"The cave is all right, I guess," Benny told us, when we had held him up so that he could see over without getting dizzy. "I can see where the upper entrance is, but, say, the brook is fierce."
We crept off from the rock and made our way carefully down the side of the ravine to the cave.
It was as Benny had said. The dam had held and was keeping the water from flooding the cave. The upper entrance was all right, although it was too muddy to use. The water had backed up around the lower entrance and part way into the cave, but beyond it was dry.
The little mountain brook had turned into a torrent, raging along like some wild beast, and foaming over the rocks below, almost like Peck's Falls. Just above these smaller falls, a tree, which had been carried down into the ravine, stretched across the stream from rock to rock, with its slippery trunk about two feet above the water.
"I guess everything is all right," said Skinny, "but maybe we'd better fix the dam a little. Gee, but it's getting dark in here."
We worked a few minutes, throwing rocks and dirt against the dam. I had just stood off to say that I thought it would hold now, when Skinny gave an awful yell and slipped off from a rock, on which he had been standing, into the flood.
I made a grab for him and missed, and in a second he was whirled down the stream.
It is queer how much thinking one can do in a second. I thought of the rocks and of the falls below and of how nobody could go through without being pounded against the stones.
I was afraid to look, until I heard another yell. Then we yelled, too, for there was Skinny clinging to the tree which stretched across the stream, just above the lower falls, and yelling to beat the band.
The water pulled and tore at his legs, dragging them under the tree and to the very edge of the rock which formed the falls. On his face was such a look, when we came near, that I knew he could not hang on much longer.