and. He also said something about going to the boat early in
the morning to countermand an order that he had given on the night
before.

"I changed my mind--I found I couldn't do--"

Paul Colbert did not understand, and scarcely heard the confused,
gasping, hurried words. He was looking at Ruth, and longing to loose his
hold on the bough, long enough to wave the assurance that his voice
could not carry across the roaring waters. And this was the instant that
Nature chose to mock the pitting of his puny powers against her
resistless forces. A fierce wave tore away the roots that the tree bound
to the bank, and hurled it into the flood. It swung round and turned
partly over, burying the bough that they clung to, deep under the water.
Both went down with it and Paul Colbert thought, with the quickness and
clearness of mind that comes to the drowning, that they could never come
up again. When he found his own head once more above water, with his
hand grasping a bough of a smaller tree, which had been driven close to
the shore, he looked round for Philip Alston. There was no silver head
anywhere to be seen now above the thick, dark river. Half stunned, he
gazed again blankly, feeling vaguely that his own head must go down very
soon; his strength was wholly gone; he could not even see the shore,
though it was very near, because he was not strong enough to lift
himself above the trunk of the tree which hid it from his sight. And
then at last he heard Father Orin's voice:--

"Hold fast, my boy. Hold fast just a moment longer. We are coming, Toby
and I. Try to hold on. We are almost there."

They reached him as his hand let go and his head sunk, and they bore him
to the shore and laid him down at Ruth's feet, unconscious, but alive.

* * * * *

When Nature has thus rent the trembling earth and thus smitten appalled
humanity by some stupendous convulsion, the outburst of passion nearly
always passes quickly, and she hastens to console by concealing its
traces. These fatal throes were hardly over before she was quelling the
frenzied river by her sudden coldness, and only a few days had passed
before she was covering its subdued waters with a heavy white sheet of
glittering ice. And then, as if to make the torn land lovely again at
once, she wrapped it in a dazzling robe of spotless snow. Above this she
hurriedly hung the broken boughs of the wrecked cottonwoods with
countless flashing prisms, e