WHEN LAND CRUMBLED
For a moment Hal Dane's heart seemed to cease beating.
The huge panther was the largest of its kind he had ever seen. In his
scouting above the flood country, he had now and again glimpsed a few of
these great tawny creatures of the cat tribe that the waters had driven
from their forest haunts. Out in the open these others had merely slunk
off, hiding from even the shadow of the airplane that passed over them.
But cornered, the panther was a different beast. He was ferocious, and
fought to kill.
This one, sides sunken with hunger, flat ugly head weaving back and
forth, jaws snarling open, crouched tense in its corner.
A sudden ague shook Hal's hand till the spotlight wavered up and down
the walls. The next instant he controlled himself, held the torch glow
again on the beast before him. In the space of that instant, the panther
had glided out from his corner. The light flung into his fiery eyes sent
him motionless again--but how long would the spell-binding of the
torchlight last?
Hal Dane moistened dry lips, shaped his mouth to whistle, and at last
forced out a shrill sound. He had seen steady whistling charm small
animals like rabbits and foxes into a momentary "freeze". He prayed,
that it would work now. Dry-mouthed or not, he must keep up this
shrilling ten seconds, twenty seconds--till his hand could lift his
revolver from its hip holster, till he could take aim.
It was a six-shooter, but he remembered, with a chilling to his very
marrow, that there was only one shot left. He had used the other five
picking off rattlesnakes that had seemed determined to move into the dry
haunts of the human refugees.
A sudden switching of tail tip, a lower crouching of the powerful tawny
body, told that the spring was imminent.
Steady! Because the head hung low, he must aim at the brain through the
eye.
But before Hal's gun could belch forth its one shot, the great beast had
leaped. Hal's hand flung up to new aim. In the ghastly white torchlight,
a roaring tornado of teeth and claws rose above him.
The pistol shot its load straight up. And that instant, the boy flung
himself backwards out of the window. Instead of landing in a waiting
boat, he plunged into the cold, yellow depths of flood water.
He came up sputtering and choking. But after the first shock of his
submersion, he felt no alarm. He was a strong swimmer and could keep
afloat for hours if necessary. He bumped into what he thought was a
drifting log, but it turned out to be a derelict canoe upside down. He
clung to that and shouted. His electric torch and revolver had been lost
as he leaped from the window, almost under the impact of the panther's
downward slashing claws.
Hal's lusty shouting soon produced results. The rescue launch which had
drifted down stream, put about and with its headlight spraying the water
surface with its searching glare, nosed cautiously back up alongside of
him and his float. Strong hands hauled him aboard and a warm blanket was
flung around him.
Colonel Wiljohn was storming up and down the little craft in a rage at
his crew for deserting Hal in his time of peril.
The fellow at the steering wheel was rather shamefaced over letting a
gunshot and panther caterwauls shake his hand so that the boat shot from
his control and into midstream.
"D-don't blame you," chattered Hal, drawing the blanket tighter about
his dripping person, "if it s-s-sounded half as awful to you all outside
as it did to me inside--it was t-t-time to be leaving!"
To make sure that the great panther was not left merely wounded to
suffer lingeringly, or perhaps to injure someone else who might enter
the place, the boat was drawn again within sight-range of the drifting
old house. Lights were played over the upper story room, now so nearly
submerged.
The long tawny form lay stretched on the floor, without sign of
movement. Hal's one shot had done its work.
Hope died hard in Colonel Wiljohn's breast. His mind told him that the
shrill "woman screams" that had lured Hal to this place could only have
been the panther's call--so like a woman crying in distress. To satisfy
himself, however, the Colonel searched every possible part of the
floating, careening old house. With an axe he forced an entrance through
the warped, swollen doors to the three upper rooms, searched closets and
cupboards. He found no woman and child hiding away from that other
passenger,--the great, tawny panther cat. A pitiful litter of clothes,
books, a few small toys, deserted when the home-dwellers had to flee for
their lives, was the only reward for his search.
Back at the camp, Hal experienced all the comforts of being a "refugee".
Good dry clothes and a draught of hot milk took the shivers out of his
bones. After his report was made out, he flung himself down in his tent
to snatch a bit of sleep. With thirty-six hours of steady strain and
flying behind him, slumber claimed him the instant he hit his bunk. But
tired as he was, he had left word that he should be called early.
Next morning before the sun rose, he was out on the field warming up the
motor to his strange gyroscope plane. He found the radio installed.
Workmen from headquarters had done it while he used the seaplane the day
before. Everything was in working order. He tested the instruments and
found that they were of the best. A few taps and a message would go
speeding through the air.
Even this early in the day, a small crowd gathered to watch the squat
old hen, the newfangled plane, make its rise. As the rotors stiffened
with their power whirl and the thing took off, Hal heard a sound of
cheering drift up to him faintly. For all its awkward look, this thing
did rise like a lark on the wing. He turned her nose out over the flood.
For the time being, Hal Dane wanted to follow out a clew entirely on his
own. In the dusk of yesterday, as he clung to the drifting, upside-down
canoe, and the lights from the launch had played over it, the name
painted on the battered derelict had seemed to sear into his brain. The
letters had been inverted and he had read them but subconsciously at
first, then their meaning had suddenly seemed to burn into his brain in
letters of fire. "M-a-l-d-e-n, Malden"--the name of the hotel where Mrs.
