“THEY FOUND THE FARMER CLINGING TO THE CHIMNEY.”
“There’s a poor thing out yonder with a kid—can’t we take her?” He pointed to a woman in her night-dress, up to her shoulders in water, on the top of an old honeysuckle, and holding her baby above the flood in her poor aching arms. But there was no room in the boat.
“We must come for her next trip,” said Boniface.
“The tree will be gone before then,” cried Donald; “we’ll stay on the roof here—won’t we, Harry?—and then you can come back for us when you’ve got the rest ashore.”
“No, that won’t do, will it, Tommy?” said the landlord; but the boys were quite positive, and said it was a currish thing to leave the woman there, and that they would make a fuss about it, if the boat didn’t go for her. Then the farmer said that, if anybody ought to stay, he supposed he ought to; but he didn’t seem very willing to stay, and his wife cried, and said that he ought to think of his children, if he didn’t care for her; and the boys settled matters by scrambling on to the roof.
“It warn’t my doin’s, mind,” growled Boniface, as the boat pulled off for the honeysuckle. The poor woman and her baby were saved, and only just in time. A few minutes after they were taken off, the tree flung up its roots as a diving duck flings up its feet. It was weary, dreary work for the boys to cling to the chimney, watching the boat pulling for the town, and waiting for it to come back for them. After all, it was not the landlord and the shoemaker who rescued them. Boniface and Tommy had worked off their “Dutch courage” in the first trip, and, besides, the Doctor’s tub would certainly have foundered if she had tried to make another. But the police-sergeant had heard the story, and he had helped to capture Warrigal in his private-trooper days, and had a great respect for Harry.
“We’ll go first for that game young Trojan,” he said to his men; and the farmer volunteered to take one policeman’s place in the boat, that there might be no mistake about the house. Harry’s heart, and Donald’s too, gave a great leap of joy when they saw the police-boat steering as straight as it could for them, over the brown waters, through the grey rain. But, pleased as they were at getting on board the boat, they could think of others. They told the sergeant that they thought they had seen a fire and some people far away on a bit of dry ground.
“I’m out of my reckoning, now,” said Harry; “but Donald thinks it must be the top of Macpherson’s Hill, on the Cornwallis Road; anyhow, Macpherson’s inn has gone.”
“Give way, lads,” cried the sergeant; and he steered the long police-boat towards the spot his young passengers had pointed out. It was a long hard pull, and the boat took up other passengers before she got to the end of it. She took off a man from a shea-oak, and a woman and two children he had lashed to branches higher up. The man had been made quite stupid by the terrible time he had had. It was as much as two policemen could do to drag him off the branch to which he clung, and then he tumbled into the boat like a sack of sand. When the poor scratching, screaming woman was got into it, she had to be tied again, because she had gone mad. About half a mile farther on, the boat came to a hut flooded up to the eaves; and “Whisht!” cried Donald (as if the rain and wind and chopping waves would mind him), “there’s a body in there.”