A STORMY SEA
Betty, about to return to the Quarter Circle D E, found herself
importuned by her small sister to take her along.
“I’ll be the goodest, ’n’ not bovver you, ’n’ go to bed jes’ the minute
you say to,” she promised.
The older sister hesitated, then turned to her father. “Why not? I’m
staying there only one night.”
“Fine. Take Little Nuisance along,” Reed said, and poked a forefinger
into Ruth’s softly padded body. “I’ve got to go to town, anyhow, an’
won’t be back till late.”
It was nearly two weeks since Betty had shaken hands with Justin
Merrick and closed in good-will a chapter of her history. She had not
seen Tug Hollister since then, but word had reached her that he had
gone back to work in the hills. Merrick’s men were on the Flat Tops
running the lines where the ditches were to go.
She was waiting for Tug to come to her. Surely he did not intend to let
things end between them as they were. He would ride up some day and
tell her that he had been a stiff-necked idiot who had at last seen the
light. Every day she had looked for him, and her eyes had moved up the
road in vain.
In the pleasant sunshine Ruth prattled cheerfully of puppies, dolls,
gingerbread, Sunday school, her new pink dress, and warts. Betty came
out of a brown reverie at the name of Hollister.
“I fink he might come an’ see us. I’m jes’ as mad at him,” the child
announced. “’N’ I’m gonna tell him so, too, when he comes.”
“If he comes,” Betty found herself saying with a little sigh.
She knew that if he did not make the first move she would take the
initiative herself. A little point of pride was not going to stand in
the way of her happiness. But she believed he ought to come to her. It
was a man’s place to meet a girl more than halfway.
It was, of course, some fantastic sense of duty that was holding him
back. She had not very much patience with it. Why was he not generous
enough to give her a chance to be generous about this fault he
magnified so greatly? He did not seem to appreciate her point of view
at all.
On Betty’s desk at the Quarter Circle D E an unopened letter lay
awaiting her. She had never seen Hollister’s writing, but at the first
glance after she picked up the envelope her heart began to hammer. She
knew who the message was from. The postmark was Wild Horse. Evidently
the mailman had delivered it an hour or two earlier.
She tore the flap and read:
Ever since I saw you last I have been close to happiness in spite of
my distress. You love me. I tell myself that over and over. I cling
to it and rest in it. For this is the greatest thing that ever came
into my life.
I wish, dear, dear friend, that I could show you my heart. I wish you
could understand how great is the temptation to throw away discretion
and accept this wonderful gift. A thousand times I have been over the
ground, trying to persuade myself that you are right and my caution a
coward’s fear with no basis in reason. But I can’t. I can’t. Before I
dared to take your life into my keeping, I would have to be sure. And
how can I be? How can I _know_ that this horrible thing won’t rise up
some day and throttle your happiness?
Why did I not meet you before I had given hostages to this
destructive menace? I keep asking myself why. I can find no answer
that is not born in bitter mockery.
If you could know what you have done for me, how you have rebuilt my
faith in good, in God! No man ever had so wonderful a friend.
That was all, except the signature at the bottom. But it made her heart
sing. Her doubts were at rest. He loved her. That was all she wanted to
know. The difficulties in his mind would vanish. Her love would beat
them down. What scruples, what fears could stand against this joy that
flooded them both?
She longed to tell him so, to pour her heart out in what was to be the
first love-letter she had ever written. Yet she was not impatient of
the delays forced on her by ranch details, by Ruth’s imperious demands
for attention. She could attend to these competently and without
irritation because subconsciously her being floated in happiness. Life
had always given Betty what she wanted. It was unthinkable that there
should be withheld from her that which was the crown of all her hopes.
Alone at the desk in the living-room, after everybody else on the
ranch had retired, Betty gave herself up to the luxury of dreams. She
felt very wide awake. It would not be possible to sleep until she had
written an answer. There was no hurry about it. She wanted to take
plenty of time to think out what she wanted to say before she even
started on it.
When she began to write, her thoughts flew fast. They kept busy the
flashing finger-tips that transmitted the messages to the white page on
the carriage of the typewriter. The sentences were short, impulsive,
energetic. They expressed the surge of eagerness in her.
She knew she would copy it in long hand, would go over every word of
every sentence. The other side of her, the shy-eyed maiden of dreams
who must be the wooed and not the wooer, would insist on deleting,
trimming down, making colorless the swift and passionate staccato of
the words. The letter she would send to Hollister would be pale and
neutral compared to this cry of the heart she was uttering.
