“Quick!” says Timothy. “The dam’s broke. They’ve just telephoned everybody. The Flats’ll be flooded. Come on and help them women load their things....”
I don’t remember any of us saying a thing. We just clomb in over the back-board of Timothy’s wagon, him reaching down to help us, courteous, and we set down on the bottom of the wagon—Mis’ Holcomb and Mis’ Sykes, them two enemies, and Mis’ Merriman and me—and we headed for the Flats.
I remember, on the ride down there, seeing the street get thick with folks—in a minute the street was black with everybody, all hurrying toward what was the matter, and all veering out and swarming into the road—somehow, folks always flows over into the road when anything happens. And men and women kept coming out of houses, and calling to know what was the matter, and everybody shouted it back at them so’s they couldn’t understand, but they come out and joined in and run anyway. And over and over, as he drove, Timothy kept shouting to us how he had just been hitching up when the news come, and how his wagon was a new one and had ought to be able to cart off five or six loads at a trip.
“It can’t hurt Friendship Village proper,” I remember his saying over and over too, “that’s built high and dry. But the whole Flats’ll be flooded out of any resemblance to what they’ve been before.”
“Friendship Village proper,” I says over to myself, when we got to the top of Elephant Hill that let us look over the Pump pasture and away across the Flats, laying idle and not really counted in the town till it come to the tax list. There was dozens of little houses—the Marshalls and the Betts’s and the Rickers’s and the Hennings and the Doles and the Haskitts, and I donno who all. All our washings was done down there—or at least the washings was of them that didn’t do them themselves. The garden truck of them that didn’t have gardens, the home grown vegetables for Silas’s store, the hired girls’ homes of them that had hired girls, the rag man, the scissors grinder, Lowry that canes chairs and was always trying to sell us tomato plants—you know how that part of a town is populationed? And then there was a few that worked in Silas’s factory, and an outlaying milkman or two—and so on. “Friendship Village proper,” I says over and looked down and wondered why the Flats was improper enough to be classed in—laying down there in the morning sun, with nice, neat little door-yards and nice, neat little wreaths of smoke coming up out of their chimneys—and the whole Mad river loose and just going to swirl down on it and lap it up, exactly as hungry for it as if it had been Friendship Village “proper.”
They was running out of their little houses, up towards us, coming with whatever they had, with children, with baskets between ’em, with little animals, with bed-quilts tied and filled with stuff. Some few we see was busy loading their things up on to the second floor, but most of ’em didn’t have any second floors, so they was either running up the hill or getting a few things on to the roof. It wasn’t a big river—we none of us or of them was afraid of any loss of life or of houses being tipped over or like that. But we knew there’d be two-three feet of water over their ground floors by noon.
“Land, land,” says Mis’ Sykes, that’s our best housekeeper, “and I ’spose it’s so late lots of ’em had their Spring cleaning done.”
“I was thinkin’ of that,” says Mis’ Holcomb, her enemy.
“But then it being so late most of ’em has got their winter vegetables et out of their sullars,” says Mis’ Merriman, trying to hunt out the bright side.
“That’s true as fate, Mis’ Merriman,” I remember I says, agreeing with her fervent.