The greatest bulwark of courage is responsibility. The old woman’s helpless collapse steadied her. A moment before she had known no sensation but terror. Now there poured back into her the sense of obligation. She had two children on her hands, one old and one young. She must be a rock upon which they could lean.
Betty stepped out of the room and closed the door in order not to waken Ruth. She noticed that the two lower steps of the stairway were already submerged.
“The dam’s gone out, Mandy. We’re caught in the flood,” she explained.
In despair Mandy threw up her brown palms. She was a short, fat woman with an indistinguishable waist-line. A handkerchief was knotted round her head for a nightcap.
“This am shore de night of Armagideon when de four ho’semen of de Epolipse am a-ridin’. Oh, Lawd, where am you at when pore black Mandy am a-reachin’ fo’ you-all?”
A lurch of the house flung her against Betty. She clutched at the girl and clung to her. Her eyes rolled. She opened her mouth to scream.
Betty clapped her hand over it. “Stop that nonsense, Mandy! I’ll not have it!” she ordered sharply. “You’ll waken Ruth. We’re all right so long as the house holds together. I’ll not have any of your foolishness.”
The old woman’s mouth closed. The words of Betty were astringent. They assumed leadership, which was all that Mandy wanted. Her voice obediently abated to a whimper.
Betty did not open her mind to the colored woman. There was no use in filling her with alarms she had not yet conjured up. But the girl knew their situation was desperate.
At the lower end of the rock-girt valley was a gateway where the hogbacks on either side of it came almost together. There was room enough for a wagon to get through and no more. Out of this gap all the water rushing into the narrow basin would have to pour to the Flat Tops below. If the Sweetwater Dam had gone out—and of that Betty had no doubt—the floods would race down for hours much faster than they could escape to the mesa. The churning stream would grow deeper instead of subsiding. The house might waterlog and sink. It might turn over. It might be rammed by trees or rocks. Or it might be beaten by the waves until it fell apart.