Cut off by a deep-scoured drainage canal from a direct approach to the farm of the big red barn, I fared back for a quarter of a mile to a road and a bridge. Crossing the latter and wading through deep puddles, I came upon what I first took to be a deserted ranch. The corrals were down, the barn partially unroofed, and the windowless house was all but stripped of its shingles. There was a response to my knock, however, and I entered a half-wrecked kitchen to find three men sitting round a table. A lamp was burning on a wall-shelf, but its flickering flame barely threw a glow above the top of the opaquely smoked chimney.
The greeting I received was unconventional—even slightly disconcerting.
"Are you broke?" boomed the blunt query from a big chap with a hammer, evidently just through tacking a blanket over a window. His two companions took pipes from their mouths and hung on my answer as though it might be a matter of considerable importance.
"Not at all...." I began, intending to go on and assure them that, far from being the hobo I looked, I had money in my pocket and a large bag of California home-dried apricots to give away. But they waited only on my denial.
"All right. Move on!" they chorused to the accompaniment of stagy gestures. "This is no place for a man that ain't broke. We are. Went broke half an hour ago. Hailed out!" An old fellow with whiskers added the explanatory trimmings.
I gulped two or three times and was about to frame a minimum demand for an hour to dry my wet togs by the fire when the big chap strode over, clapped me jovially on the shoulder and forced me into a chair by the table.
"Don't mind our little joke, friend," he said with a ringing laugh. "Whatever there is left in this shack in the way of comfort is at your disposal for the night, or as long as you want to stay. Where did the storm catch you? Car stalled on the road, I suppose."
"Boat—on river—sand-bar," I replied between gulps from the mug of steaming black coffee the big fellow had poured me.
The three of them exchanged glances, first quizzical and then indicative of dawning comprehension. Finally they threw back their heads and guffawed louder than ever. I finished my coffee and gave them time to finish their laugh. Then I asked, in a slightly hurt tone I fear, just what joke they saw in being caught on a sand-bar by an embryonic cyclone. Perhaps if they had been there themselves....
That set them off again, and I had time to pour and empty another mug of coffee before one of them was sufficiently recovered to reply. The old boy with whiskers was the first to get his merriment under leash, and so it was he who explained: "That wasn't what tickled us; we was only laughin' 'cause youse was already drowned an' had a gang scoutin' for your dead body."