“It sure does begin to look that way,” Dick called back. “Let’s push on faster and see if we can’t find a place to hang up until the creek begins to fall a bit. It can’t rain up yonder forever.”
Accordingly, they tried the pushing expedient, and kept it up until they came within a hair’s breadth of losing one of the jacks. The little animal—it happened to be the rearmost one of the two—stepped on a loose stone, slipped, scrambled frantically to regain its footing, and ended by falling heavily on its side with its feet fairly in the rising torrent. Dick, who was next in the Indian-file procession, “motivated” instantly, as a psychologist would say. With a quick leap he sprang upon the fallen burro’s head and got a death grip on its hackamore leading halter. Larry and Purdick closed in quickly, and a three-man lift got the laden animal upon its feet again. But it was a close call.
“That settles it,” Larry commented, after the little adventure had been made to end without disaster. “We can’t hurry the jacks in such going as this. If we do we’ll lose both of ’em.”
“I guess you’re right,” Dick conceded; “as right as the rain that’s bringing this creek up so fast.” And thereupon they began to feel their way more circumspectly.
But care isn’t the only thing that is necessary in taking a hazard; a little foresight is sometimes a lot more needful. It was unquestionable now that the torrent was mounting fast; getting bigger by leaps and bounds. And as it rose, the talus pathway grew narrower and narrower, until at last the Indian-file procession was squeezing itself flat against the right-hand rock wall to keep out of the water. When this came about, even Dick began to lose his nerve.
“We’d better turn back and get out of this!” he called over his shoulder to Larry, who was bringing up the rear. “We’ll never get past that next shoulder—never in this world!”
It did look dubious—more than dubious. Just ahead of them the canyon made a sharp elbow turn around a jutting cliff, and the stream, forced almost to reverse itself in the acute angle, was tearing the talus away in huge mouthfuls as it surged back from its plunge against the opposite cliff. As they stopped to look ahead, it became evident that in a very few minutes there wouldn’t be any talus left. But when they looked the other way, down the perilous path over which they had just come, they saw at once that their retreat was wholly cut off. In one place behind them the shelving slope had been entirely washed away and there was no footing left.
“We’ve got to make that turn ahead!” Larry yelled, and, squeezing himself past Dick, Purdick and the trembling jacks, he took the lead, dragging manfully at Fishbait’s halter, and shouting at the others to come on.
It was touch and go. As they approached the elbow turn the loose-piled, rocky débris under foot seemed to be dissolving into soft mush, and little Purdick, who was now at the tail end of things, went in almost to the tops of his lace boots. To make matters worse, the air was suddenly filled with a hoarse, murmuring roar that was deeper and more terrifying than the thunder of the augmented torrent. Purdick didn’t know what it was, but the other two did. Dick dropped back and pushed Purdick into the second place.