sir, and had to see you. There's only four
feet lee-way in our culvert, sir, and the scour's eating into the
underpinning; I am just up from there. We are trying bags of cement, but
it doesn't do much good."

MacFarlane caught up his hat and the two hurried down stream to the
"fill," while Jack, buttoning his oilskin jacket over his chest, and
crowding his slouch hat close to his eyebrows and ears strode out into
the downpour, his steps bent in the opposite direction.

The sight that met his eyes was even more alarming. The once quiet
little stream, with its stretch of meadowland reaching to the foot of
the steep hills, was now a swirl of angry reddish water careering toward
the big culvert under the "fill." There it struck the two flanking walls
of solid masonry, doubled in volume and thus baffled, shot straight into
and under the culvert and so on over the broad fields below.

Up the stream toward the boulevard on the other side of its sky line,
groups of men were already engaged carrying shovels, or lugging pieces
of timber as they hurried along its edge, only to disappear for an
instant and reappear again empty-handed. Shouts could be heard, as if
some one were giving orders. Against the storm-swept sky, McGowan's
short, squat figure was visible, his hands waving wildly to other gangs
of men who were running at full speed toward where he stood.

Soon a knife-edge of water glistened along the crest of the earth
embankment supporting the roadway of the boulevard, scattered into a
dozen sluiceways, gashing the sides of the slopes, and then, before
Jack could realize his own danger, the whole mass collapsed only to be
swallowed up in a mighty torrent which leaped straight at him.

Jack wheeled suddenly, shouted to a man behind him to run for his life,
and raced on down stream toward the "fill" a mile below where MacFarlane
and his men, unconscious of their danger, were strengthening the culvert
and its approaches.

On swept the flood, tearing up trees, cabins, shanties, fences; swirling
along the tortuous bed only to leap and swirl again, its solid front
bristling with the debris it had wrenched loose in its mad onslaught,
Jack in his line of flight keeping abreast of its mighty thrust,
shouting as he ran, pressing into service every man who could help in
the rescue.

But MacFarlane had already been forewarned. The engineer of the morning
express, who had crossed close to the boulevard at the moment the break
o