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“Get up quick as you kin,” she said gaspingly; “this is about the killingest thing that ever happened!”

She disappeared, but he could still hear her laughing, and to his utter astonishment with her disappearance the floor seemed to change its level. A giddy feeling seized him; he put his feet to the floor; it was unmistakably wet and oozing. He hurriedly clothed himself, still accompanied by the strange feeling of oscillation and giddiness, and passed though the opening into the next room. Again his step produced the same effect upon the floor, and he actually stumbled against her shaking figure, as she wiped the tears of uncontrollable mirth from her eyes with her apron. The contact seemed to upset her remaining gravity. She dropped into a chair, and, pointing to the open door, gasped, “Look thar! Lordy! How’s that for high?” threw her apron over her head, and gave way to an uproarious fit of laughter.

Hemmingway turned to the open door. A lake was before him on the level of the cabin. He stepped forward on the platform; the water was right and left, all around him. The platform dipped slightly to his step. The cabin was afloat,–afloat upon its base of logs like a raft, the whole structure upheld by the floor on which the logs were securely fastened. The high ground had disappeared–the river–its banks the green area 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 melting of snow in the Sierras which had brought this volume down the canyon. But was there more still to come?

“Have you anything like a long pole or stick in the cabin?”

“Nary,” said the girl, opening her big eyes and shaking her head with a simulation of despair, which was, however, flatly contradicted by her laughing mouth.