HEN Sibley and Jimmy awakened from the exhausted sleep which followed their toil, they found that the line by which they had moored their launch to a tree, tied nearly as high as they could reach from the bow of the boat, was now only two feet above the surface. During the night the water behind the levee, damned partly by the railway embankment back on the bottoms, and checked partly by the woods at the edge of Reelfoot Lake, had risen five or six feet.
The two ends of the broken levee had been lumping off, too, and the gap between them was hundreds of feet wide, and still cutting away rapidly. The current through was no longer the cascade of the night before, when they had run down into the bottoms to begin the rescue work among those immediately in front of the break; instead it was a wide, smooth sheet, with long, low undulations, broken where a tree stood against the current, and swirling, back on the bottom, where bores, or sucks, were already digging through the soft silt and cutting out deep pits, which would be "blue holes" when the water settled and the flood had gone by.
Day was breaking. The sky was clouded, but there was a sparkle of sunshine for a few minutes, and the bright, gay beams flickered on the glassy surface of the flood. One could hardly realize that the pretty running water, the singing birds in the trees, the coming green of spring, were so close to the scene of desolation which meant suffering and destitution for tens of thousands of people and destruction for none could tell how many tens of thousands of animals.
As we have seen, other boats had come down and were ready to take care of the people in jeopardy out on the Reelfoot Bottoms. The fact that they had gone through in the black night, and had risked tearing the bottom out of their launch, with the certainty of utmost peril to themselves, had given the two youths a certain distinction, and Mr. Kalas, the engineer who had been trying to build up the Reelfoot levee when the overtopping came for lack of help, asked them ashore to eat breakfast with him out of a little iron kettle simmering over a driftwood fire on the levee-top.
There was a reason for his asking them there. He needed them.
"Can you get up into the main river?" Kalas asked.
"It’s a swift current out there," Sib replied, "but if you’ll tie a handy line to a tree and float the other end down Jimmy and I can tie to it and put on our power, and pull ourselves up!"
"You’re off the river, all right!" Kalas laughed. "There’s a light line on the commission steamer coming in now, and we’ll float the rope down, tied to a keg."
Immediately Sib and Jimmy ran around into the middle of the gap in the levee. The current was too swift for them to stem it and work up through, though they could get nearly up to the line of the levee that had washed out. From a skiff, manned by three men, a keg was floated down to them with a half-inch rope tied to it. They caught the keg, and the skiffmen made the other end fast to a little gum-tree. Then Sibley and Jimmy hauled in the line, hand over hand, and, with the power of the motor behind them made the slope of the running torrent. Once over the low crest, the motor picked up and they could hardly pull in the line fast enough. They slowed the push of the motor, and as they reached the tree, the line was taken into the skiff, and the launch swung out around and down to the levee, where Kalas was waiting for them.
Kalas was one of the old, famous river engineers, who for years had studied the Mississippi, fought it, planned campaigns against it, and through it all had kept his love for the magnificence of that great flood, the might of which makes the efforts of men seem so puny and ineffectual at times, but which at other times responds to the restraints of revetments and levees.
Sibley had read his reports in the Mississippi River Commission documents. They had shown, those simple words of the man who knew the river, what must be done, what should be done, what ought not to be done. If he read the reports of some men twice, he read those of Kalas a dozen times.
Now Kalas, the great river scientist, had asked Sibley Carruth to help him and take him down the flood, because Sibley was a regular river boy, and knew the handling of a first-class motor-boat. Kalas did more than that. As they cut loose from the levee to go down the stream, he turned his bright eyes under their shaggy gray brows, upon Sibley, who stood at the wheel.