e, and that the roof was loose
clapboards, 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 afterward 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 all ran to watch it
as soon as school was out, and stayed till they had to go to supper.
Af