n the spring and had been followed by excessively low temperatures
throughout the mountains. June came again, but a strange June. The
first rise of the Crawling Stone had not moved out the winter frost,
and the stream lay bound from bank to bank, and for hundreds of miles,
under three feet of ice. When June opened, backward and cold, there
had been no spring. Heavy frosts lasting until the middle of the month
gave sudden way to summer heat, and the Indians on the upper-valley
reservation began moving back into the hills. Then came the rise.
Creek after creek in the higher mountains, ice-bound for six months,
burst without warning into flood. Soft winds struck with the sun and
stripped the mountain walls of their snow. Rains set in on the desert,
and far in the high northwest the Crawling Stone lifting its four-foot
cap of ice like a bed of feathers began rolling it end over end down
the valley. In the Box, forty feet of water struck the canyon walls
and ice-floes were hurled like torpedoes against the granite spurs:
the Crawling Stone was starting after its own.

When the river rose, the earlier talk of Dunning's men had been that
the Crawling Stone would put an end to the railroad pretensions by
washing the two hundred and fifty miles of track back to the Peace
River, where it had started. This much in the beginning was easy to
predict; but the railroad men had turned out in force to fight for
their holdings, and while the ranchers were laughing, the river was
flowing over the bench lands in the upper valley.

At the Dunning ranch the confidence of the men in their own security
gave way to confusion as the river, spreading behind the ice-jams into
broad lakes and bursting in torrents through its barriers, continued
to rise. Treacherous in its broad and yellow quiet, lifting its muddy
head in the stillness of the night, moving unheard over broad sandy
bottoms, backing noiselessly into forgotten channels, stealing through
heavy alfalfa pastures, eating a channel down a slender furrow--then,
with the soil melting from the root, the plant has toppled at the
head, the rivulet has grown a stream; night falls, and in the morning
where yesterday smiling miles of green fields looked up to the sun
rolls a mad flood of waters: this is the Crawling Stone.

CHAPTER XIX

THE CRAWLING STONE RISE

So sudden was the onset of the river that the trained riders of the
big ranch were taken completely aback, and hundreds of hea