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So Bob hastened his pace, and was soon out of sight of the big house on the hill. He left behind him two very angry persons, yet when they glanced at each other neither Susan nor Dent could help laughing. They looked as if they had been through a cyclone and cloud-burst, both at the same time, as the hired man expressed it.
Even at the brick-kiln travellers, soldiers, and trains of merchandise had stopped to wait for the end of the cloud-burst. In front of the farmhouse, too, which Hermon and his companion next reached, they saw dozens of people seeking shelter, and the Midianite urged his master to join them for a short time at least.
"Wouldn't you lie," said she, "for me?" It was, I suppose, only a little womanly probe into character; but it thrilled me in a way the poor girl could not have supposed possible. "I would do anything for you," said I boldly; "but I'd a lot rather fight than lie." The cloud-burst had flooded the swales, and across the hollows ran broad sheets of racing water.
What I could see appeared to be nothing but the continuation of the glacier's path, scored out by the cloud-burst, and swept as smooth as a floor. Sitting there, my heart beating heavily with excitement, I looked through the evening glow at the endless, pine-crowned mountain-wall with its giant's gateway pierced for me!
It seemed that the Lawtons had known nothing of the cloud-burst itself, except from its effects in filling up the ravine. Rumours of the drowning of a miner were about. It soon became evident that the brightness of the morning was reflected from the girl's mood. She fairly sparkled with gaiety and high spirits. The two got along famously. "Where are you going?" asked Bennington at last.
Gnarled trees springing out of gashes along its tortuous channel showed, in the debris lodged against their flood-bared roots and mud-swept branches, the fury of the night, and the creek banks, scoured by many floods, revealed new and savage gaps in the morning sun; but Bradley made his crossing with the stage almost as uneventfully as if a cloud-burst had never ruffled the mountains.
"I reckon," said the cowboy, "that they look on this as the easiest way to drown them all to onct." Then from behind one of the other boats suddenly appeared a huge German sailor with a hose. The devoted imbeciles in the shore boat were drenched as by a cloud-burst. Back and forth and up and down the heavy stream played, while every other human being about the ship shrieked with joy.
The sobs were not loud, but the sound reached him distinctly through the frail door between the two rooms; it expressed an utter abandonment to grief; not the cloud-burst of some passing emotion, but the slow down-pour of a whole heaven of sorrow. Woburn sat listening. There was nothing else to be done; and at least his listening was a mute tribute to the trouble he was powerless to relieve.
"Thank God we don't have a cloud-burst more than once in ten years," he remarked to his manager. "However, that is often enough, considering the high cost of this one. Those logs were worth eight dollars a thousand feet, board measure, in the millpond, and I suppose we've lost a hundred thousand dollars' worth."
We learned, however, that nature really had done the work, on the occasion of a flood, the result of a cloud-burst, which swept into the valley two or three years before. At several places in this stream, we saw groups of from two or three to ten or twelve Totonac indians, who were fishing with little nets.
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