orward. To
his surprise it wore a look of excited astonishment dominated by
irrepressible laughter.

"Get up quick as you kin," she said gaspingly; "this is about the
killingest thing that ever happened!"

She disappeared, but he could still hear her laughing, and to his utter
astonishment with her disappearance the floor seemed to change its
level. A giddy feeling seized him; he put his feet to the floor; it
was unmistakably wet and oozing. He hurriedly clothed himself, still
accompanied by the strange feeling of oscillation and giddiness, and
passed though the opening into the next room. Again his step produced
the same effect upon the floor, and he actually stumbled against her
shaking figure, as she wiped the tears of uncontrollable mirth from her
eyes with her apron. The contact seemed to upset her remaining gravity.
She dropped into a chair, and, pointing to the open door, gasped, "Look
thar! Lordy! How's that for high?" threw her apron over her head, and
gave way to an uproarious fit of laughter.

Hemmingway turned to the open door. A lake was before him on the level
of the cabin. He stepped forward on the platform; the water was right
and left, all around him. The platform dipped slightly to his step. The
cabin was afloat,--afloat upon its base of logs like a raft, the whole
structure upheld by the floor on which the logs were securely fastened.
The high ground had disappeared--the river--its banks the green area
beyond. They, and THEY alone, were afloat upon an inland sea.

He turned an astounded and serious face upon her mirth. "When did it
happen?" he demanded. She checked her laugh, more from a sense of polite
deference to his mood than any fear, and said quietly, "That gets me.
Everything was all right two hours ago when the wimmen left. It was
too early to get your breakfast and rouse ye out, and I felt asleep, I
reckon, until I felt a kind o' slump and a jar." Hemmingway remembered
his own half-conscious sensation. "Then I got up and saw we was adrift.
I didn't waken ye, for I thought it was only a sort of wave that would
pass. It wasn't until I saw we were movin' and the hull rising ground
gettin' away, that I thought o' callin' ye."

He thought of the vanished general store, of her father, the workers on
the bank, the helpless women on their way to the Bar, and turned almost
savagely on her.

"But the others,--where are they?" he said indignantly. "Do you call
that a laughing matter?"

She stop