And us two pairs of feuds talked about it, together, till we got down into the Flats and begun helping ’em load.
We filled up the wagon with what they had ready, tied up and boxed up and in baskets or thrown in loose, and Timothy started back with the first load, Mis’ Haskitt calling after him pitiful to be careful not to stomp on her best black dress that she’d started off with in her arms, and then trusted to the wagon and gone back to get some more. Timothy was going to take ’em up to the top of Elephant Hill and dump ’em there by appointment, and come back for another load, everybody sorting their own out of the pile later, as best they could. While he was gone we done things up for folks like wild and I donno but like mad, and had a regular mountain of ’em out on the walk when he come driving back; but when we got that all loaded on, out come Mis’ Ben Dole, running with a whole clothes bars full of new-ironed clothes and begged Timothy to set ’em right up on top of the load, just as they was, and representing as they did Two Dollars’ worth of washing and ironing for her, besides the value of the clothes that mustn’t be lost. And Timothy took ’em on for her, and drove off balancing ’em with one hand, and all the clothes blowing gentle in the breeze.
I looked over to Mis’ Holcomb, all frantic as she was, and it was so she looked at me.
“That was Ben Dole’s wife that Timothy done that for,” I says, to be sure we meant the same thing. “Just as if he hadn’t never harmed her husband’s cement plant.”
“I know,” says Mis’ Holcomb. “Don’t that beat the very day to a froth?” and she went on emptying Mis’ Dole’s bureau drawers into a bed-spread.
By the time the fourth load or so had gone on, and the other wagons that had come was working the same way, the water was seeping along the Lower Road, down past the wood-yard. More than one was saying we’d ought to begin to make tracks for high ground, because likely when it come, it’d come with a rush. And some of us had stepped out on the street and was asking Silas, that you kind of turn to in emergency, because he’s the only one that don’t turn to anybody else, whether we hadn’t better go, when down the street we see a man come tearing like mad.
“My land,” I says, “it’s Bitty Marshall. He wasn’t home. And where’s his wife? I ain’t laid eyes on her.”
None of us had seen her that morning. And us that stood together broke into a run, and it was Silas and Mis’ Merriman and me that run together, and rushed together up the stairs of Bitty’s little grocery, to where he lived, and into the back room. And there set Bessie Marshall in the back room, putting her baby to sleep as tranquil as the blue sky and not knowing a word of what was going on, and by the window was Bitty’s old mother, shelling pop-corn.
I never see anybody work like Silas worked them next few minutes. If he’d been a horse and a giant made one he couldn’t have got more quick, necessary things out of the way. And we done what we could, and it wasn’t any time at all till we was going down the stairs carrying what few things they’d most need for the next few days. When we stepped out in the street, the water was an inch or more all over where we stood, and when we’d got six steps from the house and Bitty had gone ahead shouting to the wagon, Bessie Marshall looked up at Silas real pitiful.
“Oh, Mr. Sykes,” she says, “there’s a coop of little chickens and their mother by the back door. Couldn’t we take ’em?”