When he recovered it was broad daylight and Jack was bending over him. Sick and weak as the rugged cow-puncher felt as his senses rushed back like an arrested tide, he could not forbear smiling as he gazed at the lad.
Jack’s costume was, to say the least, an airy one. It consisted in fact, of part of his night clothing, badly torn, and a pair of boots which he had just had time to put on in the hurried retreat from the camp.
The boy saw the smile and guessed its reason. But the smile was speedily replaced by a more serious expression as Pete sat up and at once sought to have explained to him just what had happened.
“Something that felt like one of them octopusses you read about, gripped me, and that’s about all I can recall,” he said; “what came next?”
“I hardly know much more about that than you,” was Jack’s response, “except that when I recovered my senses after that spill that Firewater gave us I found myself half drowned, all tangled up in the roots of a big tree that the flood was hurrying along. Feeling about me the first thing I discovered was you, and I can tell you I was mighty glad, too, Pete, old boy. No, don’t glare at me. I know,—or can guess,—that it was you who saved my life after Firewater threw us both off and——”
“No more of that, youngster,” snorted Pete sternly, although his eyes were filled with an odd moisture. “I reckon it was the old tree yonder that saved us both. We were both struggling in the flood when it hit me and put me to sleep for a while. It’s a good thing it came on roots first or we might not have bin so chipper this partic’lar A. M.”
They both regarded the tree to which they probably owed their lives. A big stick of timber of the pine variety, and evidently of mountain growth, it lay a short distance from them just as the flood had left it stranded. For the cloudburst over, the water had sunk in the dry river bed as rapidly as it had arisen. Hardly a foot of muddy liquid now remained in the river to show the aftermath of the wild watercourse of the night.
“But now, what has become of the others?” exclaimed Jack anxiously. “I hope they are all right.”
“I guess so, son,” said Pete, rising rather weakly to his feet, for the blow the tree had struck him, while it had not broken the skin, had been a stunning one.