-while the raft, on the other hand, could
and did, and would carry her treasure safely enough for a while.
Wading waist deep through the drowned fields behind the house, she
gained the uplands, and rushed dripping along the ridge to the next
farm, where, as she knew, a boat was kept. This farmhouse, perched on
a bluff, was safe from all floods; and the farmer was at home,
congratulating himself. Before he quite knew what was happening, he
found himself being dragged to the boat--for his neighbor was a
strenuous woman, whom few in the settlement presumed to argue with, and
it was plain to him now that she was laboring under an unwonted
excitement. It was not until he was in the boat, with the oars in his
hands, that he gathered clearly what had happened. Then, however, he
bent to the oars with a will which convinced even that frantic and
vehement mother that nothing better could be demanded of him. Dodging
logs and wrecks and uprooted trees, the boat went surging down the
flood, while the woman sat stiffly erect in the stern, her face white
as death, her eyes staring far ahead, while from time to time she
muttered angry phrases which sounded as if the baby had gone off on a
pleasure trip without leave and was going to be called to sharp account
for it.

"The other mother had the deeper and more immediate cause for anguish.
Coming to the bank where she had left her cub in the tree, she found
the bank caved in and the tree and cub together vanished. Unlike the
baby's mother, she _could_ swim; but she knew that she could run faster
and farther. In stoic silence, but with a look of piteous anxiety in
her eyes, she started on a gallop down the half-drowned shores,
clambering the heaps of debris, and swimming the deep, still estuaries
where the flood had backed up into the valleys of the tributary brooks.

"At last, with laboring lungs and pounding heart, she came out upon a
low, bare bluff overlooking the flood, and saw, not a hundred yards
out, the raft with its two little passengers asleep. She saw her cub
lying curled up with his head in the baby's arms, his black fur mixed
with the baby's yellow locks. Her first thought was that he was
dead--that the baby had killed him and was carrying him off. With a
roar of pain and vengeful fury, she rushed down the bluff and hurled
herself into the water.

"Not till then did she notice that a boat was approaching the raft--a
boat with two human beings in it. It was very