r seemed to pick itself up and start down the stream.
With the increasing motion the ice-wall broke in a hundred places, and
from up and down the shore came the rending and crashing of uprooted
trees.

Corliss and Bishop laid hold of Bill and started off to McPherson's,
and Jacob Welse and the baron were just sliding his mate over the
eaves, when a huge block of ice rammed in and smote the cabin squarely.
Frona saw it, and cried a warning, but the tiered logs were overthrown
like a house of cards. She saw Courbertin and the sick man hurled
clear of the wreckage, and her father go down with it. She sprang to
the spot, but he did not rise. She pulled at him to get his mouth
above water, but at full stretch his head, barely showed. Then she let
go and felt about with her hands till she found his right arm jammed
between the logs. These she could not move, but she thrust between
them one of the roof-poles which had underlaid the dirt and moss. It
was a rude handspike and hardly equal to the work, for when she threw
her weight upon the free end it bent and crackled. Heedful of the
warning, she came in a couple of feet and swung upon it tentatively and
carefully till something gave and Jacob Welse shoved his muddy face
into the air.

He drew half a dozen great breaths, and burst out, "But that tastes
good!" And then, throwing a quick glance about him, Frona, Del Bishop
is a most veracious man."

"Why?" she asked, perplexedly.

"Because he said you'd do, you know."

He kissed her, and they both spat the mud from their lips, laughing.
Courbertin floundered round a corner of the wreckage.

"Never was there such a man!" he cried, gleefully. "He is mad, crazy!
There is no appeasement. His skull is cracked by the fall, and his
tobacco is gone. It is chiefly the tobacco which is lamentable."

But his skull was not cracked, for it was merely a slit of the scalp of
five inches or so.

"You'll have to wait till the others come back. I can't carry." Jacob
Welse pointed to his right arm, which hung dead. "Only wrenched," he
explained. "No bones broken."

The baron struck an extravagant attitude and pointed down at Frona's
foot. "Ah! the water, it is gone, and there, a jewel of the flood, a
pearl of price!"

Her well-worn moccasins had gone rotten from the soaking, and a little
white toe peeped out at the world of slime.

"Then I am indeed wealthy, baron; for I have nine others."

"And who shall deny? who