Little spoke them a word of comfort, promised them all clothes as soon as the shops should open, and hurried off to the lower part of the town in search of Ransome.
He soon found the line the flood had taken. Between Poma Bridge and Hillsborough it had wasted itself considerably in a broad valley, but still it had gone clean through Hillsborough twelve feet high, demolishing and drowning. Its terrible progress was marked by a layer of mud a foot thick, dotted with rocks, trees, wrecks of houses, machinery, furniture, barrels, mattresses, carcasses of animals, and dead bodies, most of them stark naked, the raging flood having torn their clothes off their backs.
Four corpses and two dead horses were lying in a lake of mud about the very door of the railway station; three of them were females in absolute nudity. The fourth was a male, with one stocking on. This proved to be Hillsbro' Harry, warned in vain up at Damflask. When he actually heard the flood come hissing, he had decided, on the whole, to dress, and had got the length of that one stocking, when the flying lake cut short his vegetation.
Not far from this, Little found Ransome, working like a horse, with the tear in his eyes.
He uttered a shout of delight and surprise, and, taking Little by both shoulders, gazed earnestly at him, and said, “Can this be a living man I see?”
“Yes, I am alive,” said Little, “but I had to work for it: feel my clothes.”
“Why, the are dryer than mine.”
“Ay; yet have been in water to the throat; the heat of my body and my great exertions dried them. I'll tell you all another day: now show me how to do a bit of good; for it is not one nor two thousand pounds I'll stick at, this night.”
“Come on.”
Strange sights they saw that night.