It will be recalled that in the division of forces for the search
Herman Boyd and the Trojan were detailed to follow the road down the
valley, making inquiries at each house and seeking news of the missing
Shark and Varley.
This duty they performed conscientiously, but wholly without result.
Nobody had seen or heard anything of the pair. From each house which
was provided with a telephone the boys made report to Mrs. Grant and
learned from her that seemingly the other hunters were having no better
fortune. More than once they were advised to give up their task and
accept shelter and refreshment; but they declined the invitations and
resumed their march. What is more, they did not restrict themselves to
inquiries of the residents, but now and then made a detour toward the
river. It was to be observed, as they neared the foot of the valley,
that the lowlands were flooded in many places. The boys agreed that
their prospects of success were not bright, but neither was willing to
turn back.
“We’ll keep on as far as the bridges, anyway,” the Trojan said. “Sam’d
expect us to do that much.”
Herman nodded. “He’d keep on, if he were here.”
“Sure he would!”
“Yes, old Sam’s a sticker.”
“Then we’ll be stickers, too: we won’t fail him.”
This decided, they continued their tramp. And while they went splashing
and sloshing along the road, which was by no means a poor imitation of
a canal in places, Step and Poke, heading in the opposite direction,
were having a very similar experience.
The tall youth and his plump chum were quite as much in earnest as
were Herman and the Trojan, but temperamentally were not so well
fitted to carry out a commander’s orders implicitly. Besides, under
the depressing weather conditions, Poke could hardly avoid meditation
upon the sorrows of his own lot. With rain driving in his face and
snow water at times a quarter-way up the legs of his rubber boots, it
is scarcely to be wondered that he tended to the pessimistic view. To
tell the truth, Poke liked the comfortable things of life, and turned
regretfully from the warm kitchens of the farmhouses at which he halted
to ask the question, to which there was regularly the same answer.
Nobody had seen a smallish boy in glasses and a larger boy who didn’t
wear glasses.
Trudging on, doggedly and faithfully, Poke relapsed into a dull
silence, which at last attracted the attention of Step. The latter
was not unmindful of his friend’s mood; in fact, he tried to show his
sympathy. Ordinarily, the two got on famously, but now Step contrived
to strike a jarring note.
“Oh, buck up, Poke; buck up!” he urged. “Luck’ll have to turn. You
ought to be able to see that.”
Now, this was meant in all kindness, but it did not fall pleasingly on
Poke’s ear. Doubtless the fault was his own, not Step’s.
“Huh! Talk’s cheap!” he growled.
Step flushed wrathfully. “Oh, well, if you don’t want to see, you don’t
have to, you chump!”
“Huh! Chump, am I? Well, if I had a periscope-pole neck like yours I
could see a lot of funny things, too.”
This was personal insult, so intended and so received. Step pulled up
short.
“Periscope neck, eh? Well, I’d rather have one like that than be a
human flat-iron!”
Poke halted, too. He glared up at Step as savagely as Step was glaring
down at him. Together they presented a quaint scene of wrath, standing
there in slush to their ankles and with the rain running down their
long coats in little streams. The humor of the situation escaped Poke,
but he was quick witted enough to take advantage of the circumstance
that Step had been first to pause. He cut short his own delay, and took
as long a stride as his short legs permitted.
“That’s right--be a quitter!” he said over his shoulder. “Anything to
get out of hunting for Varley and the Shark, of course!”
Step was beside him in an instant. “Quitter, eh?” he snarled. “We’ll
see who’ll be first to lay down his playthings in this game!”
“Oh, then you haven’t really laid them down, eh?” said Poke with crafty
sweetness. “Isn’t it too bad it looked so much like that?”
Step merely gritted his teeth in reply, and set a pace which put Poke
into a dog-trot to keep abreast of him.
It was, of course, the most trivial of quarrels, but like some other
trifles in life fated to have consequences out of all ratio to its
real importance. It made both boys determined to go on with the hunt
without much regard for reason. Also it brought it about that when in
the growing darkness the flood came sweeping down the valley in a fine
wave, Poke and Step were still marching along, each more intent upon
wearing out the other than upon keeping keen watch for danger.
Luckily, the roar of the approaching water gave even these preoccupied
youths some warning. Luckily, too, though the road they were then
traveling was close to the river, they were near a tiny hillock on
which stood a shed such as farmers sometimes build in remote fields to
protect stock or tools. Poke and Step dashed for its shelter, and were
well above the wave as it went raging down the valley. However, it left
them on what was now an island, safe for the time being, but cut off
from the shore by a hundred yards or more of deeply inundated swale.
