CHAPTER II
THE HOME OF THE RAIN
The gray morning broke over the desolate scene, and Anton, hollow-eyed and exhausted, looked at the muddy waters rushing savagely over the place where his home had stood. By the tops of the trees, only, was he able to trace the outline of the fields he had known all his boyhood.
"Do you suppose it'll ever dry up, Ross?" he asked.
"Of course it will, Anton," the older lad said, reassuringly, "you'll see. In a week or two all this water'll run off and you'll forget that the old place ever looked like this."
The crippled lad shook his head, as though in doubt.
"My books have gone," he said mournfully.
The tones were quiet, but a tragedy lay beneath the words, and no one knew better than Ross how largely his chum's life lay in the world revealed in his tiny library. The flood would pass away and the fertility of summer would hide every trace of the disaster, but for Anton's loss there was no such swift remedy. His books were his closest friends, and now, at one stroke, he was bereft of all of them.
"Come," said Ross, to change the current of his chum's thoughts, "we'll have to make a start. Where do you suppose your folks are?"