In the dead of night I awoke with a strange sense of deadly fright. A crackling sound had aroused me, and my unconscious faculties interpreted it. The base of the dead tree had caught fire, and it was falling upon us. I yelled to Bierce as I stood up in the prison of my sleeping-bag, and had time to hop twice when the air quivered above me and a deafening crash chilled the blood in my veins. Something lightly touched my hair, and then there was again the perfect stillness of the Sierra night, and a pitchy blackness reigned. Moving my head, I found the thing that had touched it was rigid. I put my hand up. It was a foot-thick branch of the fallen tree. A few inches from my side there was another branch, and between Bierce and myself, who were not more than six feet apart, there was another great limb; and Bierce was hemmed in by them, as was I. He had been similarly awakened by the crackle, but not taking time to rise, shrewd youth, had rolled in his bag about as far as I hopped, or about six feet from where we had lain. Two feet back of us was the giant trunk across the canvas on which we had been sleeping. In the morning the tree was merrily burning, telling us plainly that had we not perished at once on being struck by the trunk or impaled by its sharp limbs, a slow roasting to death would have been our fate.

--Theodore Solomons, 1894

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