Wiljohn and Jacky had stayed. This was a boat from that riverside
resort. Malden was miles below where he and the drifting boat had
collided yester evening. So that meant someone had gone up-river in the
canoe and let it get away to come drifting back down. That someone could
be the Wiljohns. What had happened to them? Were they alive after all
this time? More likely, dead!
It was all too frail a clew to build any hopes on. Hal could not bear to
mention it to Colonel Wiljohn. He had suffered too much already, to have
another castle of hope built up, only to have it crash into bitter
disappointment.
Young Dane flew his craft southward with the flood to a location he had
noted the day before, marked by a gnarled oak on a ridge lifting its
battered branches slightly above the torrent. It was near here that he
had first sighted the house of the panther screams. This big piece of
drift and the derelict canoe must have entered the main flood out of the
mouth of Tanabee Creek--or what had once been Tanabee Creek. That humble
stream was now a mile-wide torrent, filling a valley. The overflow from
the burst dam at Nelgat Lake had swamped this broad level.
Here the devastation had been terrible. As Hal pushed farther in this
direction than he had been before, he constantly came upon sights that
taxed his every sympathy. Many times he saw the bodies of men, women and
children floating with the current. With a sinking heart, he swept low
over those sightless faces turned toward the sky--searching, searching,
but he had not found them yet. Numberless dead animals drifted down with
the flood. Shattered homes rocked to and fro on the pull of currents,
followed often by a welter of broken furniture,--chairs, a baby
carriage, a cupboard that had once held dear family possessions.
Deeper into this desolation he pressed. About him everywhere, life
seemed to have been smothered out under the waters.
He had been flying slowly, searchingly, for more than an hour, when his
hawklike gaze focused upon a tiny rim of land, a crescent-shaped island
barely showing above the torrent. The force of currents was eating
steadily at the thin line of land. As Hal watched, a portion crumbled
and toppled into the flood.
And then as he swooped down nearer, he saw to his horror that there was
a human figure on that slender stretch of ground. He dropped closer,
closer, the spread wings of the rotor above his machine letting him down
as gently as though he hung in a great parachute. He dropped to a mere
forty feet above the flood, to thirty. He could see a white dress, a
woman's long hair flung out on the ground. She was apparently dead.
With every moment the rim of land was submerging. Soon the ravening
yellow torrent would sweep over the last vestige. It seemed utter folly
to risk a life and a plane for one already dead. Still there might be a
flickering spark of vitality in that still body.
No use to tap radio messages for help. No help beyond himself could
reach this doomed spot in time.
He must land on this narrow bit of earth already crumbling from the wash
of the waves.
Under its strange whirl of wings, the gyroscope plane dropped straight
as a plummet. A deviation to the right or to the left, and aircraft,
aviator and all would have been engulfed in a roaring torrent without
one chance in a thousand of escape.
But his trained eye had measured distances carefully. In that straight
drop he landed well in the middle of the tiny land crescent, and where
it was least narrow.
In the drawing of a breath, he was out of the cockpit and running toward
the prostrate figure. Even at the thump of the machine to earth, that
one had not stirred. But now, out from under a shelter of brush a child
came creeping, a little boy that even this much effort seemed to
exhaust, for he slumped down weakly.
It was Jacky Wiljohn!
"Jacky! Jacky!" shouted Hal Dane, "run for the plane, quick, while I
bring your mother!" As he spoke, he could feel the rim of land trembling
beneath him, crumbling to the awful power of the waters.
But the child lay where he had dropped. It was as though his last faint
store of energy had been used in his effort to creep into the open.
Hal had already lifted the woman across his shoulder where she hung
limp. He was staggering under this burden, yet he must add more. With a
quick swoop, he seized one of the child's hands and dragging him, took a
few swaying steps forward.
Ten paces, twelve paces! Would he ever make it?
He sagged against the cockpit, slid the woman in; with another motion he
swept the child in beside her.
Like mad, he spun the motor and leaped for the fuselage as the great
horizontal wings began their first slow whirl.
Before him a whole end of the narrow island broke off and the flood
foamed and roared across the place where land had been a moment ago.
Behind, there was a crash and sound of the torrent pouring over. Hal
could not turn to look, but he knew what was happening. Earth toppling
into the flood!
Would those four rotor blades above him ever stiffen with enough lifting
power for flight?
Within ten feet of the gyroscope's nose water poured over the crumbled
land edge. No room for even the slightest run now. Those rotors must
lift straight up with their extra burden--or it would mean the end.
Centrifugal force was whirling the limp flimsiness of the rotors into an
engine of mighty lifting power. Flexible steel stiffened as it spun a
thousand, two thousand whirls to the minute.
The gyroscope was rising, slowly, not straightly as it should. Wrong
balance of its burden shifted the take-off climb from perpendicular to
an angle.
But at that, it cleared land and rose up and up into the sky.
Hal Dane looked down. It had been a fearfully close thing. Below him was
no island at all, merely a surging waste of waters where he had just
been. The last of the land rim had crumbled.
Now that he was above it all, his heart beat to the zooming roar of his
rotors.
Speed! Speed! He must wing it back before life force ebbed entirely from
those limp bodies behind him. Already his tapping fingers had flung the
message of his find into the ether.