ded the rest of the way, and the roof was
shingled.

Jim Leonard said it was all logs once, and that the roof was loose
clap-boards, held down by logs that ran across them, like the roofs in the
early times, before there were shingles or nails, or anything, in the
country. But none of the oldest boys had ever seen it like that, and you
had to take Jim Leonard's word for it if you wanted to believe it. The
little fellows nearly all did; but everybody said afterwards it was a good
thing for Jim Leonard that it was not that kind of roof when he had his
hair-breadth escape on it. He said himself that he would not have cared if
it had been; but that was when it was all over, and his mother had whipped
him, and everything, and he was telling the boys about it.

He said that in his Pirate Book lots of fellows on rafts got to land when
they were shipwrecked, and that the old-fashioned roof would have been
just like a raft, anyway, and he could have steered it right across the
river to Delorac's Island as easy! Pony Baker thought very likely he
could, but Hen Billard said:

"Well, why didn't you do it, with the kind of a roof you had?"

Some of the boys mocked Jim Leonard; but a good many of them thought he
could have done it if he could have got into the eddy that there was over
by the island. If he could have landed there, once, he could have camped
out and lived on fish till the river fell.

It was that spring, about fifty-four years ago, when the freshet, which
always came in the spring, was the worst that anybody could remember. The
country above the Boy's Town was under water, for miles and miles. The
river bottoms were flooded so that the corn had to be all planted over
again when the water went down. The freshet tore away pieces of orchard,
and apple-trees in bloom came sailing along with logs and fence rails and
chicken-coops, and pretty soon dead cows and horses. There was a dog
chained to a dog-kennel that went by, howling awfully; the boys would have
given anything if they could have saved him, but the yellow river whirled
him out of sight behind the middle pier of the bridge, which everybody was
watching from the bank, expecting it to go any minute. The water was up
within four or five feet of the bridge, and the boys believed that if a
good big log had come along and hit it, the bridge would have been knocked
loose from its piers and carried down the river.

Perhaps it would, and perhaps it would not. The boys