Ironheart

Betty, about to return to the Quarter Circle D E, found herself importuned by her small sister to take her along.

“I’ll be the goodest, ’n’ not bovver you, ’n’ go to bed jes’ the minute you say to,” she promised.

The older sister hesitated, then turned to her father. “Why not? I’m staying there only one night.”

“Fine. Take Little Nuisance along,” Reed said, and poked a forefinger into Ruth’s softly padded body. “I’ve got to go to town, anyhow, an’ won’t be back till late.”

It was nearly two weeks since Betty had shaken hands with Justin Merrick and closed in good-will a chapter of her history. She had not seen Tug Hollister since then, but word had reached her that he had gone back to work in the hills. Merrick’s men were on the Flat Tops running the lines where the ditches were to go.

She was waiting for Tug to come to her. Surely he did not intend to let things end between them as they were. He would ride up some day and tell her that he had been a stiff-necked idiot who had at last seen the light. Every day she had looked for him, and her eyes had moved up the road in vain.

In the pleasant sunshine Ruth prattled cheerfully of puppies, dolls, gingerbread, Sunday school, her new pink dress, and warts. Betty came out of a brown reverie at the name of Hollister.

“I fink he might come an’ see us. I’m jes’ as mad at him,” the child announced. “’N’ I’m gonna tell him so, too, when he comes.”

“If he comes,” Betty found herself saying with a little sigh.

She knew that if he did not make the first move she would take the initiative herself. A little point of pride was not going to stand in the way of her happiness. But she believed he ought to come to her. It was a man’s place to meet a girl more than halfway.

It was, of course, some fantastic sense of duty that was holding him back. She had not very much patience with it. Why was he not generous enough to give her a chance to be generous about this fault he magnified so greatly? He did not seem to appreciate her point of view at all.

On Betty’s desk at the Quarter Circle D E an unopened letter lay awaiting her. She had never seen Hollister’s writing, but at the first glance after she picked up the envelope her heart began to hammer. She knew who the message was from. The postmark was Wild Horse. Evidently the mailman had delivered it an hour or two earlier.

She tore the flap and read:

That was all, except the signature at the bottom. But it made her heart sing. Her doubts were at rest. He loved her. That was all she wanted to know. The difficulties in his mind would vanish. Her love would beat them down. What scruples, what fears could stand against this joy that flooded them both?

She longed to tell him so, to pour her heart out in what was to be the first love-letter she had ever written. Yet she was not impatient of the delays forced on her by ranch details, by Ruth’s imperious demands for attention. She could attend to these competently and without irritation because subconsciously her being floated in happiness. Life had always given Betty what she wanted. It was unthinkable that there should be withheld from her that which was the crown of all her hopes.

Alone at the desk in the living-room, after everybody else on the ranch had retired, Betty gave herself up to the luxury of dreams. She felt very wide awake. It would not be possible to sleep until she had written an answer. There was no hurry about it. She wanted to take plenty of time to think out what she wanted to say before she even started on it.

When she began to write, her thoughts flew fast. They kept busy the flashing finger-tips that transmitted the messages to the white page on the carriage of the typewriter. The sentences were short, impulsive, energetic. They expressed the surge of eagerness in her.

She knew she would copy it in long hand, would go over every word of every sentence. The other side of her, the shy-eyed maiden of dreams who must be the wooed and not the wooer, would insist on deleting, trimming down, making colorless the swift and passionate staccato of the words. The letter she would send to Hollister would be pale and neutral compared to this cry of the heart she was uttering.

The little glass-cased clock on her desk struck two. Betty was surprised. She had been here alone with her thoughts for four hours. The fire in the grate had died down and the room was beginning to chill. She gathered the live coals and put upon them two split lengths of resinous pine.

For a few minutes she sat before the blaze warming her hands. That was the obvious reason for her staying. A more compelling one was that she saw pictures in the coals, dream pictures of the future in which two figures moved to the exclusion of all others. These had the texture of fiction, not consciously, but because our conceptions of the future must always be adjusted to a reality affected by environment and human character.

