I had been drinking hard—fiery Bourbon, you bet!—for about a week, when early one morning, as I lay in my ragged bit of a tent, I woke up, sudden-like, to a roarin’ noise like thunder; and then there came a whirl and a rush, and I was swimmin’ for life, half choked with the water that had carried me off. Now it was hitting my head, playful like, agen the hardest corners of the rock it could find in the Gulch; then it was hitting me in the back, or pounding me in the front with trunks of trees swept down from the mountains, for something had bust—a lake, or something high up—and in about a wink the hull settlement in Yaller Gulch was swep’ away.
“Wall,” I says, getting hold of a branch, and drawing myself out, “some on ’em wanted a good wash, and this ’ll give it ’em;” for you see water had been skeerce lately, and what there was had all been used for cleaning the gold.
I sot on a bit o’ rock, wringing that water out of my hair—leastwise, no: it was someone else like who sot there, chap’s I knowed, you see; and there was the water rushing down thirty or forty foot deep, with everything swept before it—mules, and tents, and shanties, and stores, and dead bodies by the dozen.
“Unlucky for them,” I says; and just then I hears a wild sorter shriek, and looking down, I see a chap half-swimming, half-swept along by the torrent, trying hard to get at a tree that stood t’other side.
“Why, it’s you, is it, Hez?” I says to myself, as I looked at his wild eyes and strained face, on which the sun shone full. “You’re a gone coon, Hez, lad; so you may just as well fold yer arms, say amen, and go down like a man. How I could pot you now, lad, if I’d got a shooting-iron; put you out o’ yer misery like. You’ll drown, lad.”
He made a dash, and tried for a branch hanging down, but missed it, and got swept against the rocks, where he shoved his arm between two big bits; but the water gave him a wrench, the bone went crack, and as I sat still there, I see him swept down lower and lower, till he clutched at a bush with his left hand, and hung on like grim death to a dead nigger.
“Sarve yer right,” I says coolly. “Why shouldn’t you die like the rest? If I’d had any go in me I should have plugged yer long ago.”
“Halloa!” I cried then, giving a start. “It ain’t—’tis—tarnation! it can’t be!”
But it was.
There on t’other side, not fifty yards lower down, on a bit of a shelf of earth, that kept crumbling away as the water washed it, was Jael, kneeling down with her young ’un; and, as I looked, something seemed to give my heart a jigg, just as if some coon had pulled a string.