“About a mile a minute, you’d say. It’s up within a few feet of the bridge deck right now. They’re saying, over town, that the railroad bridge won’t stand it.”
“The Main Street bridge will go first,” Purdick predicted. “Last year, one time when the water was low, you could see the bottom of the piers sticking out like toes out of a broken boot. Looked to me as if they weren’t founded upon anything but the sand and gravel.”
“If the Main Street bridge goes out it will take the railroad bridge with it,” said Larry. “In the Chronicle office they told me the wires are down in every direction and the whole country’s in trouble.”
“We’ll get it here, too,” asserted Purdick, who seemed to be full of gloomy forebodings. “This town was flooded once before, away back in the early days. I’ve been listening for the bell ever since you went away.”
“To call the fellows out? Most of them are out now. Fellows who own boats are hard at it, dragging them up to higher ground. The boat-houses are all afloat and some of them have been washed away. I’m going out again as soon as I get my descrip.”
“I’d go with you if I had a raincoat,” said Purdick.
“I’ve got an old one that’s too small for me. Pile in and get your work up and we’ll take a whirl at it together.”
Following this there was a silent interval of strenuous study, while the rain, coming in sheets, hissed upon the windowpanes. At the end of it, when Purdick was pushing his chair back and Larry was filling in the last few lines of his demonstration drawings, the big clock bell in the college tower was booming out its call in the “general alarm.”
“That means us,” said Larry, jumping up and leaving his drawing unfinished. “Something’s happening.”
A few minutes later they were “afoot and afloat,” as Purdick put it. The streets were rivers, and in places the sidewalks were under water. The college buildings and suburb, situated upon a reasonably elevated level above the river, were out of danger, and so was the greater part of the town proper on the opposite side of the river. But there were bottom lands on both banks of the stream—protected in some measure, to be sure, by old levees—which were pretty sure to go under if the flood should rise high enough.