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rowed slowly, his eyes growing more accustomed to the shades of darkness. The open places amid the drift were faintly shimmering, reflecting the feeble light that shone through the clouds from the stars; the drift itself loomed in fantastic shapes of pure black on the water. There were logs and patches of sticks and grass; lumps of straw-stacks; the rectangles and triangles of sides of buildings; barrels and hogs heads; tangles like jackstraws of lumber and trees. It was as if everything that will float had its kind in the masses, around which were straits and ponds and open waterways as smooth as blown glass.

      He entered upon an acre of perfectly open water, and on the far side was running through a narrows hardly fifteen feet wide when he saw a black mass of drift shoving down across the way ahead of him. He heard the wet wood grinding and the dull snap of breaking branches.

      Instantly he fell against the sweeps, to stop the boat in its course; he pulled out of the closing gap, and turned through the wide water to skirt around the moving mass—not for a moment worried, because he had seen in time the thrust of the coming squeeze.

      At intervals he heard the shout from the drift, and he answered it. It was a long way through those low floating islands, over to the person who had called for help! He had to go in and out of openings that proved to be more bays; and then again, what looked like a solid mass ahead of him would drag itself asunder and a wide gate would open for him to pass.

      His oars made a loud splash, and at times he heard nearer shore a roaring that told of a pile of drift, a clump of trees, or some other obstruction standing against the power of the torrent. In the most intense silence he heard beginning the far-away rasping and breaking and rubbing of floating islands crowding one another as two eddies of surface current flowed into the same suck.

      What had seemed to be one great flow of water with a common course, when he regarded it from the safe harbor inshore, now proved to be a wonderful host of swirls, jets, masses, bulges, waves, and bodies of water, all going down the one channel, but changing and breaking up, gathering momentum. Sib was learning much about a flood that he had never known before!

      "This way!" he heard a voice, suddenly very near, and over to his left he saw the flare of a match.

      He pushed toward the figure he could dimly see standing on something. It was then as though the river were a perverse spirit, for out of the dark pressed floating islands of drift and right around them squeaked and ground one of those terrible squeezes which at their worst break tree trunks into slivers.

      There was an uproar. Sib felt the bumping of heavy timber under his boat; he saw a snag limb thirty feet long whirling around not forty yards distant; he heard the rending of boards and the straining of acres of flotsam writhing on all sides. Logs pressed under the bow of his cabin-boat and lifted it; logs, pressed under the stern, and raised it too.

      He ran up on the roof, caught up the lantern, and jumped down to look overside, to see if the bottom of his boat was torn off.

      "Why! I’m lifted clear out!" he cried aloud. "That’s what comes of having a long rake to the hull!"

      "Mister! Mister!" the voice shouted, "we’re breakin’ up!"

      Sib held up the lantern, and threw the bull’s eye beam in the direction of the shout. On a pile of drift fifty or sixty feet away stood a boy about the size of Sib. He held another smaller boy in his arms. The space between was filled with a mass of sticks, planks, corn-stalks, branches, logs, and what not. It looked firm enough for the moment, but Sib knew what it was—a place full of pitholes and bottomless wells—and that in a minute it might break up into mere match-stick scum upon the surface.

      "Come on!" Sib cried.

      "I can’t!" the other choked. "He’s caught his leg into a crack—"

      "I’m coming!" Sib shouted, catching a coil of rope from its hook on the stern and hanging it on his arm. He threw two half-hitches and took a bite over the stern bumper cleat, and then with the lantern in one hand, and playing out the rope from the coil with the other, he ran from chunk to chunk till he reached the two boys on the drift.

      "I’m coming!"

      "Our boat tore up!" the speaker said. "Jep and me got onto a log raft, and he went to sleep—his foot’s caught—or we could’ve got a-goin’. Help, can you? He’s fainted!"

      "Hold the lantern!" Sib said, and catching up a pole six feet long and three inches through, he jammed it down into the crack where Jep’s foot was caught. He set his shoulder to the pole and twisted it, and then the other boy took hold and together they pried.

      Catching the imprisoned leg by the knee, Sib suddenly felt it ease out, and with a cry he caught Jep up on his shoulder and started for the shanty-boat over the floating island. The other boy followed him.

      "Keep hold of the rope!" Sib warned. "Hold the lantern so we’ll see where to step!"

      "She’s strainin’!" the stranger gasped, as the rope rose from the drift ahead of him.

      "Hold ’er!" Sib exclaimed, setting down his burden and catching the rope. "I’ll snub it on this snag branch!"

      The drift was twisting all around them, and they could see the big logs crawling through the mass, could feel them straining underfoot; and between them and the boat water appeared among the flotsam. It was a fearful moment, for the squeeze had ended, and the mass of drift was breaking up and separating in little lumps. They saw the house-boat settling down as the logs rolled and floated from under her. Their own island began to flatten down and spread out. Sib caught the unconscious boy in his arms, and held to the branch that he had used for a snub. He could hear the light rope whimpering under the terrific strain as the boat tried to drift one way and the great snag to which she was fastened pulled the other.

      Then suddenly the rope sagged.

      "Hold ’im!" Sib exclaimed, and the other youth caught the helpless burden while Sib, inch by inch, foot by foot, stole the slack of the line from the river. The shanty-boat swung around, pulled away like a colt, drew a little nearer, and then worked away again.

      At last, when there was only open water around it, and when all the other drift had left the big snag, the stern of the shanty-boat came to them. They hoisted their burden up on the deck, and Sib clambered after.

      The other boy held with both hands to the cleat and stared, white-faced. Sib caught him, and dragged him on board.

      "I’m all in. I can’t lift a pound!" the boy said in a low voice as he fell forward on the deck. "We’ve ben comin’—a long time—an’ we’ve ben fightin’ Ole Mississip, night ’n day!"

      He was no older than Sib, if as old. The lad he had stood by to the end was two or three years younger. What they had endured showed in part in their white, pinched faces. Sib, after a few hours on the river, was already tired, while these two had been fighting the river night and day!

      "Hungry?" he asked.

      "Hungry!" the other gasped. "We’ve ben eatin’ tree bark, stranger. They ain’ much eatin’, ’ceptin’ the mud, out o’ the Big Muddy—is there?"

      He smiled.

      "My brother—he’s just fainted. He wasn’t scairt—just worried, some—an’ his leg hurt, too! It held right there ’most all day! Must be near mornin’ now, ain’t it?"

      Sib looked around. They were in open water. Little sticks of drift and a chunk or two of wood were within the radius of the light. The drift had gone away off somewhere. There was a little time for refreshments.

      He carried the two boys into the cabin, and laid one down on his own cot; the other he placed in the rocking-chair by the coal stove. Then he made tea. The younger boy, with a little tea in his throat, began to stir. The older boy stopped drinking his own, to watch anxiously.

      "He’s all right!" Sib exclaimed. "Just tired out—worn out!"

      "He couldn’t stand it," the elder brother explained. "We had two nights of it, besides this one. Somebody tried to git to us, up to Chester, but they got squeezed off. Comin’

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