It will be recalled that in the division of forces for the search Herman Boyd and the Trojan were detailed to follow the road down the valley, making inquiries at each house and seeking news of the missing Shark and Varley.

This duty they performed conscientiously, but wholly without result.

Nobody had seen or heard anything of the pair. From each house which was provided with a telephone the boys made report to Mrs. Grant and learned from her that seemingly the other hunters were having no better fortune. More than once they were advised to give up their task and accept shelter and refreshment; but they declined the invitations and resumed their march. What is more, they did not restrict themselves to inquiries of the residents, but now and then made a detour toward the river. It was to be observed, as they neared the foot of the valley, that the lowlands were flooded in many places. The boys agreed that their prospects of success were not bright, but neither was willing to turn back.

“We’ll keep on as far as the bridges, anyway,” the Trojan said. “Sam’d expect us to do that much.”

Herman nodded. “He’d keep on, if he were here.”

“Sure he would!”

“Yes, old Sam’s a sticker.”

“Then we’ll be stickers, too: we won’t fail him.”

This decided, they continued their tramp. And while they went splashing and sloshing along the road, which was by no means a poor imitation of a canal in places, Step and Poke, heading in the opposite direction, were having a very similar experience.

The tall youth and his plump chum were quite as much in earnest as were Herman and the Trojan, but temperamentally were not so well fitted to carry out a commander’s orders implicitly. Besides, under the depressing weather conditions, Poke could hardly avoid meditation upon the sorrows of his own lot. With rain driving in his face and snow water at times a quarter-way up the legs of his rubber boots, it is scarcely to be wondered that he tended to the pessimistic view. To tell the truth, Poke liked the comfortable things of life, and turned regretfully from the warm kitchens of the farmhouses at which he halted to ask the question, to which there was regularly the same answer. Nobody had seen a smallish boy in glasses and a larger boy who didn’t wear glasses.

Trudging on, doggedly and faithfully, Poke relapsed into a dull silence, which at last attracted the attention of Step. The latter was not unmindful of his friend’s mood; in fact, he tried to show his sympathy. Ordinarily, the two got on famously, but now Step contrived to strike a jarring note.

“Oh, buck up, Poke; buck up!” he urged. “Luck’ll have to turn. You ought to be able to see that.”

Now, this was meant in all kindness, but it did not fall pleasingly on Poke’s ear. Doubtless the fault was his own, not Step’s.

“Huh! Talk’s cheap!” he growled.

Step flushed wrathfully. “Oh, well, if you don’t want to see, you don’t have to, you chump!”

“Huh! Chump, am I? Well, if I had a periscope-pole neck like yours I could see a lot of funny things, too.”

This was personal insult, so intended and so received. Step pulled up short.

“Periscope neck, eh? Well, I’d rather have one like that than be a human flat-iron!”

Poke halted, too. He glared up at Step as savagely as Step was glaring down at him. Together they presented a quaint scene of wrath, standing there in slush to their ankles and with the rain running down their long coats in little streams. The humor of the situation escaped Poke, but he was quick witted enough to take advantage of the circumstance that Step had been first to pause. He cut short his own delay, and took as long a stride as his short legs permitted.

“That’s right—be a quitter!” he said over his shoulder. “Anything to get out of hunting for Varley and the Shark, of course!”

Step was beside him in an instant. “Quitter, eh?” he snarled. “We’ll see who’ll be first to lay down his playthings in this game!”

“Oh, then you haven’t really laid them down, eh?” said Poke with crafty sweetness. “Isn’t it too bad it looked so much like that?”

Step merely gritted his teeth in reply, and set a pace which put Poke into a dog-trot to keep abreast of him.

It was, of course, the most trivial of quarrels, but like some other trifles in life fated to have consequences out of all ratio to its real importance. It made both boys determined to go on with the hunt without much regard for reason. Also it brought it about that when in the growing darkness the flood came sweeping down the valley in a fine wave, Poke and Step were still marching along, each more intent upon wearing out the other than upon keeping keen watch for danger.

Luckily, the roar of the approaching water gave even these preoccupied youths some warning. Luckily, too, though the road they were then traveling was close to the river, they were near a tiny hillock on which stood a shed such as farmers sometimes build in remote fields to protect stock or tools. Poke and Step dashed for its shelter, and were well above the wave as it went raging down the valley. However, it left them on what was now an island, safe for the time being, but cut off from the shore by a hundred yards or more of deeply inundated swale.

