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Page 45
There was a sound of weary, resigned ejaculations and pantings, and
three gaunt women in lustreless alpaca gowns appeared before the
cabin. They seemed prematurely aged and worn with labor, anxiety,
and ill nourishment. Doubtless somewhere in these ruins a flower
like Jay Jules had once flourished; doubtless somewhere in that
graceful nymph herself the germ of this dreary maturity was hidden.
Hemmingway welcomed them with a seriousness equal to their own.
The supper was partaken with the kind of joyless formality which in
the southwest is supposed to indicate deep respect, even the
cheerful Jay falling under the influence, and it was with a feeling
of relief that at last the young man retired to his fenced-off
corner for solitude and repose. He gathered, however, that before
"sun up" the next morning the elder women were going to Rattlesnake
Bar for the weekly shopping, leaving Jay as before to prepare his
breakfast and then join them later. It was already a change in his
sentiments to find himself looking forward to that tete-a-tete with
the young girl, as a chance of redeeming his character in her eyes.
He was beginning to feel he had been stupid, unready, and withal
prejudiced. He undressed himself in his seclusion, broken only by
the monotonous voices in the adjoining apartment. From time to
time he heard fragments and scraps of their conversation, always in
reference to affairs of the household and settlement, but never of
himself,--not even the suggestion of a prudent lowering of their
voices,--and fell asleep. He woke up twice in the night with a
sensation of cold so marked and distinct from his experience of the
early evening, that he was fain to pile his clothes over his
blankets to keep warm. He fell asleep again, coming once more to
consciousness with a sense of a slight jar, but relapsing again
into slumber for he knew not how long. Then he was fully awakened
by a voice calling him, and, opening his eyes, beheld the blanket
partition put aside, and the face of Jay thrust forward. 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 stopped at the sound of his voice as at a blow. Her face
hardened into immobility, yet when she replied it was with the
deliberate indolence of her father. "The wimmen are up on the
hills by this time. The boys hev bin drowned out many times afore
this and got clear off, on sluice boxes and timber, without
squealing. Tom Flynn went down ten miles to Sayer's once on two
bar'ls, and I never heard that HE was cryin' when they picked him
up."
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