Prizes could come and prizes could go, but under the strain of combing the torrent-washed land for the lost Jacky Wiljohn, neither Hal nor the Colonel could have time for thoughts of contests. At least, Hal would not let his thoughts dwell on the great chance he’d have to miss. Right now was a time of testing out a character, if not of testing out a ship for a prize.
Grimly, Hal forced the tremble out of his hands on the controls, and turned the nose of his plane out over the rolling ochre-colored waste of flood waters.
He had come perhaps ten miles from Troja when, out of the wide, flooding mouth of a tributary creek, he saw a roof top come drifting into the main rush of the torrent. Hal flew low, noting it expectantly—any drift from the creek bottoms might contain those he sought. His sharp eyes soon showed him, though, that this derelict had already been searched. The strip of weather-stained red calico nailed to the gable told him that much. But while he still hovered near with engine muffled to its softest, his ear seemed to catch a scream—a woman’s scream from within the drifting house.
The flapping bit of red calico signaled, “No occupant—searchers have been here.”
That one long-drawn wail still echoing in Hal’s brain, though, must mean that some victim of the flood was housed within. There was the chance that a refugee from floating logs, or a tree top, had but lately managed to crawl aboard the half-submerged dwelling.
Hal noted well the location and the type of house this drifter was, but instead of radioing for help, he shot back to Troja in his plane. At the camp, he sought out Colonel Wiljohn and told him of the case. All he had to go on was the fact that this old dwelling had drifted in from the creek bottoms, and that the sound of a woman’s scream had seemed to come from it. Frail grounds for hoping that here might be Jacky Wiljohn’s mother and the boy himself. But Colonel Wiljohn squared back his shoulders; he became all fire and energy in his preparations. A launch was got ready, blankets, hot soup in thermos bottles, axes to break any barriers, ropes.
In short order the boat shot out across the waters, leaving a froth of yellow foam in its wake.
When the drifting, two-story dwelling was sighted, the pilot cut in close and maneuvered until he got his craft alongside one of the windows.
Hal was the first man to scramble from the boat to the window ledge that was now just a few inches above the roaring yellow torrent. As he flung a leg over the sill and slid down into the room, a scream, like that first he had heard, greeted him—only terrifically loud, a wild demoniac scream, followed by a coughing, snarling roar.
As Hal focused the electric torch on the corner whence came the sound, the beam blazed upon the wide-set eyes, the tense, crouched body of a great panther.