Helen felt she had not lost consciousness, but she did not know. Hayward was struggling to release her from the wrecked landau. He was calling to her, screaming rather,—for the shrieking wind was raging as if with the taste of blood. She could see him plainly as he fought through the threshing branches of the giant oak that had smashed them. The light which revealed him to her was continuous, but flashing and dancing. She looked to see whence it came, and her blood froze as she saw the sputtering end of an electric transmission cable which the falling forest monarch had broken and carried down. At the foot of Niagara were mighty turbines a-whirl which sent the deadly current to threaten and to slay. Men had intended it for works of peace and industry in lake villages, but Nature had stepped in to reclaim it as one of her own cataclysmic forces, and Niagara’s rioting waters, unwitting and uncaring, sent it just as merrily and as mightily to works of death. Hayward well knew that death was in the touch of that whipping wire, tangled in boughs beaten and lashed by the demoniac winds: but Helen was in danger, and he hesitated not to come to her. After a struggle that tested muscle as well as courage, he dragged her free and started to carry her up the roadside bank to a small hut or shack which the light revealed. Helen shook herself from his arms. "Where is Shortman?" she cried against the tempest. Hayward pointed to the wrecked carriage. As she looked, one of the horses, uttering a cry and trying to rise, was flicked on the head by the end of the hissing wire, and, in a flash of greenish-blue flame, sank down and was still. "Help Shortman!" Helen cried again. At her command Hayward plunged into the tree-top and after a longer struggle than had been necessary in rescuing Helen, he pulled the coachman out and laid him limp at his wife’s feet. He understood rather than heard the question she asked. He nodded his head in affirmative answer, and said, as if talking to himself: "Dead, Miss Helen." It had not been more than two minutes since the fury of the storm broke upon them. The rain-drops, which had been desultory, now came down in torrents. Hayward turned toward his wife. She was sinking trembling to the road. He caught her up and hurried her to the hut. Their refuge was quite small, but afforded shelter from the downpour of water. It was a little patched-up affair that had been used by the labourers who constructed the electric transmission line, and was without opening except the door, there being no shutter to that. A rude table of rough planks built against the wall was its only furnishing. What had been a small bench was broken up and useless.