Betty lifted her head and listened. What was that rushing, swishing sound? She rose, startled, affected instantly by a sense of insecurity and danger. Something crashed heavily against the wall. The floor seemed to weave.

She went to the window and looked out into the darkness. A river, swift and turbid, was roaring past where the lawn had been a few minutes before. The girl stood terrified, her mind caught in the horror of unknown disaster. Even as she stood there, she saw that the waters were rising.

Again there sounded a rending crash of timbers. Like a battering-ram the end of a telephone pole smashed through the side of the house, crossed the room, and came to rest in the fireplace. With it came a rush of water that covered the floor.

Betty screamed. Her panicky heart beat wildly. Was the world coming to an end? She looked out again. What she saw was appalling—a swirl of rising waters tossing like the backs of cattle on a stampede. She noticed that the barn, plainly visible a few moments before, had vanished from sight.

The sloshing tide in the room was rising. Already it reached the bottom of her skirts. There was no longer any doubt that the floor was tilting. The house had been swept from its foundations. Built of frame, it was tossing on the face of a rough sea.

Betty waded to the stairway, climbing over the telephone pole. Except Ruth and the old colored woman Mandy there was nobody in the house with her. Both of these were sleeping on the second floor. In the bunkhouse were three men employed by her, but she realized that it, too, must have been carried away.

The girl flew upstairs from the pursuing flood. She knew now that it must have been caused by the breaking of the Sweetwater Dam. The Quarter Circle D E ran along a narrow valley down which must be pouring all the melted snow and rainfall impounded in the big reservoir.

Pounded by the impact of the descending waters, the house rocked like a boat. The lights had gone out when the wires had become disconnected, but Betty groped her way into the room where her sister lay asleep in the moonlight. She was running to pick up the child when Mandy’s voice stopped her. It came in an excited wail.

“De day of judgment am hyeh, honey. Oh, Lawdy, Lawdy, we’re sure come to de River Jordan!”

The greatest bulwark of courage is responsibility. The old woman’s helpless collapse steadied her. A moment before she had known no sensation but terror. Now there poured back into her the sense of obligation. She had two children on her hands, one old and one young. She must be a rock upon which they could lean.

Betty stepped out of the room and closed the door in order not to waken Ruth. She noticed that the two lower steps of the stairway were already submerged.

“The dam’s gone out, Mandy. We’re caught in the flood,” she explained.

In despair Mandy threw up her brown palms. She was a short, fat woman with an indistinguishable waist-line. A handkerchief was knotted round her head for a nightcap.

“This am shore de night of Armagideon when de four ho’semen of de Epolipse am a-ridin’. Oh, Lawd, where am you at when pore black Mandy am a-reachin’ fo’ you-all?”

A lurch of the house flung her against Betty. She clutched at the girl and clung to her. Her eyes rolled. She opened her mouth to scream.

Betty clapped her hand over it. “Stop that nonsense, Mandy! I’ll not have it!” she ordered sharply. “You’ll waken Ruth. We’re all right so long as the house holds together. I’ll not have any of your foolishness.”

The old woman’s mouth closed. The words of Betty were astringent. They assumed leadership, which was all that Mandy wanted. Her voice obediently abated to a whimper.

Betty did not open her mind to the colored woman. There was no use in filling her with alarms she had not yet conjured up. But the girl knew their situation was desperate.

At the lower end of the rock-girt valley was a gateway where the hogbacks on either side of it came almost together. There was room enough for a wagon to get through and no more. Out of this gap all the water rushing into the narrow basin would have to pour to the Flat Tops below. If the Sweetwater Dam had gone out—and of that Betty had no doubt—the floods would race down for hours much faster than they could escape to the mesa. The churning stream would grow deeper instead of subsiding. The house might waterlog and sink. It might turn over. It might be rammed by trees or rocks. Or it might be beaten by the waves until it fell apart.