The little glass-cased clock on her desk struck two. Betty was
surprised. She had been here alone with her thoughts for four hours.
The fire in the grate had died down and the room was beginning to
chill. She gathered the live coals and put upon them two split lengths
of resinous pine.
For a few minutes she sat before the blaze warming her hands. That was
the obvious reason for her staying. A more compelling one was that she
saw pictures in the coals, dream pictures of the future in which two
figures moved to the exclusion of all others. These had the texture of
fiction, not consciously, but because our conceptions of the future
must always be adjusted to a reality affected by environment and human
character.
Betty lifted her head and listened. What was that rushing, swishing
sound? She rose, startled, affected instantly by a sense of insecurity
and danger. Something crashed heavily against the wall. The floor
seemed to weave.
She went to the window and looked out into the darkness. A river, swift
and turbid, was roaring past where the lawn had been a few minutes
before. The girl stood terrified, her mind caught in the horror of
unknown disaster. Even as she stood there, she saw that the waters were
rising.
Again there sounded a rending crash of timbers. Like a battering-ram
the end of a telephone pole smashed through the side of the house,
crossed the room, and came to rest in the fireplace. With it came a
rush of water that covered the floor.
Betty screamed. Her panicky heart beat wildly. Was the world coming
to an end? She looked out again. What she saw was appalling--a swirl
of rising waters tossing like the backs of cattle on a stampede. She
noticed that the barn, plainly visible a few moments before, had
vanished from sight.
The sloshing tide in the room was rising. Already it reached the
bottom of her skirts. There was no longer any doubt that the floor was
tilting. The house had been swept from its foundations. Built of frame,
it was tossing on the face of a rough sea.
Betty waded to the stairway, climbing over the telephone pole. Except
Ruth and the old colored woman Mandy there was nobody in the house with
her. Both of these were sleeping on the second floor. In the bunkhouse
were three men employed by her, but she realized that it, too, must
have been carried away.
The girl flew upstairs from the pursuing flood. She knew now that
it must have been caused by the breaking of the Sweetwater Dam. The
Quarter Circle D E ran along a narrow valley down which must be pouring
all the melted snow and rainfall impounded in the big reservoir.
Pounded by the impact of the descending waters, the house rocked like a
boat. The lights had gone out when the wires had become disconnected,
but Betty groped her way into the room where her sister lay asleep in
the moonlight. She was running to pick up the child when Mandy’s voice
stopped her. It came in an excited wail.
“De day of judgment am hyeh, honey. Oh, Lawdy, Lawdy, we’re sure come
to de River Jordan!”
The greatest bulwark of courage is responsibility. The old woman’s
helpless collapse steadied her. A moment before she had known no
sensation but terror. Now there poured back into her the sense of
obligation. She had two children on her hands, one old and one young.
She must be a rock upon which they could lean.
Betty stepped out of the room and closed the door in order not to waken
Ruth. She noticed that the two lower steps of the stairway were already
submerged.
“The dam’s gone out, Mandy. We’re caught in the flood,” she explained.
In despair Mandy threw up her brown palms. She was a short, fat woman
with an indistinguishable waist-line. A handkerchief was knotted round
her head for a nightcap.
“This am shore de night of Armagideon when de four ho’semen of de
Epolipse am a-ridin’. Oh, Lawd, where am you at when pore black Mandy
am a-reachin’ fo’ you-all?”
A lurch of the house flung her against Betty. She clutched at the girl
and clung to her. Her eyes rolled. She opened her mouth to scream.
Betty clapped her hand over it. “Stop that nonsense, Mandy! I’ll
not have it!” she ordered sharply. “You’ll waken Ruth. We’re all
right so long as the house holds together. I’ll not have any of your
foolishness.”
The old woman’s mouth closed. The words of Betty were astringent.
They assumed leadership, which was all that Mandy wanted. Her voice
obediently abated to a whimper.
Betty did not open her mind to the colored woman. There was no use in
filling her with alarms she had not yet conjured up. But the girl knew
their situation was desperate.
At the lower end of the rock-girt valley was a gateway where the
hogbacks on either side of it came almost together. There was room
enough for a wagon to get through and no more. Out of this gap all the
water rushing into the narrow basin would have to pour to the Flat Tops
below. If the Sweetwater Dam had gone out--and of that Betty had no
doubt--the floods would race down for hours much faster than they could
escape to the mesa. The churning stream would grow deeper instead of
subsiding. The house might waterlog and sink. It might turn over. It
might be rammed by trees or rocks. Or it might be beaten by the waves
until it fell apart.
