Back at the camp, Hal experienced all the comforts of being a “refugee”. Good dry clothes and a draught of hot milk took the shivers out of his bones. After his report was made out, he flung himself down in his tent to snatch a bit of sleep. With thirty-six hours of steady strain and flying behind him, slumber claimed him the instant he hit his bunk. But tired as he was, he had left word that he should be called early.
Next morning before the sun rose, he was out on the field warming up the motor to his strange gyroscope plane. He found the radio installed. Workmen from headquarters had done it while he used the seaplane the day before. Everything was in working order. He tested the instruments and found that they were of the best. A few taps and a message would go speeding through the air.
Even this early in the day, a small crowd gathered to watch the squat old hen, the newfangled plane, make its rise. As the rotors stiffened with their power whirl and the thing took off, Hal heard a sound of cheering drift up to him faintly. For all its awkward look, this thing did rise like a lark on the wing. He turned her nose out over the flood.
For the time being, Hal Dane wanted to follow out a clew entirely on his own. In the dusk of yesterday, as he clung to the drifting, upside-down canoe, and the lights from the launch had played over it, the name painted on the battered derelict had seemed to sear into his brain. The letters had been inverted and he had read them but subconsciously at first, then their meaning had suddenly seemed to burn into his brain in letters of fire. “M-a-l-d-e-n, Malden”—the name of the hotel where Mrs. Wiljohn and Jacky had stayed. This was a boat from that riverside resort. Malden was miles below where he and the drifting boat had collided yester evening. So that meant someone had gone up-river in the canoe and let it get away to come drifting back down. That someone could be the Wiljohns. What had happened to them? Were they alive after all this time? More likely, dead!
It was all too frail a clew to build any hopes on. Hal could not bear to mention it to Colonel Wiljohn. He had suffered too much already, to have another castle of hope built up, only to have it crash into bitter disappointment.
Young Dane flew his craft southward with the flood to a location he had noted the day before, marked by a gnarled oak on a ridge lifting its battered branches slightly above the torrent. It was near here that he had first sighted the house of the panther screams. This big piece of drift and the derelict canoe must have entered the main flood out of the mouth of Tanabee Creek—or what had once been Tanabee Creek. That humble stream was now a mile-wide torrent, filling a valley. The overflow from the burst dam at Nelgat Lake had swamped this broad level.
Here the devastation had been terrible. As Hal pushed farther in this direction than he had been before, he constantly came upon sights that taxed his every sympathy. Many times he saw the bodies of men, women and children floating with the current. With a sinking heart, he swept low over those sightless faces turned toward the sky—searching, searching, but he had not found them yet. Numberless dead animals drifted down with the flood. Shattered homes rocked to and fro on the pull of currents, followed often by a welter of broken furniture,—chairs, a baby carriage, a cupboard that had once held dear family possessions.
Deeper into this desolation he pressed. About him everywhere, life seemed to have been smothered out under the waters.
He had been flying slowly, searchingly, for more than an hour, when his hawklike gaze focused upon a tiny rim of land, a crescent-shaped island barely showing above the torrent. The force of currents was eating steadily at the thin line of land. As Hal watched, a portion crumbled and toppled into the flood.
And then as he swooped down nearer, he saw to his horror that there was a human figure on that slender stretch of ground. He dropped closer, closer, the spread wings of the rotor above his machine letting him down as gently as though he hung in a great parachute. He dropped to a mere forty feet above the flood, to thirty. He could see a white dress, a woman’s long hair flung out on the ground. She was apparently dead.