“I’m going in to Ruth,” Betty said. “If you’re coming, too, you’ll have to behave, Mandy. I’ll not have you frightening her by any silly hysterics.”

“Yas’m,” assented Mandy meekly.

Ruth was still asleep, though the roar of the sweeping waters came through the open window and occasionally a drench of spray. Her sister went to close the casement. Above, the moon was shining placidly; below, the current boiled and churned. The depth of the stream, Betty guessed, must be eight or ten feet. It was still rising, but the force of its downward rush was terrific.

The house pitched like a boat. What was worse, it had tilted so that water was pouring in at the lower windows. If the stream continued to rise, it would probably either sink or overturn.

The noise of crashing timbers and beating waves continued. Betty wondered how much pounding an old frame building like this could stand. It was built with an ell, the wing a later addition to the farmhouse. The binding beams connecting the two parts creaked and groaned under the strain put upon them.

Ruth woke. Betty sat down on the bed and put her arms round the child.

“What ’tis?” asked the child, frightened.

“Some of the water got out of the dam and we’re floating in it, dearie. Don’t cry, Ruthie. Betty’ll be here with you all the time.”

There came a series of heavy bumps accompanied by the sound of rending timbers. It was as though the floor was being torn from under their feet. Betty thought they were going down. The house listed sharply, then righted itself so suddenly that the girl was flung to the bed.

The house had been torn asunder, one wing from the other.

Mandy and the child screamed. For a moment Betty was near panic herself. But she fought down her terror resolutely.

“See. The floor’s level now.” Her voice was steady and calm. “We’ll probably be all right. Stop that noise, Mandy. Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t have it?”

The housekeeper sniffled. “I’m ce’tainly scared to death, honey, I shorely is.” She folded her short, fat arms and rocked. “I been a mighty triflin’ nigger, but I aims frum now on to get shet uv my scandalacious ways an’ travel de road what leads to de pearly gates. Yas’m. Glory Hallelujah! If de good Lawd evah lets me git outa hyeh alive, I’ll shout for salvation at de mourners’ bench mighty loud.”

The situation was too desperate for Betty to find any amusement in Mandy’s good resolutions, but it occurred to her to turn some of her fear into another channel.

“Let’s sing,” she suggested.

Above the booming of the wild waters she lifted her clear young soprano and sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” The first line she carried alone, then Mandy’s rich contralto quavered in and Ruth’s small piping treble joined.

With an impact that shook every timber the current flung the house against a great boulder. The building swung as on a pivot and was driven into the rocks again. Betty looked out of the window. They were wedged between two great spars of red sandstone. The furious buffeting of the racing tide lifted their frail refuge and dropped it upon the sharp edges of the crags.

“We’re caught at the Steeples,” the girl told the others.

If they could get out and climb the rock spires! But that was impossible. The house was submerged almost to the second floor in the swashing torrent which surrounded it and dragged at it with a violence they could feel.

Again the shipwrecked three sang. This time it was “Rock of Ages.” They held one another’s hands for comfort, and in their prayer, voiced through the words of the old hymn, they found a sustaining strength. Presently Mandy took up “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and the others came in with support.

Betty helped to wear away the long night with talk. She forced into her voice cheerfulness and courage, though there was not a minute of the dark hours not filled with alarms. It would be morning soon, she promised. Daddy would come and get them, or Lon, or perhaps Justin Merrick’s men who were camping on the Flat Tops. Then they would have fun talking it all over and telling how brave Ruth had been for not crying (except just the teentiest time) like a silly little girl.

After what to those in peril seemed an eternity of waiting, light sifted into the sky with a promise of the coming day. The darkness lifted and showed them a valley of wild and turbid waters. The Quarter Circle D E ranch had become a furious and rushing river flung back upon itself by the hogbacks which dammed its free course.

In the darkness it had seemed that the menace of the flood had been tenfold increased by the unknown peril that lay back of the visible. But in the light they could see too much. The force of the torrent was appalling. It showed them to what a puny reed of safety they were clinging. At any moment the building might collapse like an empty eggshell under pressure.