It is needless to relate the shifts and plans adopted to restore the
place to its former state, but we were favoured by the weather, a long
spell of hot sunshine working wonders, and the rapid drying and the work
of many hands soon produced a change. In two days we could go about on
dry ground. In four, mud was scaling over everything in cakes, and
being cracked into dust it regularly powdered off the trees, and a
couple of tremendous tropical showers sufficed to clear off the
remainder from twig and leaf, so that what with the rapid vegetation,
and the clearing effects of rain and dew, a month had hardly passed
before the place began to look very much as it did before the
misfortune, Morgan informing me smilingly that the soft mud was as good
for the garden as a great dressing of manure.
Our furniture in the house was of the simplest, and though Sarah
declared that the place would never be the same again, I very soon began
to forget all about our trouble, and was only reminded of it by the
wisps of dry grass and muddy, woody twigs that clung here and there
among some of the trees.
On one occasion I found Pomp busy with a bucket of water and a brush
down at the bottom of the garden, where he was scrubbing away at
something black.
"Hallo!" I exclaimed. "What's that?"
"'Gator head, Mass' George. Pomp find um 'tuck in dah 'tween um two
trees."
He illustrated his meaning by showing me how the head had been washed
from its place, and swept between a couple of tree-stumps, where it had
remained covered with mud and rubbish, till it had caught his eye, such
a trophy being too valuable to lie there in neglect.
I stopped till he had done, and then, all wet and glistening, the great
dried head with its gaping jaws was replaced on the spike-nail Morgan
had driven in the tree.
"Dah, you 'top till water come and wash um down again, and den Pomp come
and wash um up."
These words of the boy set me thinking; and that night I asked my father
about the probabilities of another flood.
"It is impossible to say how long it may be before we have another
visitation," he replied. "From what I can gather, it seems that they
are so rare that a generation may go by without such a flood occurring,
and I hardly like to give up so satisfactory a home on the chance of a
fresh one coming during our lives."
"Oh no, father, don't give it up," I said. "Everything at the
settlement seems to be straight again."
"They suffered more than we did too," he continued.
"But don't you think some one ought to have come in a boat to help us?"
"Yes, if the poor things had thought of it; but I fully believe that in
their trouble and excitement, trying to save life as they were, they did
not even give a thought to us."
Then the flood was set aside with the troubles from the Indians and the
Spaniards, my father saying quietly enough that people who came out to
an entirely new country must do so bearing in mind that they have to
take the risks with the pleasures. Some of which Sarah heard, for she
took up the subject next time I saw her alone, and she shook her head at
me as she said--
"Yes, my dear, there's a lot to put up with for those who come to live
in new lands, and a couple more of my chickens gone; but I don't know
what you and your poor father would have done if me and Morgan had not
made up our minds to come too."
I'm afraid I was playing the impostor a little, for I said to her, "We
couldn't have got on at all without you, Sarah;" but all the time I was
thinking how much more easily we could have managed during the night of
peril if we had not had Sarah with us, and how it was in trying to save
her that my father nearly lost his life.