"Then move!"
King waited until he had gone a few yards before he followed him. They had not retraced more than half the distance they had come when they heard a great splash in the river behind them. They turned at once and looked back. A large section of the river bank, undermined by the action of the water, had fallen and had taken away the very ground on which they had been standing only a moment before.
King paused in silent contemplation of how petty, after all, are the things that vex us most. Only a moment did he allow his mind to wander from the business he had in hand; then he faced Rickard again, and without a word the two went off together.
King took the team back and gave it into the keeping of one of the men. He never left Rickard's side, however, until he had seen him safely away from the workers. Then he returned and went on with his work.
That evening the task was completed and King, after taking supper at MacMurray's and chatting a moment with Anne, walked over to Hurley's to talk with Cherry a little before he went to his shack. All day his mind had reverted time and time again to the incident with Rickard, and more especially to what seemed like a miraculous escape from what might have meant death to both. Now that the work was over and his mind was free, the whole affair came back upon him with renewed freshness. He told it all to Cherry and Mrs. Hurley, and when he had finished, Cherry, who had listened throughout without speaking a word, turned a serious face to King and put her hand upon his arm.
"It looks almost—as if God himself were helping us," she said.
She did not speak fervently, nor with any emotion. Her voice was quiet and her tone matter-of-fact. And yet King was struck by the simplicity of her manner. She evidently believed implicitly in what she had said—and King found himself impelled to share somewhat in her faith.
It was the last thought that lingered in his mind that night before he went to sleep to the sound of the rain falling upon the roof of his shack.
Hugh Hurley and Keith McBain sat together in the land office very late that night. No one in town was in any mood for going to bed, and the sounds that came from Cheney's and MacMurray's bore ample evidence to the fact that the men were apparently preparing to make a night of it. Old Gabe Smith dropped in when it was very late and stayed long enough to observe, among other things, that if the rain didn't soon cease in the hills the water in the river would be over the top of the bank.
After Gabe had gone, the two men decided upon taking a walk down to the river to look at the rising water. What they saw when they got there struck fear into their hearts at once. Since it had grown dark the stream had risen a full foot, and was now rushing with terrific force around the bend, about the outer angle of which clustered the huts and cabins of the little town. Already the current had swept away large portions of the high bank, in which there was no rock or stone of any account to offer any resistance to the enormous weight of water that swept down like a vicious cataract out of the hills.