s of nervous
balance which is apt to affect all those who go through the slightest
earthquake experience was felt by all. But some sense of humor, however,
remained.

"Looks as if the water risks we took ain't goin' to cover earthquakes,"
drawled Dick Frisney; "still that wasn't a bad shot, if we only knew
what they were aiming at."

"Do be quiet," said Virginia Piper, her cheeks pink with excitement.
"Listen, can't you? What's that funny murmuring you hear now and then up
there?"

"It's only the snow-wind playin' with the pines on the summit. You girls
won't allow anybody any fun but yourselves."

But here a scream from "Georgy," who, assisted by Captain Fairfax, had
mounted a camp-stool at the mouth of the valley, attracted everybody's
attention. She was standing upright, with dilated eyes, staring at
the top of the trail. "Look!" she said excitedly, "if the trail isn't
moving!"

Everybody faced in that direction. At the first glance it seemed indeed
as if the trail was actually moving; wriggling and undulating its
tortuous way down the mountain like a huge snake, only swollen to twice
its usual size. But the second glance showed it to be no longer a trail
but a channel of water, whose stream, lifted in a bore-like wall four or
five feet high, was plunging down into the devoted valley.

For an instant they were unable to comprehend even the nature of the
catastrophe. The reservoir was directly over their heads; the bursting
of its wall they had imagined would naturally bring down the water in a
dozen trickling streams or falls over the cliff above them and along the
flanks of the mountain. But that its suddenly liberated volume should
overflow the upland beyond and then descend in a pent-up flood by their
own trail and their only avenue of escape, had been beyond their wildest
fancy.

They met this smiting truth with that characteristic short laugh
with which the American usually receives the blow of Fate or the
unexpected--as if he recognized only the absurdity of the situation.
Then they ran to the women, collected them together, and dragged them
to vantages of fancied security among the bushes which flounced the long
skirts of the mountain walls. But I leave this part of the description
to the characteristic language of one of the party:--

"When the flood struck us, it did not seem to take any stock of us in
particular, but laid itself out to 'go for' that picnic for all it
was worth! It wiped it off th