Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/122

 would have taken shelter in a doorway from a city downpour, but it was no comfortable doorway that he found. The rain was drumming on the leaves in a confused uproar; the branches were tossing, the trees creaking; and the water poured down on him in broken streams. A blaze of lightning lit up the green depths around him with an unearthly cold incandescence. He saw a wide perspective of black tree trunks, overhung with threshing branches and fluttering leaves transparently green—a confusion of frightened underbrush, dripping rocks, ferns tremulously swaying—and the ruts and stones and ditch gullies of a road that was arched with tree limbs and drenched foliage like an arbor.

It all glowed vitreously bright for one blinking instant, and then darkness snatched it away; the thunder crashed and reverberated as if he were in a cave that split and rocked around him; a new fury of rain rushed through the tree tops with a hissing rage; a wet leaf slapped him smartly across his cheek