There is not much sleeping done in the flood district during a spring flood. The gas was shut off, and I gave Mr. Reynolds and the Ladleys each a lamp. I sat in the back room that I had made into a temporary kitchen, with a candle, and with a bedquilt around my shoulders. The water rose fast in the lower hall, but by midnight, at the seventh step, it stopped rising and stood still. I always have a skiff during the flood season, and as the water rose, I tied it to one spindle of the staircase after another.
I made myself a cup of tea, and at one o'clock I stretched out on a sofa for a few hours' sleep. I think I had been sleeping only an hour or so, when some one touched me on the shoulder and I started up. It was Mr. Reynolds, partly dressed.
"Some one has been in the house, Mrs. Pitman," he said. "They went away just now in the boat."
"Perhaps it was Peter," I suggested. "That dog is always wandering around at night."
"Not unless Peter can row a boat," said Mr. Reynolds dryly.
I got up, being already fully dressed, and taking the candle, we went to the staircase. I noticed that it was a minute or so after two o'clock as we left the room. The boat was gone, not untied, but cut loose. The end of the rope was still fastened to the stair-rail. I sat down on the stairs and looked at Mr. Reynolds.
"It's gone!" I said. "If the house catches fire, we'll have to drown."
"It's rather curious, when you consider it." We both spoke softly, not to disturb the Ladleys. "I've been awake, and I heard no boat come in. And yet, if no one came in a boat, and came from the street, they would have had to swim in."
I felt queer and creepy. The street door was open, of course, and the lights going beyond. It gave me a strange feeling to sit there in the darkness on the stairs, with the arch of the front door like the entrance to a cavern, and see now and then a chunk of ice slide into view, turn around in the eddy, and pass on. It was bitter cold, too, and the wind was rising.
"I'll go through the house," said Mr. Reynolds. "There's likely nothing worse the matter than some drunken mill-hand on a vacation while the mills are under water. But I'd better look."