d of Dunning
cattle were swept away before they could be removed to points of
safety. Fresh alarms came with every hour of the day and night, and
the telephones up and down the valley rang incessantly with appeals
from neighbor to neighbor. Lance Dunning, calling out the reserves of
his vocabulary, swore tremendously and directed the operations against
the river. These seemed, indeed, to consist mainly of hard riding and
hard language on the part of everybody. Murray Sinclair, although he
had sold his ranch on the Crawling Stone and was concentrating his
holdings on the Frenchman, was everywhere in evidence. He was the
first at a point of danger and the last to ride away from the slipping
acres where the muddy flood undercut; but no defiance seemed to
disturb the Crawling Stone, which kept alarmingly at work.

Above the alfalfa lands on the long bench north of the house the
river, in changing its course many years earlier, had left a
depression known as Mud Lake. It had become separated from the main
channel of the Crawling Stone by a high, narrow barrier in the form of
a bench deposited by the receding waters of some earlier flood, and
added to by sand-storms sweeping among the willows that overspread it.
Without an effective head or definite system of work the efforts of
the men at the Stone Ranch were of no more consequence than if they
had spent their time in waving blankets at the river. Twenty men
riding in together to tell Lance Dunning that the river was washing
out the tree claims above Mud Lake made no perceptible difference in
the event. Dicksie, though an inexperienced girl, saw with helpless
clearness the futility of it all. The alarms and the continual
failures of the army of able-bodied men directed by Sinclair and her
cousin wore on her spirit. The river rose until each succeeding inch
became a menace to the life and property of the ranch, and in the
midst of it came the word that the river was cutting into the willows
and heading for Mud Lake. All knew what that meant. If the Crawling
Stone should take its old channel, not alone were the two square miles
of alfalfa doomed: it would sweep away every vestige of the long
stacks below the corrals, take the barns, and lap the slope in front
of the ranch-house itself.

Terror seized Dicksie. She telephoned in her distress for Marion,
begging her to come up before they should all be swept away; and
Marion, turning the shop over to Katie Dancing, got into the