u see;
and there was the water rushing down thirty or forty foot deep, with
everything swept before it--mules, and tents, and shanties, and stores,
and dead bodies by the dozen.

"Unlucky for them," I says; and just then I hears a wild sorter shriek,
and looking down, I see a chap half-swimming, half-swept along by the
torrent, trying hard to get at a tree that stood t'other side.

"Why, it's you, is it, Hez?" I says to myself, as I looked at his wild
eyes and strained face, on which the sun shone full. "You're a gone
coon, Hez, lad; so you may just as well fold yer arms, say amen, and go
down like a man. How I could pot you now, lad, if I'd got a
shooting-iron; put you out o' yer misery like. You'll drown, lad."

He made a dash, and tried for a branch hanging down, but missed it, and
got swept against the rocks, where he shoved his arm between two big
bits; but the water gave him a wrench, the bone went crack, and as I sat
still there, I see him swept down lower and lower, till he clutched at a
bush with his left hand, and hung on like grim death to a dead nigger.

"Sarve yer right," I says coolly. "Why shouldn't you die like the rest?
If I'd had any go in me I should have plugged yer long ago."

"Halloa!" I cried then, giving a start. "It ain't--'tis--tarnation! it
can't be!"

But it was.

There on t'other side, not fifty yards lower down, on a bit of a shelf
of earth, that kept crumbling away as the water washed it, was Jael,
kneeling down with her young 'un; and, as I looked, something seemed to
give my heart a jigg, just as if some coon had pulled a string.

"Well, he's 'bout gone," I says; "and they can't hold out 'bout three
minutes; then they'll all drown together, and she can take old Hez his
last babby to miss--cuss 'em! I'm safe enough. What's it got to do
with me? I shan't move."

I took out my wet cake of 'bacca, and whittled off a bit, shoved it in
my cheek, shut my knife with a click, and sot thar watchin' of 'em--
father, and mother, and bairn.

"You've been too happy, you have," I says out loud; not as they could
hear it, for the noise of the waters. "Now you'll be sorry for other
people. Drown, darn yer! stock, and lock, and barrel; I'm safe."

Just then, as I sot and chawed, telling myself as a chap would be mad to
try and save his friends out of such a flood, let alone his enemies,
darn me! if Jael didn't put that there little squealer's hands together,
and hold them up as if