“Why do you want the anchor?” demanded Clay. “Do you think the boat will float straight up in the rain? We can find the mud hook in the morning.”
“Use one of your own jokes to weigh the Rambler down,” advised Alex tucked up in his bunk. “They’re heavy enough to weigh an ocean steamer down.”
Case removed Alex from his bunk, all bundled up in blankets, and rolled him about on the floor, not as a punishment for a too personal suggestion, he explained, but for the good of his digestion. Teddy assisted in the manipulation of the lad, and Captain Joe actually laughed.
“When you’ve finished with that monkeyshining,” Clay said, “perhaps you’ll tell me why you want the anchor.”
“Just you go out and look,” was all the answer Case made.
Clay did not go out and look, for it was raining steadily, and he would have been wet to the skin in a minute, but he went to the door and looked out. The little valley of the rivulet was a brimming ocean of angry water, and the natural levee which separated it from the Columbia was out of sight. In fact, there was a current running over it!
The Rambler, weighed down to some extent by the iron wheels which had been put on the afternoon before for the purpose of running her over the shore to the smooth water below the rapids, was still in what had been the sheltered pool, but the boat had floated, and the wheels were fast against the levee.
Whenever the water should lift the boat so that the wheels would clear the levee, then the Rambler would drift out into the raging stream, and the experience of the previous night would be re-enacted, with a different result in prospect. It was another trying situation.
“How in the dickens did this valley get so full of water, all at once?” he asked, turning back to the cabin. “This is serious!”
“There must have been a cloudburst on the mountain,” Alex suggested, arising and looking out at the yellow sweep of water, now far above the spot on the bank where the cooking fire had been built “Looks like another flood.”