h shanties
for shelter upon the rafts it seemed to Will Brent as safe a
proposition to embark with them as to be shipwrecked with a crew of
pirates.

He had himself entertained no intention of boarding any of these three
rafts, but he was not craven, and if a girl was going to trust herself
to those chances of flood and human passion he told himself that he
could do no less than stand by.

The river was already creeping above the gnarled sycamore roots that
jutted out of the precipice, marking the highest stage of previous
flood tides.

The two neighbor women had come back into the room where Aaron McGivins
lay wounded. The man himself, reassured by the presence of his
daughter, had fallen at last into an undisturbed sleep and the doctor
delivered himself of the first encouragement that had crossed his
sternly honest lips. "I reckon now he's got a right even chanst ter
git well ef he kin contrive ter rest a-plenty."

The girl's head came back, with a spasmodic jerk. It was the sudden
relaxing of nerves that had been held taut to the snapping point. With
a step suddenly grown unsteady she made her way to a chair by the
hearth and sat gazing fixedly at the dying embers.

She had not let herself hope too much, and now a sudden rush of
repressed tears threatened a flood like the one which had come outdoors
from the broken tightness of the ice.

But she felt upon her the critical eyes of the neighbor women and
refused to surrender to emotion. After a little period of respite she
let herself out of the door into the rain that had begun falling with a
sobbing fitfulness, and went through the starkness of the woods.

Back of the house was the "spring-branch" of which she had spoken as a
gauge to the stage of the flood. By some freakish law of
co-ordination, which no one had ever been able to explain, that small
stream gave a reading of conditions across the ridge, as a pulse-beat
gives the tempo of the blood's current. One could look at it and
estimate with fair accuracy how fast and how high the river was rising.
When a rotting stump beside the basin of the spring had water around
its roots it meant that the arteries of the hills were booming into
torrential fury. When the basin overflowed, the previous maximum of
the river's rise had been equaled. It was overflowing now.

Alexander stood for a moment gazing with widened and terrified eyes.
She had now no time to lose. The lapping waters of a tiny brook w