A man lay trapped inside the cab of a smouldering fourteen-wheel trailer, which had rammed into a tree. His truck had been forced off the road by a drunken driver.

Police officer Don Henry, responding to a radio SOS, raced to the scene. A recovery vehicle pulled up. But even after towlines had been attached to the cab door, the crushed metal refused to budge.

Someone screamed, ‘Look. Fire!’ Flames began to flicker from the bottom of the cab. In a few minutes, the truck would be a funeral pyre.

Then out of the night strode a towering figure. ’Can I be of any help?’ He spoke softly. ’We’ve done all we can,’ replied Henry. They’ve gone for cutting torches. It’s our last hope.’

The stranger paused only a second, then walked up to the cab and slowly wrenched off the jammed door with his bare hands.

‘You could hear the metal rip.’ said Henry later. ’I saw the big man’s shirt sleeves split open as his tremendous muscles bulged.’

The truck driver was alive but unconscious when Henry hauled him to safety. But when Henry looked for the giant rescuer, he had disappeared into the night. ’Who was the mysterious Samson?’ the local newspapers asked the next morning. For days the question went unanswered. Then the foreman of a local transport company noticed that a thirty-three-year-old named Charles Jones had strange cuts on his hands and moved away from the crowds that talked about the accident.

Jones, it turned out, was the modern Samson. ‘God gives one strength to do anything in an emergency,’ he said when questioned.

What Jones did not say was that for the past fourteen months he had been terribly afraid of fire - ever since his own child died in the flames of their burning home.

By an unknown reporter.