his elbow, and made a light with his flint and tinder,
and looked at me.

"Got a goose-egg on yer for'ard," said he, and then I saw there was
blood on his face.

"Ef it hed n't been fer the withes they 'd 'a' ground us t' powder."

We were lying alongside the little house, and the logs were leaning
to it above us.

"Jerushy Jane Pepper!" D'ri exclaimed, rising to his knees. "'S
whut I call a twister."

He began to whittle a piece of the splintered platform. Then he
lit a shaving.

"They 's ground here," said he, as he began to kindle a fire,
"ground a-plenty right under us."

The firelight gave us a good look at our cave under the logs. It
was about ten feet long and probably half as high. The logs had
crashed through the side of the house in one or two places, and its
roof was a wreck.

"Hungry?" said D'ri, as he broke a piece of board on his knee.

"Yes," I answered.

"So 'm I," said he, "hungrier 'n a she-wolf. They 's some bread
'n' ven'son there 'n the house; we better try t' git 'em."

An opening under the logs let me around the house corner to its
door. I was able to work my way through the latter, although it
was choked with heavy timbers. Inside I could hear the wash of the
river, and through its shattered window on the farther wall I could
see between the heaped logs a glow of sunlit water. I handed our
axe through a break in the wall, and then D'ri cut away some of the
baseboards and joined me. We had our meal cooking in a few
minutes--our dinner, really, for D'ri said it was near noon.
Having eaten, we crawled out of the window, and then D'ri began to
pry the logs apart.

"Ain't much 'fraid o' their tumblin' on us," said he. "They 're
withed so they 'll stick together."

We got to another cave under the logs, at the water's edge, after
an hour of crawling and prying. A side of the raft was in the
water.

"Got t' dive," said D'ri, "an' swim fer daylight."

A long swim it was, but we came up in clear water, badly out of
breath. We swam around the timber, scrambling over a dead cow, and
up-shore. The ruined raft was torn and tumbled into a very
mountain of logs at the edge of the water. The sun was shining
clear, and the air was still. Limbs of trees, bits of torn cloth,
a broken hay-rake, fragments of wool, a wagon-wheel, and two dead
sheep were scattered along the shore. Where we had seen the
whirlwind coming, the sky was clear, and beneath it was a great gap
in the wood