Poke clutched Step, and Step clung to Poke, their bickering forgotten
and peace restored. In a moment they were as thoroughly comradely
as Herman and the Trojan, who three or four miles down the valley
watched, or, more accurately, heard the sweep of the wave down the
stream. Chance had put the Trojan and his companion, at the time on the
hillside, well above the flood level. In the faint light they could
make out little except that the stream, of a sudden, was over its
banks; but while they were pausing, uncertain what to do, Mr. Grant’s
hired man drove up. He could give them no information except that he
had been instructed to carry on the inquiry for the Shark and Varley at
the gorge at the mouth of the valley. They held a short consultation,
agreeing that the man should go on as far as he could, the road at this
point being well above high water mark, while the boys turned back. By
keeping to the hillside they would be able to regain the Grant place,
and on the way they could continue the search for traces of the missing
pair.
For Poke and Step, however, no such solution of their problem was
possible. They were effectually marooned. Neither felt tempted to
venture to swim to the shore. They put their heads together, debated
briefly, and agreed that there was nothing to do but to make the best
of the situation.
The roof of the shed leaked abominably, but at one end they found a
comparatively dry spot, and here, too, they made a discovery. Against
the wall lay a boat, bottom up, evidently in storage for the winter.
It was a home-made affair; a punt, broad, flat-bottomed, square-ended;
built of heavy planks and generally so clumsy and weighty that they
were unable to move it, though they put all their strength into the
effort.
“No use!” groaned Step, and now it was Poke who took the rôle of
comforter.
“Well, I don’t see any oars, so it doesn’t matter very much.... What’s
that? Don’t want to stay here all night, you say? Well, I don’t want
to, either; but I’m not going to worry about it. Maybe something will
turn up.”
Step dismally pointed a number of very good reasons for doubting that
anything could turn up to their advantage; but Poke declined to lose
heart.
“I know, I know!” he said. “Luck’s against us just now--guess I’m a
regular Jonah, anyway. But it’ll have to turn--say! I’m not sure but it
has turned.”
“How?” Step demanded skeptically.
Poke waved a hand at the dark flood. “Suppose that had caught us. This
is no picnic, you’re thinking? I tell you it’s a party compared with
being out in that mess. Goodness knows, I’ve got troubles enough in
life, but I’m not quite ready to be drowned yet!”
“Well, I’m not, either,” Step admitted. “Only--only I do wish it’d stay
light a little longer.”
“With you there!” cried Poke earnestly.
The gloom, in fact, was for the chums--as for the larger party in the
old house--the most insistent of the night’s discomforts. It was worse
than the pelting rain, from which, indeed, they had found shelter of
a sort; it was worse than the chill of the air which increased as the
night advanced, for they could huddle together for warmth. It even
seemed to offer more menacing perils than the steadily rising flood,
whose approach to the summit of the hillock it concealed. How Step and
Poke endured the dragging hours can better be imagined than described.
They had their alarms--many of them. Mysterious sounds came from the
bosom of the flood; an owl hooted sepulchrally; occasionally a squall
swept by, whistling shrilly about the shed. There were long intervals,
though, in which they heard only the monotonous beat of the rain and
a sound very like a heavy murmur from the river; and at such times
weariness took its toll, and both boys slept, fitfully, brokenly and
restlessly.
Rather oddly, neither of them suspected the manner in which the waters
were creeping toward their refuge. Neither had the mathematical bent of
the Shark to work out a theory of a valley like a plugged bowl; and so,
while they were perfectly aware of the discomforts of their situation
and while they were full of anxiety as to the fate of their friends,
the discovery, at last, that the still rising river was invading the
shed came with surprise as well as consternation.
They turned again to the boat, and made desperate efforts to drag it
out; but in this they were hampered and handicapped by the darkness.
They did succeed in turning it on its side, but there it stuck, in
spite of all their efforts.
Now came a new cause of alarm. Some shift in the current began to
swerve drifting objects toward their island. A score or more of big
logs, freed by the breaking of some boom up-stream, came like a fleet
of rams to batter the walls of the rickety structure. By this time the
water was more than knee deep on the highest part of the earth floor of
the shed, and Poke and Step were perched in insecurity on a pile of old
boxes in a corner. The only alleviating feature of their situation was
a lessening of the darkness with the coming of the dull dawn; but it
was still a faint twilight which was all about them when the end of the
shed came.
Another lot of logs, traveling with even more momentum than the first
flotilla, seemed to charge upon them. One tore a great hole in the shed
wall; a second ripped away an end. Then a huge timber lodged against an
upright of the framework, and with the full force of the flood behind
it, turned like a beam of a great derrick, carrying away what was left
of the roof, tearing out the wall as if it had been made of paper, and
completing the ruin of the shed. The pile of boxes was tossed aside,
and Poke and Step were pitched into the water.
The big log, though, served them a good turn as well as a bad one.
Their asylum was gone, but the boat had been set afloat by the blow,
and, what was still better, was floating right side up. Half full of
water as it was, it was a very ark of safety to the boys, who climbed
aboard just as the current seized it and carried it free of the
wreckage.
For a moment or two the voyagers were content to sit still and regain
breath. Then, pluckily, they set about improving the opportunity for
escape which Fortune had thrown in their way.
