"A cloud-burst, by all that's holy!" screamed Brooks, as he sprang down the grassy side of the bluff. "Up with you, up the hill-side, for your lives!" The dancers, faltering through the sudden flutter of the band, for the first time looked upward, and saw the peril. Then, men and women, bandsmen and "strikers," the camp made a wild rush up the eastward hill-side. Another blinding flash, another thunderous roar that seemed to shake and loosen the rocks about them, and in that second of brilliant, dazzling glare the watchers could see the white wall of the Blanca come spray-tossing, seething, whirling huge logs and trees on its outermost wave, tumbling them end over end, now deep-engulfed, now high in air,--one immense, furious moving mountain of raging water, sweeping towards them from the depths of the chasm. Then, rolling and frothing over its puny banks in the valley below, a chocolate flood, foam-crested, spread right and left through the deserted camp, licking up the cookfires, sweeping camp-chairs and tables off their legs, bodily lifting wagons and ambulances and sending them waltzing to the wild music of the storm over the flats where twinkled dainty-slippered feet the moment before, then bore them away towards the inner mouth of the gorge just in time to mix them up with such frantically struggling mules as through native obstinacy had resisted the impulse to scamper to higher ground while yet there was time. Worst sight of all, right there in the midst of the logs, chairs, wagon-beds, that came swirling beneath them, was a despairing woman's struggling form, revealed by a woman's white dress.
"Merciful God!" shrieked Mrs. Faulkner; "it's Laura Winn. She went up towards the falls not ten minutes ago."
Vain fool! What could have been her object? Barclay, never dancing, had been looking smilingly on. Both the Frazier girls had been led, not too willing, away by partners. Four sets had been formed, and Mrs. Winn, pleading fatigue, had asked to be excused, had sauntered past Barclay's seat, and, before his eyes, had turned up the narrow, winding, sheltered pathway by the Blanca. Had she dreamed it possible that he would follow? Follow her he did not. Was it--a far more charitable thought--in search of Harry she had gone? Sombre and absent-minded, he had earlier slipped away among the trees, avoiding even Brayton. But now Barclay was seen on the near side of the torrent, limping up and along the steep slope, in imminent danger of slipping in, swinging in his hand a long lariat that he had drawn from the nearest wagon when the wild up-hill fight began. They remembered later that he was the last man out of the hollow. Already Brooks, Brayton, De Lancy, and half a dozen men were hurrying along the hill-side to aid, but Brayton reached him first and seized his arm just as another cry went up from the hill-top,--just as from the opposite side of the seething torrent the tall figure of Harry Winn came bounding through the stunted trees, and, hatless, wild-eyed, he seemed searching the tossing mass of wreckage on the bosom of the waters. Another instant still a white hand was waved aloft in their midst; then a white arm encircling a log, a terror-stricken white face, all showed dimly one moment before again borne underneath, hidden by the yellow body of a whirling ambulance, and in that one instant, far leaping, Winn plunged into the torrent and struck out savagely to reach his wife.