"Why did you come to us?" he inquired steadily. "It would have been quicker to go down through the fields to the farms in the valley, to call out Henry Brook and send him with men and shovels and sandbags to stop the flood. To get here is a mile by the road and there was no time to lose." He pressed his question mercilessly. "Why did you come to us?"
Anthony Crawford moistened his dry lips, but he did not speak. There was a pause, though all of them knew that every second the waters of Medford River were sweeping higher and higher. It was finally Tom Brighton who answered his own question.
"You were afraid to go elsewhere. It was your doing, this flood; you took the land, you neglected the dikes, you sent John Massey away who would have watched against such a disaster as this. You were afraid to face those men, below, and tell them what you had done."
The other nodded.
"I haven't a friend in Medford Valley to help me—except you. Yes, I was afraid to face them; the break is in just the place where it may flood the whole bottom land. I thought they wouldn't move to help me until it was too late. And, on my life, Tom Brighton, if we can stop the flood I do not care what becomes of me."
It was quite true, as they could all see, that the man's desperate terror was not all for himself, that the situation was far too bad for that. He was picturing how the whole torrent of Medford River might soon be sweeping across those fields of ripening grain, those comfortable barns with their cows and sheep and horses, those pleasant white farmhouses where a hundred people lay asleep. He was seeing how, little by little, he had built up the wrong that was to be his ruin, he had driven away his friends, he had seized the land, he had turned off its guardian, and now, in a wild whirlwind, the results of his misdoing were upon him. He did not look at Tom Brighton's set face but at Jasper Peyton, the one he had wronged most.
"A man can't live without friends," he said. "Will you stand by me, Jasper, not for what I deserve, but for what I need?"
"Yes," answered Jasper Peyton. He smiled suddenly, with all the old, tense misery quite gone from his face. "We're going to stand by you, Anthony, all of us. We are with you still."