There were no oars aboard, but Step tore a broken thwart from its
fastenings. One piece of the board he gave to Poke and another he
himself put over the side. Both boys fell to paddling frantically--but
to small avail. The punt was heavy, clumsy, water-logged. The paddles
were the poorest of excuses. It was all they could do to swing the
blunt bow of the boat toward the dimly visible shore; and after ten
minutes’ hard, but vain, endeavor the chums ceased their labors.
Their plight now was distressful, though possibly having less of
peril than had threatened them on their temporary island. Their ark,
if unmanageable, kept afloat, and was stout enough to be in no great
danger from collision with other flotsam borne along by the current.
They were in water half-way to their knees, but even if the boat
filled, its wooden bulk promised sufficient buoyancy to support them.
“Sooner or later we’ll have to drift ashore--somewhere,” Poke remarked
philosophically. “Kind of like the stone you chuck in the air--‘What
goes up must come down,’ you know. And this isn’t the ocean--we’ll
make land after a while.”
[Illustration: “WE’LL HAVE TO DRIFT ASHORE SOMEWHERE”]
“Huh! Don’t make out any now!” croaked Step.
Poke made deliberate survey. The light was still dim; low lying, gray
clouds seemed to merge in thin mists, through which only vaguely could
the shore be discerned. The rain had decreased somewhat, but it was
like a veil in hiding distant objects. There were, to be sure, other
objects near at hand, which under happier conditions the voyagers must
have found interesting. Keeping pace with the boat, and not fifty feet
away, drifted an overturned wagon. Trailing this came a pagoda-like
summer-house, at the head of a fleet of chicken coops, boxes and
barrels. Farther still from the boat floated the roof of a barn. All
about them the boys saw planks, logs, a section of wooden fence,
limbs torn from trees, doors, odds and ends of furniture; anything,
in fact, which the flood could bear along. A squirrel, perched on a
log, chattered at them; a cat, crouched on a big packing-case, mewed
piteously. Beyond the case they could see the body of a cow, still held
by a halter to the shed in which she had been drowned, and which now
was sweeping down the stream.
Except for the current there was more suggestion of lake than river;
though the trees protruding above the water added a weird touch to the
picture, which differed markedly from that of any lake either boy ever
had seen. Even the philosophy of Poke was not proof against the effects
of such evidences of destruction. He huddled himself lower, and his
voice shook.
“I--I--say, this is pretty fierce, Step! Things must have been awful
for the folks up above.”
“They’re awful enough for the folks here!” groaned Step.
Then there was a long pause. The light strengthened, but slowly, very
slowly. Neither of the boys took pains to maintain a vigilant lookout;
and so it happened that they were sighted from the old house before
they were aware of the attic still protruding above the flood.
Roused to action by the shouts of Sam and his comrades, they caught
up their extemporized paddles and fell to work as for dear life. Had
the boat not been drifting almost directly toward the house, however,
it is much to be doubted if they could have brought it alongside. As
things were, they accomplished the feat, the side of the punt crunching
against the roof just where Sam and his friends were gathered.
Then a curious complication arose. It was eloquent testimony to the
slight confidence or liking either party had for its quarter; for as
the boys in the house tried to scramble into the boat, Poke and Step
leaped wildly for the break in the roof. In consequence, Poke and the
Shark collided, and pitched together to the floor of the attic, while
Step and Orkney, clinging to each other, reeled against Lon with such
force as to drive him back from the opening.
Sam and Varley chanced to be a little to one side. This kept them free
of the unintentional mêlée, but, at the same time, put them farther
from the boat, which, helped, no doubt, by the impetus of Poke and
Step’s leaps, edged away from the house.
It would be hard to say which was the quicker to grasp the danger
of losing the boat. Both sprang forward; both tried to grasp the
gunwale--and both failed by inches.
Then Varley did a thing which may have been rash, but the daring of
which was not to be denied. Like a flash he whipped off his greatcoat;
vaulted the wreck of wall; plunged into the flood; caught the side of
the boat. Sam, no laggard in such an emergency, leaned out and seized
Varley by the leg. In an instant his call for Lon brought help. The big
punt was heavy; the current was beginning to lay hold upon it again.
For a little it seemed to be impossible that Varley should be able to
retain his grasp on the rail or that Lon and Sam should be able to haul
in their human cable; then, inch by inch, they began to gain. The boat
was dragged within reach. Orkney and the Shark, by this time clear of
Step and Poke, held it fast, while Sam hauled Varley out of the water.
“Get aboard--quick--everybody!” Sam cried, and helped Varley to obey
the order. Then he turned and caught Step’s shoulder.
“Pile in! Hustle Poke, too! It’s our only chance!”
Step resisted. “Wait a minute, Sam! There are no oars. You can’t do
anything. You can’t----”
Sam half pitched the objector into the punt. Poke, taking the hint,
followed, unassisted.
Lon ripped up a narrow floor-board.
“Here’s oars in the makin’,” he shouted. “All aboard--everybody that’s
goin’!”
There was no need of further exhortation. In thirty seconds more the
Safety First Club was afloat, and the boat was again beginning to drift
away from the old house.