“Well, he’s ’bout gone,” I says; “and they can’t hold out ’bout three minutes; then they’ll all drown together, and she can take old Hez his last babby to miss—cuss ’em! I’m safe enough. What’s it got to do with me? I shan’t move.”
I took out my wet cake of ’bacca, and whittled off a bit, shoved it in my cheek, shut my knife with a click, and sot thar watchin’ of ’em—father, and mother, and bairn.
“You’ve been too happy, you have,” I says out loud; not as they could hear it, for the noise of the waters. “Now you’ll be sorry for other people. Drown, darn yer! stock, and lock, and barrel; I’m safe.”
Just then, as I sot and chawed, telling myself as a chap would be mad to try and save his friends out of such a flood, let alone his enemies, darn me! if Jael didn’t put that there little squealer’s hands together, and hold them up as if she was making it say its prayers—a born fool!—when that thar string seemed to be pulled, inside me like, agin my heart; and—I couldn’t help it—I jumped up.
“Say, Dab,” I says to myself, “don’t you be a fool. You hate that lot like pyson, you do. Don’t you go and drown yerself.”
I was ’bout mad, you know, and couldn’t do as I liked, for, if I didn’t begin to rip off my things, wet and hanging to me. Cuss me! how they did stick!—but I cleared half on ’em off, and then, like a mad fool, I made a run and a jump, and was fighting hard with the water to get across to Hez’s wife and child.
It was a bit of a fight. Down I went, and up I went, and the water twisted me like a leaf: but I got out of the roar and thunder, on to the bit of a shelf where Jael knelt; when, if the silly thing didn’t begin to hold up to me her child; and her lips, poor darling, said dumbly, “Save it! save it!”
In the midst of that rush and roar as I saw that poor gal, white, horrified, and with her yaller hair clinging round her, all my old love for her comes back, and I swore a big oath as I’d save her for myself, or die.
I tore her dress into ribbons, for there warn’t a moment to lose, and I bound that bairn somehow on to my shoulders, she watching me the while; and then, with my heart beating madly, I caught her in my arms, she clinging tightly to me in her fear, and I stood up, thinking how I could get back, and making ready to leap.
The flood didn’t wait for that, though. In a moment there was a quiver of the bank, and it went from beneath my feet, leaving me wrastling with the waters once more.