Poke clutched Step, and Step clung to Poke, their bickering forgotten and peace restored. In a moment they were as thoroughly comradely as Herman and the Trojan, who three or four miles down the valley watched, or, more accurately, heard the sweep of the wave down the stream. Chance had put the Trojan and his companion, at the time on the hillside, well above the flood level. In the faint light they could make out little except that the stream, of a sudden, was over its banks; but while they were pausing, uncertain what to do, Mr. Grant’s hired man drove up. He could give them no information except that he had been instructed to carry on the inquiry for the Shark and Varley at the gorge at the mouth of the valley. They held a short consultation, agreeing that the man should go on as far as he could, the road at this point being well above high water mark, while the boys turned back. By keeping to the hillside they would be able to regain the Grant place, and on the way they could continue the search for traces of the missing pair.

For Poke and Step, however, no such solution of their problem was possible. They were effectually marooned. Neither felt tempted to venture to swim to the shore. They put their heads together, debated briefly, and agreed that there was nothing to do but to make the best of the situation.

The roof of the shed leaked abominably, but at one end they found a comparatively dry spot, and here, too, they made a discovery. Against the wall lay a boat, bottom up, evidently in storage for the winter. It was a home-made affair; a punt, broad, flat-bottomed, square-ended; built of heavy planks and generally so clumsy and weighty that they were unable to move it, though they put all their strength into the effort.

“No use!” groaned Step, and now it was Poke who took the rôle of comforter.

“Well, I don’t see any oars, so it doesn’t matter very much.... What’s that? Don’t want to stay here all night, you say? Well, I don’t want to, either; but I’m not going to worry about it. Maybe something will turn up.”

Step dismally pointed a number of very good reasons for doubting that anything could turn up to their advantage; but Poke declined to lose heart.

“I know, I know!” he said. “Luck’s against us just now—guess I’m a regular Jonah, anyway. But it’ll have to turn—say! I’m not sure but it has turned.”

“How?” Step demanded skeptically.

Poke waved a hand at the dark flood. “Suppose that had caught us. This is no picnic, you’re thinking? I tell you it’s a party compared with being out in that mess. Goodness knows, I’ve got troubles enough in life, but I’m not quite ready to be drowned yet!”

“Well, I’m not, either,” Step admitted. “Only—only I do wish it’d stay light a little longer.”

“With you there!” cried Poke earnestly.

The gloom, in fact, was for the chums—as for the larger party in the old house—the most insistent of the night’s discomforts. It was worse than the pelting rain, from which, indeed, they had found shelter of a sort; it was worse than the chill of the air which increased as the night advanced, for they could huddle together for warmth. It even seemed to offer more menacing perils than the steadily rising flood, whose approach to the summit of the hillock it concealed. How Step and Poke endured the dragging hours can better be imagined than described. They had their alarms—many of them. Mysterious sounds came from the bosom of the flood; an owl hooted sepulchrally; occasionally a squall swept by, whistling shrilly about the shed. There were long intervals, though, in which they heard only the monotonous beat of the rain and a sound very like a heavy murmur from the river; and at such times weariness took its toll, and both boys slept, fitfully, brokenly and restlessly.

Rather oddly, neither of them suspected the manner in which the waters were creeping toward their refuge. Neither had the mathematical bent of the Shark to work out a theory of a valley like a plugged bowl; and so, while they were perfectly aware of the discomforts of their situation and while they were full of anxiety as to the fate of their friends, the discovery, at last, that the still rising river was invading the shed came with surprise as well as consternation.

They turned again to the boat, and made desperate efforts to drag it out; but in this they were hampered and handicapped by the darkness. They did succeed in turning it on its side, but there it stuck, in spite of all their efforts.

Now came a new cause of alarm. Some shift in the current began to swerve drifting objects toward their island. A score or more of big logs, freed by the breaking of some boom up-stream, came like a fleet of rams to batter the walls of the rickety structure. By this time the water was more than knee deep on the highest part of the earth floor of the shed, and Poke and Step were perched in insecurity on a pile of old boxes in a corner. The only alleviating feature of their situation was a lessening of the darkness with the coming of the dull dawn; but it was still a faint twilight which was all about them when the end of the shed came.

Another lot of logs, traveling with even more momentum than the first flotilla, seemed to charge upon them. One tore a great hole in the shed wall; a second ripped away an end. Then a huge timber lodged against an upright of the framework, and with the full force of the flood behind it, turned like a beam of a great derrick, carrying away what was left of the roof, tearing out the wall as if it had been made of paper, and completing the ruin of the shed. The pile of boxes was tossed aside, and Poke and Step were pitched into the water.

The big log, though, served them a good turn as well as a bad one. Their asylum was gone, but the boat had been set afloat by the blow, and, what was still better, was floating right side up. Half full of water as it was, it was a very ark of safety to the boys, who climbed aboard just as the current seized it and carried it free of the wreckage.

For a moment or two the voyagers were content to sit still and regain breath. Then, pluckily, they set about improving the opportunity for escape which Fortune had thrown in their way.

