Since both were good swimmers there was nothing much to the plunge but a sudden ducking, and as they were both soaked to the skin anyway, this didn’t matter. But when they groped around and got the cellar stair under their feet, old Brother Calamity reached out and grabbed them. By some twist of the rising flood the cellar door had been swung to, and there must have been a spring catch on it. For when they braced themselves as best they could on the steps and tried to open it, it wouldn’t move.
“Gee!” said Dick, with his teeth chattering, “we’re trapped right, this time. When the water fills this stairwell we’ll drown!”
Almost as he spoke they heard thumping footsteps on the house stair over their heads, followed by a great splashing in the room beyond the trapping door. Then, quite distinctly, a voice which they both recognized as that of the sham “lame dog” who had once taken a thrashing at Larry’s hands in Farmer Holdsworth’s stubble field, shouted: “Come on, Bry!—here’s a canoe tied to the back porch. Bring that sack of swag and hop in.” And the splashing stopped abruptly with a double tumble into the boat and a quick dipping of paddles.
“Huh!” Dick shivered; “Bry Underhill and Snitty Crawford. And neither one of them stopped to think that there might be somebody else needing that canoe. Besides that, they were looting!”
“Never mind them,” Larry put in. “We’ve got to get out of this trap someway. Brace your feet against the wall and hold me while I shove.”
Dick braced and Larry shoved. There was a tearing of screws from their holdings and the door swung open. Wading into the kitchen they made their way to the front of the house and got to the porch in time to see their canoe, with two swaying figures in it paddling for dear life, disappear among the half-submerged houses.
Larry slipped out of his rain coat and began to get rid of everything down to shirt and trousers, and Dick quickly followed his example. The flooded area behind the levee was now completely deserted, and there was little hope that they would be missed and sought for in time to do any good.
“What’d we better do?” Dick asked. “Shall we swim for it? Or would it be safer to take a chance with the house when it floats off its foundations?”
They were saved the trouble of making the decision. While they were still stripping to be prepared for the worst there was an earthquake upheaval somewhere in the background, followed instantly by the onsweep of a wall of water that toppled the house sidewise from its underpinning and heaved it over into a street which had suddenly become a seething millrace of mud, water and wreckage, and the catastrophe had climaxed.
Going over it afterward, neither one of them could give any connected account of the battle for life into which the breaking of the levee had flung them. With a thousand chances to one of being overwhelmed in the watery avalanche, they clung to one of the porch pillars of the overturned house; choked, climbed and clung again when the house was dashed against an embankment which they took to be the Main Street fill at the bridge end; had a passing glimpse of the bridge itself shuddering to its fall; were buried and half-drowned once more when the approach fill gave way before the onrushing flood; and finally emerged, gasping, in a tangle of trees, broken buildings and floating débris of all sorts caught against a barrier which they presently realized was the lower railroad bridge.