HE roar and rumble of distant thunder had been heard in the hills all morning, and along about noon a big black cloud came creeping up over the crest of the continent, listed a little when a peak of one of the hills caught the lower corner, ripped it open, and let the water out. It didn't rain; the water simply fell out of the cloud, and went rushing down the side of the mountain as it rushes off the roof of a house in a hard April shower.
The little fissures were filled first, then the gorges, gullies, and rough ravine; and when these emptied into the countless rills that ran away toward the foot of the range, every rill became a rushing river. Leaves and brush and fallen trees were borne away on the breast of the flood, that grew in volume and increased in speed alarmingly. When all this water came rushing down into the main cañon the song of the stream that rippled there was hushed, the bed of the creek was filled with big boulders that had been rolled down by the flood, and a great river went roaring down toward the plain. Up through this narrow, crooked cañon a narrow-gauge railroad ran to Silver Cliff. Silver Cliff, at one time, had thirty thousand people, then thirty hundred; and now not more than thirty people live there, unless their business compels them to do so. It produced some silver, a sensational murder, one Congressman, and petered out.
When the flood had gone a mile in the main cañon, and picked up eight or ten railroad bridges and all the dead timber in the gulch, it presented a rolling front twenty-five feet high and reached from hill to hill.
Great spruce trees were uprooted; the track, with the cross-ties still hanging to the rails, was ripped up, and the rails, bending like baling wire, wound about the rolling debris and clogged the cañon. Then the welling flood would fill the whole gorge, and roil on with such a mass of bridge timber and fallen trees pushed in front of it that you could see no sign of water as it bore down upon you, but only a tangled mass of rails and ties and twisted trees. A couple of prospectors heard the roar of it, and climbed the cañon wall just in time to save themselves, while the little burros, with their packs on their backs, went down to a watery grave. Next came a long string of freight teams bringing lumber down from a little mountain sawmill. The rattle and noise of the heavy wagons made it impossible for the freighters to hear the roar of the flood, and, as they were coming down the cañon, they had their backs to it; so they were overtaken in a narrow place. Some of them, leaping from their wagons, scrambled up the steep hill out of the way of the water, while others took to the tall trees. But when the flood came, the stoutest trees in the gulch went down like sunflowers in a cyclone's path, and the luckless freighters mingled with the horses and wagons and were washed away.
Fortunately for us, we were an hour late in leaving the Junction that day, and had not yet reached the narrow part of the cañon. The engineer had been watching the black cloud as it came up over the range, and knew we were due to run into a washout at any moment. The very winds that came down the cañon fresh and cool, seemed to have water in them. The three day coaches were filled with a heterogeneous herd pushing to the Cliff, which, like many other camps, was then posing as "a second Leadville." There were preachers and play-actors, miners and merchants, cowboys and confidence men; and here and there, gaunt-faced girls with peach-blow complexions and wonderful, impossible hair, billed for the variety.