There were no oars aboard, but Step tore a broken thwart from its fastenings. One piece of the board he gave to Poke and another he himself put over the side. Both boys fell to paddling frantically—but to small avail. The punt was heavy, clumsy, water-logged. The paddles were the poorest of excuses. It was all they could do to swing the blunt bow of the boat toward the dimly visible shore; and after ten minutes’ hard, but vain, endeavor the chums ceased their labors.

Their plight now was distressful, though possibly having less of peril than had threatened them on their temporary island. Their ark, if unmanageable, kept afloat, and was stout enough to be in no great danger from collision with other flotsam borne along by the current. They were in water half-way to their knees, but even if the boat filled, its wooden bulk promised sufficient buoyancy to support them.

“Sooner or later we’ll have to drift ashore—somewhere,” Poke remarked philosophically. “Kind of like the stone you chuck in the air—‘What goes up must come down,’ you know. And this isn’t the ocean—we’ll make land after a while.”

“Huh! Don’t make out any now!” croaked Step.

Poke made deliberate survey. The light was still dim; low lying, gray clouds seemed to merge in thin mists, through which only vaguely could the shore be discerned. The rain had decreased somewhat, but it was like a veil in hiding distant objects. There were, to be sure, other objects near at hand, which under happier conditions the voyagers must have found interesting. Keeping pace with the boat, and not fifty feet away, drifted an overturned wagon. Trailing this came a pagoda-like summer-house, at the head of a fleet of chicken coops, boxes and barrels. Farther still from the boat floated the roof of a barn. All about them the boys saw planks, logs, a section of wooden fence, limbs torn from trees, doors, odds and ends of furniture; anything, in fact, which the flood could bear along. A squirrel, perched on a log, chattered at them; a cat, crouched on a big packing-case, mewed piteously. Beyond the case they could see the body of a cow, still held by a halter to the shed in which she had been drowned, and which now was sweeping down the stream.

Except for the current there was more suggestion of lake than river; though the trees protruding above the water added a weird touch to the picture, which differed markedly from that of any lake either boy ever had seen. Even the philosophy of Poke was not proof against the effects of such evidences of destruction. He huddled himself lower, and his voice shook.

“I—I—say, this is pretty fierce, Step! Things must have been awful for the folks up above.”

“They’re awful enough for the folks here!” groaned Step.

Then there was a long pause. The light strengthened, but slowly, very slowly. Neither of the boys took pains to maintain a vigilant lookout; and so it happened that they were sighted from the old house before they were aware of the attic still protruding above the flood.

Roused to action by the shouts of Sam and his comrades, they caught up their extemporized paddles and fell to work as for dear life. Had the boat not been drifting almost directly toward the house, however, it is much to be doubted if they could have brought it alongside. As things were, they accomplished the feat, the side of the punt crunching against the roof just where Sam and his friends were gathered.

Then a curious complication arose. It was eloquent testimony to the slight confidence or liking either party had for its quarter; for as the boys in the house tried to scramble into the boat, Poke and Step leaped wildly for the break in the roof. In consequence, Poke and the Shark collided, and pitched together to the floor of the attic, while Step and Orkney, clinging to each other, reeled against Lon with such force as to drive him back from the opening.

Sam and Varley chanced to be a little to one side. This kept them free of the unintentional mêlée, but, at the same time, put them farther from the boat, which, helped, no doubt, by the impetus of Poke and Step’s leaps, edged away from the house.

It would be hard to say which was the quicker to grasp the danger of losing the boat. Both sprang forward; both tried to grasp the gunwale—and both failed by inches.

Then Varley did a thing which may have been rash, but the daring of which was not to be denied. Like a flash he whipped off his greatcoat; vaulted the wreck of wall; plunged into the flood; caught the side of the boat. Sam, no laggard in such an emergency, leaned out and seized Varley by the leg. In an instant his call for Lon brought help. The big punt was heavy; the current was beginning to lay hold upon it again. For a little it seemed to be impossible that Varley should be able to retain his grasp on the rail or that Lon and Sam should be able to haul in their human cable; then, inch by inch, they began to gain. The boat was dragged within reach. Orkney and the Shark, by this time clear of Step and Poke, held it fast, while Sam hauled Varley out of the water.

“Get aboard—quick—everybody!” Sam cried, and helped Varley to obey the order. Then he turned and caught Step’s shoulder.

“Pile in! Hustle Poke, too! It’s our only chance!”

Step resisted. “Wait a minute, Sam! There are no oars. You can’t do anything. You can’t——”

Sam half pitched the objector into the punt. Poke, taking the hint, followed, unassisted.

Lon ripped up a narrow floor-board.

“Here’s oars in the makin’,” he shouted. “All aboard—everybody that’s goin’!”

There was no need of further exhortation. In thirty seconds more the Safety First Club was afloat, and the boat was again beginning to drift away from the old house.