beyond. They, and THEY alone, were afloat upon an inland sea.
He turned an astounded and serious face upon her mirth. "When did it
happen?" he demanded. She checked her laugh, more from a sense of polite
deference to his mood than any fear, and said quietly, "That gets me.
Everything was all right two hours ago when the wimmen left. It was
too early to get your breakfast and rouse ye out, and I felt asleep, I
reckon, until I felt a kind o' slump and a jar." Hemmingway remembered
his own half-conscious sensation. "Then I got up and saw we was adrift.
I didn't waken ye, for I thought it was only a sort of wave that would
pass. It wasn't until I saw we were movin' and the hull rising ground
gettin' away, that I thought o' callin' ye."
He thought of the vanished general store, of her father, the workers on
the bank, the helpless women on their way to the Bar, and turned almost
savagely on her.
"But the others,--where are they?" he said indignantly. "Do you call
that a laughing matter?"
She stopped at the sound of his voice as at a blow. Her face hardened
into immobility, yet when she replied it was with the deliberate
indolence of her father. "The wimmen are up on the hills by this time.
The boys hev bin drowned out many times afore this and got clear off,
on sluice boxes and timber, without squealing. Tom Flynn went down
ten miles to Sayer's once on two bar'ls, and I never heard that HE was
cryin' when they picked him up."
A flush came to Hemmingway's cheek, but with it a gleam of intelligence.
Of course the inundation was known to them FIRST, and there was the
wreckage to support them. They had clearly saved themselves. If they had
abandoned the cabin, it was because they knew its security, perhaps had
even seen it safely adrift.
"Has this ever happened to the cabin before?" he asked, as he thought of
its peculiar base.
"No."
He looked at the water again. There was a decided current. The overflow
was evidently no part of the original inundation. He put his hand in
the water. It was icy cold. Yes, he understood it now. It was the sudden
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