tell you what I'll do, Jack. I'll sell it for two
hundred dollars, considering the flood."

"If father'll take it, will you count in the fifty you said you owed
me?" inquired Jack.

The miller made a wry face for a moment, but then responded, smiling:

"Well! After what you've done to-night, too: saved all there was on
the first floor,--yes, I will. Tell him I'll do it."

They all turned suddenly toward the dam. A high ridge of water was
sweeping down across the pond. It carried a crest of foam, logs,
planks, and rubbish, shining white in the moonlight, and it rolled on
toward the mill and the dam as if it had an errand.

Crash--roar--crash--and a plunging sound,--and it seemed as if the
Crofield dam had vanished. But it had not. Only a section of its top
work, in the middle, had been knocked away by the rushing stroke of
those logs.

A frightened shout went up from the spectators, and it had hardly died
away before there followed another splintering crash.

"The bridge!" shouted Jack.

The frail supports of the bridge, brittle with age and weather, already
straining hard against the furious water, needed only the battering of
the first heavy logs from the boom, and down they went.

"Gone!" exclaimed Mr. Ogden. "The hotel's gone, and the meeting-house,
and the dam, and the bridge. There won't be anything left of Crofield,
at this rate."

"I'm going to get out of it," said Jack.

"I'll never refuse you again," replied his father, with energy. "You
may get out any way you can, and take your chances anywhere you please.
I won't stand in your way."

The roar of the surging Cocahutchie was the only sound heard for a full
minute, and then the miller spoke.

"The mill's safe," he said, with a very long breath of relief; "the
breaking of that hole in the dam let the water and logs through, and
the pond isn't rising. Hurrah!"

There was a very faint and scattering cheer, and Jack Ogden did not
join in it. He had turned suddenly and walked away homeward, along the
narrow strip of land that remained between the wide, swollen
Cocahutchie and the fence.

At the end of the fence, where he came into his own street, away above
where the head of the bridge had been, there was a large gathering.
That around the mill had been nearly all of men and boys. Here were
women and girls, and the smaller boys, whose mothers and aunts held
them and kept them from going nearer the water. Jack found it of no
use to s