“Keep going!” he panted. “There’s a cloud-burst flood coming down the canyon, and if we can’t turn that corner and find standing room beyond it, we’re goners!”
Fortunately—how fortunately they were soon to realize—the corner was turned successfully, and on the upper side of the jutting cliff there was not only safer footing: there was a small side gulch coming down steeply into the main canyon. Up this gulch to higher ground they urged the stumbling burros, and even as they did it, the murmuring roar grew louder and the solid earth seemed to be trembling under their feet.
Shouting, pulling, hauling and working like maniacs, they pushed and dragged the two pack animals up to the very head of the little side gulch, and they barely had done it when a wall of water, mountain high, it seemed to them, and black with débris and forest wreckage, came sweeping down the main gorge, rolling great boulders, hogshead size, before it as if they were pebbles. And with the terrifying flood, as if borne on its crest, came a dank wind that sucked up into the small side gulch as it passed, chilling the three who were bracing themselves to hold the burros—and their own footing—like the breath from an ice cavern.
Like a good many of nature’s cataclysms, a cloud-burst flood does not last forever. While they were still shivering from the effect of the passing blast, the deafening roar withdrew into the down-canyon distances, and in a few minutes the waters began to subside.
“A little of that goes a long way, especially when a fellow hasn’t had much breakfast to start out with,” said Larry with grim humor. Then: “I hope we’re all of us as thankful as we ought to be. If that flood had caught us anywhere between here and the mouth of the canyon, we wouldn’t have known what hit us—at least, not one half-second after it did hit us.”
“But Great Cats!” gasped little Purdick, whose teeth were still chattering, “we’ll never get out of here, as it is! You know, well enough, that that flood hasn’t left us anything to walk on, either up-stream or down!”
“Wait,” Larry said; and even as he spoke the water began to sink away as if by magic. In an incredibly short time the torrent had subsided, not only to its former level, but much below it—so much below it that, lacking a trail-path bank, the stream bed itself offered a practicable trail.
“It’s all to the good, I guess,” said Purdick, “only I’m not just used to seeing things happen this way. Back in my native land the rivers don’t scare you to death one minute and skip out of sight the next. Let’s go.”
It was high noon and past when they won out into the upper region of thunder storms and cloud-bursts, and by that time the skies had cleared and there was nothing but a trickling rill here and there to tell of the late deluge. As nearly as they could judge, they had about fifteen hundred feet more of elevation to make before they could cross the range, and after a cold lunch of canned tomatoes and the remains of the pan-bread that Purdick had baked at breakfast-time, they attacked the final ascent.
On this part of the climb they were obliged to become pathfinders in grim earnest. There was no sign of a trail, and again and again they found themselves in a cul de sac; up against cliffy heights that no mountain goat could climb, much less a loaded pack animal. Luckily they had no snow of any consequence to contend with. The three added weeks of summer sunshine had taken it all save the deep drifts in the gulches, and these were melting rapidly. But the zig-zagging and exploring, the tramping up and down and back and forth in the effort to find a practicable trail to the summit, tried them to the utmost.