“I’m going in to Ruth,” Betty said. “If you’re coming, too, you’ll
have to behave, Mandy. I’ll not have you frightening her by any silly
hysterics.”
“Yas’m,” assented Mandy meekly.
Ruth was still asleep, though the roar of the sweeping waters came
through the open window and occasionally a drench of spray. Her sister
went to close the casement. Above, the moon was shining placidly;
below, the current boiled and churned. The depth of the stream, Betty
guessed, must be eight or ten feet. It was still rising, but the force
of its downward rush was terrific.
The house pitched like a boat. What was worse, it had tilted so that
water was pouring in at the lower windows. If the stream continued to
rise, it would probably either sink or overturn.
The noise of crashing timbers and beating waves continued. Betty
wondered how much pounding an old frame building like this could stand.
It was built with an ell, the wing a later addition to the farmhouse.
The binding beams connecting the two parts creaked and groaned under
the strain put upon them.
Ruth woke. Betty sat down on the bed and put her arms round the child.
“What ’tis?” asked the child, frightened.
“Some of the water got out of the dam and we’re floating in it, dearie.
Don’t cry, Ruthie. Betty’ll be here with you all the time.”
There came a series of heavy bumps accompanied by the sound of rending
timbers. It was as though the floor was being torn from under their
feet. Betty thought they were going down. The house listed sharply,
then righted itself so suddenly that the girl was flung to the bed.
The house had been torn asunder, one wing from the other.
Mandy and the child screamed. For a moment Betty was near panic
herself. But she fought down her terror resolutely.
“See. The floor’s level now.” Her voice was steady and calm. “We’ll
probably be all right. Stop that noise, Mandy. Didn’t I tell you I
wouldn’t have it?”
The housekeeper sniffled. “I’m ce’tainly scared to death, honey, I
shorely is.” She folded her short, fat arms and rocked. “I been a
mighty triflin’ nigger, but I aims frum now on to get shet uv my
scandalacious ways an’ travel de road what leads to de pearly gates.
Yas’m. Glory Hallelujah! If de good Lawd evah lets me git outa hyeh
alive, I’ll shout for salvation at de mourners’ bench mighty loud.”
The situation was too desperate for Betty to find any amusement in
Mandy’s good resolutions, but it occurred to her to turn some of her
fear into another channel.
“Let’s sing,” she suggested.
Above the booming of the wild waters she lifted her clear young
soprano and sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” The first line she
carried alone, then Mandy’s rich contralto quavered in and Ruth’s small
piping treble joined.
With an impact that shook every timber the current flung the house
against a great boulder. The building swung as on a pivot and was
driven into the rocks again. Betty looked out of the window. They were
wedged between two great spars of red sandstone. The furious buffeting
of the racing tide lifted their frail refuge and dropped it upon the
sharp edges of the crags.
“We’re caught at the Steeples,” the girl told the others.
If they could get out and climb the rock spires! But that was
impossible. The house was submerged almost to the second floor in the
swashing torrent which surrounded it and dragged at it with a violence
they could feel.
Again the shipwrecked three sang. This time it was “Rock of Ages.”
They held one another’s hands for comfort, and in their prayer, voiced
through the words of the old hymn, they found a sustaining strength.
Presently Mandy took up “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and the others came
in with support.
Betty helped to wear away the long night with talk. She forced into
her voice cheerfulness and courage, though there was not a minute of
the dark hours not filled with alarms. It would be morning soon, she
promised. Daddy would come and get them, or Lon, or perhaps Justin
Merrick’s men who were camping on the Flat Tops. Then they would have
fun talking it all over and telling how brave Ruth had been for not
crying (except just the teentiest time) like a silly little girl.
After what to those in peril seemed an eternity of waiting, light
sifted into the sky with a promise of the coming day. The darkness
lifted and showed them a valley of wild and turbid waters. The Quarter
Circle D E ranch had become a furious and rushing river flung back upon
itself by the hogbacks which dammed its free course.
In the darkness it had seemed that the menace of the flood had been
tenfold increased by the unknown peril that lay back of the visible.
But in the light they could see too much. The force of the torrent
was appalling. It showed them to what a puny reed of safety they were
clinging. At any moment the building might collapse like an empty
eggshell under pressure.