that the tone was a mocking one.

Consumed with anxiety, he hurried on to see how Silas' swamp stood.
Aghast, he found the level of the water a full inch higher than any
point that it had ever before reached. Connecting this condition
vaguely with that other phenomenon that he had noted, he whirled his
runabout and ran back into Burnit Avenue. In twenty-four hours a
remarkable change had been wrought. There were pools everywhere. The
lot where he had first noticed it was now entirely covered with water,
with barely the tips of the grass showing through. Frightened, he
drove over the entire Addition, up one street and down another. In
many places the lots were flooded. One entire block had become no more
nor less than a pond. At other points the water, carrying with it the
yellow soil, was flowing over his beautiful clean sidewalks and
spreading its stain upon his immaculate streets. The darkness alone
drove him from that inspection, and then it occurred to him to send
once more for Jimmy Platt. At the first suburban telephone station he
tried for nearly an hour to locate his man, but in vain. Later he
tried it from his club, but could not reach him. That night was a
sleepless one, and the next morning's daybreak found him speeding out
the roadway to the Applerod Addition.

Early as he was, however, he found young Platt there ahead of him and
in despair. He had good cause. The whole north end of the Applerod
Addition had turned black, and over the top of Bobby's now grimy
cement wall poured a broad, dark sheet of the murky swamp-water which
had stained it. The pond of Silas Trimmer had overflowed in spite of
all Platt's confident figuring that it could not, and in spite of the
fact that dry weather had prevailed for two solid weeks. That was the
inexplicable part. Clear weather, and still the entire suburb was
becoming practically submerged! With solid, dry soil surrounding it,
wherever the eye could reach it had become but a morass of mud! Mud
was smeared upon every path and every roadway, and Bobby's automobile
slipped and slid in the oily, yellow liquid that lay sluggishly in
every gutter and blotched every rod of his clean asphalt.

Young Platt's face blanched as he saw Bobby.

"I've made a miserable botch of it," he confessed, torn with an agony
of regret at his failure; "and I can't see yet what I overlooked. I'd
no right to tackle a man's job like this!"

"You!" replied Bobby vehemently. "It was Trimmer who