“No time for any of your 'speriments to be hindering me,” called the rider over his shoulder, as his horse plunged on down the road. “I’m spreading the call for help. Floods over everything up Sargon Sound! Folks homeless and dying!” and with a clatter of hoofs, he was gone.
He was a surprised rider, though, when he galloped into King’s Cove village some ten minutes later and found that his news had preceded him.
Two little portable radio machines, manipulated by a couple of youngsters, had brought the word faster, ten times faster, than his horse could travel and men were already preparing to set out to rescue the flood sufferers.
CHAPTER IX
SARGON SOUND
A line of wagons were unloading along a ridge of land that overlooked the turbid yellow waters of the Sargon flood. One group of men were stacking sacks of meat and meal, which had been lugged over the hill road to help feed the stricken families that had lost everything. Another group had already started for the woods with their saws and axes to fell trees for rafts, on which to bring off the hundreds of refugees huddled on ridges still showing above the water.
“Powerful heavy, and don’t feel like nothing to eat,” said Jed Prother, giving a disdainful kick against some crates and a pile of metal pieces wrapped in old sacking which he had just lifted off a wagon.
“Hi—don’t! That’s our radio! Might break something!” protested Renaud, coming on the jump.
“Radio? Huh!” snorted Prother. “Better have brought meat and blankets 'stead of that thing! No time to tinker at toys down here!”
“He must allow to serenade the rabbits and the 'possums—give ’em a little music, perhaps,” broke out another of the workmen with a bitter laugh.
Lee Renaud started to retort, then checked his words. These fellows had a right to feel bitter, with all their possessions swept away in that rolling ocean of muddy waters. It was an appalling disaster. A cloudburst up in the hills had flooded a whole valley. Trees, houses, dead animals rode the current in a procession of horror. And if help did not reach out soon to the pitiful families marooned on tiny islands, human bodies would be swirled off into that awful drift.