chain lightning

faster than a cat lapping chain lightning

[…] over a mile square of [the desert floor] was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky.

1872, Mark Twain, chapter 74, in Roughing It, page 534

Wild wind sweeps from the North, flattening the bushes / As with a crash of doom chain-lightning falls.

1971, Robert Graves, “Dreaming Children”, in Poems, 1970-1972, published 1973, page 14

The birch trees are bare and white as chain lightning against the sky.

1985, W. P. Kinsella, “Vows”, in The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories, page 129

It was too late in the day; I would find that compared to a trout a bonefish was chain lightning; I wouldn’t see a bonefish; I would not get one if I did.

1921, Mary Roberts Rinehart, chapter 7, in The Out Trail, page 227

[…] he had access to figures which might not have meant much to the ordinary plodder, but to Stanwood’s chain-lightning brain they meant a lot.

1943, Erle Stanley Gardner, chapter 6, in The Case of the Smoking Chimney, page 12

With one chain-lightning motion, he kneed Acey viciously in the belly, and, with his right hand, chopped him across the side of the neck.

1986, Joseph R. Rosenberger, chapter 4, in The Heroin Connection, page 55

Give me a meetin where nobody cares a snap of a finger for nobody in particular, and has no interest but in a good feed, a good song, a good smoke, and chain-lightning to top it all off with.

1860, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, “The Old and the New Year”, in The Season-Ticket, page 306

Grandma said no more, but brought a bottle from the closet, and began to rub the spots with chain lightning. To Prudy’s joy and surprise, the dress was soon as clean as ever.

1874, Rebecca Sophia Clarke, chapter 9, in Miss Thistledown, page 130

To jeopardize the whole trip and the lives of the men in his care was an outrage and I told him so. He only laughed and said that chain lightning, as he called it, was the best stuff in the world.

1985, John Hawkes, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, page 147