LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER I

      CARRIED AWAY IN A RIVER FLOOD

       Table of Contents

      THE Mississippi River was in flood; the great spring tide had overflowed the natural banks for hundreds of miles below Cairo, situated in the forks of the Ohio. Three streams of monster size were contributing to the overflow—the Missouri River, with headwaters in the Rockies, the upper Mississippi, with its sources in six or seven states above the mouth of the Missouri, and the Ohio, draining a thousand majestic ridges, from southwestern New York, through Pennsylvania, down to northern Alabama. A million square miles of watershed poured millions of cubic feet of water an hour past Cairo, and for a thousand miles below, in all the great river bottoms, hundreds of thousands of people were waiting with anxiety to learn where disaster had fallen, and whether or not their efforts would avail to avert the destruction of property and loss of lives.

      Sibley Carruth, alone on his parents’ cabin boat, which was moored in a narrow creek ravine just above Cape Girardeau, seemed to be in as safe a place as one could find. Up the creek, however, hard rains had fallen and some hundreds of acres were pouring off water in muddy streams, with a run-off which was strong enough to lift a big, dry dead oak-tree where it had fallen, and float it slowly down-stream, its snags of roots and branches sticking out in all directions.

      Mr. and Mrs. Carruth had gone to town in the skiff, rowing over corn-fields, through a patch of woods, and to a street corner where the water had not yet submerged the lower stories of the buildings. Tying their boat to a hitching-post in a flooded side street, they went to the telegraph office to learn from the Weather Bureau bulletins whether or not the river was going any higher. They learned that it was, considerably, for rain had been falling almost continuously over thousands of square miles drained by tributaries of the Mississippi.

      The Carruths were river people. Years before, Mr. Carruth had gone down the Missouri River on a hunting-trip, with a fellow sportsman. He had been so fascinated by the strange life aboard a shanty-boat that three or four years later he had taken Mrs. Carruth down the upper Mississippi for their honeymoon. His work of timber-looking for the firm of which he was the head enabled him to live where he wished and he chose a small house-boat from which he could go to seek especially fine trees to cut into furniture pieces, or extra-veneers, or high-grade sticks for unusual purposes. Thus the Carruths had become river people.

      Sibley, awaiting his parents’ return, grew bored. The rain was still falling, and not caring to go out in the wet and have to change his shoes and stockings, and perhaps everything else if his mother on her return happened to find him damp—and she surely would!—he lay down on his folding cot in the kitchen of the two-roomed house-boat and soon was fast asleep.

      The house-boat was a cabin built on a scow. The hull, constructed of good pine lumber, with a strong frame, was twenty-eight feet long, eight feet wide, and thirty inches deep. It was truss-braced to withstand strains caused by waves or by bumping against the bank or other obstructions. The cabin was eighteen feet long, as wide as the hull, and served as the house. The five-foot space at bow and stern was decked over so neither rain nor waves could leak through into the hull. Steps led down into the cabin, which was six feet high inside, but outside stood only a little more than four feet higher than the top of the hull, for the floor rested on the stringers along the hull’s bottom planks. The cabin, being low, with walls partly inside the hull, offered little resistance to the wind when the boat was floating down the river current.

      Sibley slept soundly, for he had sat up later than his mother wanted him to, the evening before. And as he slept, and the afternoon waned, the boat worked in and out on the stretch and sag of the one line by which it was tied, from a bow cleat on the bumper, to a stake driven in the clay up the bank. The stake was of ash, three feet long and strong enough to stand any strain put upon it by the boat.

      The creek current, swollen by rains, washed down the little valley with increasing force. The great low surges of waves that heaved out of the main torrent of the Mississippi worked against the flood in the creek-bed, so that the cabin-boat was washed back and forth, pulling the stake every time it sagged away. As it strained, the rain fell into the hole around the stake; as it eased up, the stake, springing, squeezed out the water, which at the next strain oozed down into the hole again. Of course, some clay washed out with the water each time, and before many hours had passed, the stake was just standing in the hole, surrounded by slippery clay.

      Down the creek drove the great dry oak snag. As it went it broke off several smaller root branches which dug into the bank on one side, and once it caught crosswise in the current, from bank to bank. The top of the snag was broken away by drift that lodged against the trunk, pressing heavily. Down the lower end of the creek the snag moved slowly out into the great flood.

      A fork of the roots pressed against the side of the little house-boat, so softly that the craft did not jar enough to awaken Sibley;

Скачать книгу