died away in the distance, his eyes still ached with the intense light, and his ears rung with the deafening bolt that had followed.