In two bounds he reached the sleepers’ sides and fairly shouted and shook them into wakefulness.
“What is it, Indians?” cried Jack, springing erect.
“Another bear!” gasped the professor.
“It ain’t neither. It’s worser th’n both!” was Coyote’s alarming, if oddly expressed, rejoinder.
As he spoke the roaring became louder, closer, more ominous.
Through the darkness they could now see that rushing toward them down the dry river bed was a mighty line of white. In the very indefiniteness of its form there was something that gripped them all with a cold chill of alarm, the keener for its very lack of understanding of the nature of the approaching mass. Ralph snatched up a rifle, but Coyote, seizing his arm, checked him in a flash.
“Don’t do that, son. It’s not a mite of good,” he cried, and then the next instant:—
“Run for your lives, everybody! Thar’s bin a cloudburst in ther mountains, and here comes ther gosh darndest flood since Noah’s!”