Agueda, left alone upon her side of the roof, crouched, looking ever toward the south, searching for a cask, a boat, a tree, a plank, a piece of household furniture, anything by which she might hold and save her life and Beltran's. Not Felisa's; that she could not do, even though Beltran loved her.
Until now Agueda had thought that she longed for death; but the instinct of self-preservation is strong, and she could hardly comprehend her newly awakened desire to seize upon some sort of floating thing which might mean safety for herself. She stood gazing over the broad expanse of water. It had become a sea. The face of nature was changed. The position of the river bank was discernible only from the waving line of branches which testified where their trunks stood. There were one or two oases whose tops showed still above the surface of the stretching, reaching flood. Agueda thought that she could discern some one in a treetop near the hill rancho. She wondered if it could be Uncle Adan. She thought that she heard a shout. She tried to answer, but the weak sound of her voice was forced back into her throat. It would not carry against the force of the wind. No other land nearer than the heights of Palmacristi was to be seen. The horses and cattle must have perished. It had indeed become, as Uncle Adan had warned her, a greater flood than the country had ever known. To add to the unspeakable gloom of the scene, the clouds parted wider and allowed the moon to sparkle more fully upon the boiling water below and the trees and branches as they rolled and hastened onward.
As Agueda stood and gazed up the stream, suddenly, from out the perspective of the moon-flecked tide, a little craft came sailing down--a tiny thing that seemed to have been set upon the waste of waters by some pitying hand. She watched it with eager eyes, as it floated onward. Her body swayed unconsciously with each change in its course or pointing of its bow to right, to left, as if she feared that it would escape her anxious hand. Fate drifted it exactly across the thatch at the south end of the roof. On it came, and was driven to her very feet. Here was succour! Here was help! She could save herself, unwatched, unknown, of those others behind the shelter there, and float away to the chance of rescue. Agueda stepped ankle-deep in the water, and stooping, held in frenzied clutch this gift of the gods.