And so, hour after hour, Lee Renaud kept his old Marconi sparking—taking innumerable calls, sputtering back directions in Morse.
Then his little portable radios had their inning. Lem Hicks, with one of the fieldpack mechanisms on his back, traveled the return trail till he was halfway between Sargon and King’s Cove. From here he relayed the flood reports from Lee on to Jimmy Bobb at the Cove. This was done to ease the minds of the King’s Cove folk who had plenty of kin all up and down Sargon Valley, and were anxious for news.
It was a blessed thing, though, that young Renaud had pounded his old Marconi on longdistance calls for aid through the day, for the night hours brought a new and worse disaster. A great power dam, fifty miles up the Sargon, broke under the pressure of water, and by early morning a second flood rushed down and widened the first flood by miles.
CHAPTER X
A PENCIL LINE
Lee did not know just what had happened in that brief interval when he nodded at his post, but he awoke to find himself sprawled in the midst of radio wreckage on the floor of his cabin, which was reeling and rocking, adrift in the flood. Water swishing over his face had brought him around. It was coming in fast now, and the cabin was sinking. He would have to get out.
Something must have struck him when the flood swept off the cabin, for his head throbbed dizzily. Nevertheless he managed to climb to the rafters, dragging with him his little shoulder-pack radio though he feared the fall had ruined it. Hacking with his pocket-knife, he tore off enough shingles to let himself out on the roof.
All about him stretched a horrible yellow sea. On its drift were other flood-loosed buildings, tangle of house furnishings, swollen dead animals, bellies up, and now and then a human corpse.
Like some frail skiff sucked into the wake of a great ocean liner, Lee’s sodden little roof rolled smashingly against a big two-story cupolaed dwelling that was careening magnificently on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. The boy was catapulted into the air, then down into the flood, and came up, swimming for life. When the waves flung him against the big derelict again, he clung desperately to the ragged planking of what once must have been the porch, caught his breath, and began to draw himself up into this new haven of doubtful safety.
Heavy with weariness and the weight of water, it was a momentous matter to inch himself up the house wall to gain a high window sill and to crawl over. Half-fainting from exhaustion, he fell inside on the slippery floor.
A voice beat in his ears. It was startling to have words come out of that shadowy corner across the room.