"I'll take Nell on behind me," Dan announced roughly. "It's the only way."
Within a minute, Lou and Dan were mounted. Then, Dan bent over, and swung the girl up to a seat behind him.
"Hold on tight," he commanded.
The girl obeyed passively. What with the cold and the soaking and the loss of her pony, and this dreadful river which they were about to enter, and the strangeness of everything, the child was frightened and miserable. She was sobbing very softly, and the sound irritated Dan McGrew.
"You lead, Lou," he ordered, "since you know the way. You can see well enough?" he asked anxiously. "You're sure that you know the way?"
"Yes," was the confident reply. "But the water is higher than I've ever seen it. Why, it's up level with the bank, almost."
"Is it safe, then?" Dan demanded.
"We must risk it, anyhow," Lou returned. "If we go by the road now, they'll be waiting for us ahead."
"If the creek's as shallow as you said, I guess we can manage it, all right," was the man's decision. "There must have been a cloud-burst somewhere in the mountains where the stream rises. We got the tail end of the storm—and that was a plenty!" he added savagely. "Let's be off."
Lou led the way as he had bidden her. She rode a furlong down the bank of the stream, to a point beyond the grove where she and her husband had entered the water for the crossing. As the horse stepped reluctantly down the shelving bank into the current, a qualm of dismay stirred in the woman. She could not doubt that the rush of the water as it came swirling about the horse's legs was much more violent than it had been on those other occasions when she had ridden through it. And, too, there was something strangely dispiriting in the combined effects of the black tide and the ominous gloom of the night beneath a heaven hidden by the masses of scurrying clouds. She looked back, as her horse advanced with laggard pace into the deepening water. She craved the comfort of companionship in this horrible time and place. Her eyes could make out only a silhouette that moved a little way behind her. She could not perceive any detail there in the darkness. But she knew that Dan McGrew rode close at hand, and with him, though invisible, rode her daughter, Nell—the one thing dear left to her in all the world. So, she went forward bravely enough, though her mood was as black as the blackness of the night that hung upon her in a smothering pall of weariness.