The river was in flood just then, and its banks were overflowed for miles on each side. There was water everywhere, and the ground was soft so that it was hardly possible to get down to the real river, where the water was deep and the current strong. If the children had been thrown into that, they would have drowned at once. But the slave did not take time to go all the way around the plain to the bank itself. He put the basket down in the first deep pool he found and left it to be carried down to the river, for the flood was beginning to ebb. Instead of that the basket lodged on a knoll and stayed there, not very far from the banks.
[Illustration: The little creatures inside the basket were not cubs or lambs]
In flood time, as Ursula had often heard her father the hunter say, animals are sometimes so frightened that the fierce and the timid take refuge together on some island or rocky ridge, without harming each other at all. This flood had come up suddenly and drowned some of them in their dens. A wolf that had lost her cubs in that way was picking her steps across the drenched plain, when she heard a noise—two noises—from a willow basket under a wild fig tree. She went quietly over there and looked in. The little creatures inside the basket were not cubs or lambs, but they were hungry; any one would know that from the way they squalled. Wolf talk and man talk are quite different, but baby talk and cub talk are understood by all mothers. The wolf tipped the basket over with her paw, and the little things tumbled out in the cold and wet and cried louder than ever. Perhaps they thought she was a big dog. At any rate they crawled toward her, and plunged their strong little chubby hands into her fur, and crowed. When she lay down they snuggled close to her warm furry side, and she licked them all over.
A shepherd named Faustulus came that way when the flood had gone down, looking after a lost sheep. He found wolf tracks, and grasping his spear firmly, traced them to this knoll. He found the gray wolf curled up there with the two babies, asleep and warm and rosy, in the circle of her big, strong body.
The shepherd did not know just what to do. He thought that if he tried to take the children away from her she would fight, and they might be hurt, and he probably would be hurt himself. He decided to go and get help. Later in the day he came back with some of his friends, and set a rude box-trap for the wolf, baited with fresh meat from a drowned calf. When they had trapped her they took her home and the children also, in their basket. They kept the wolf for some time, and she seemed quite tame; but at last she ran away and never came back. They fed the babies on warm milk, and the shepherd and his wife both fell in love with them from the very first. They heard a rumor after awhile, whispered about secretly as such things are, that the chief Amulius had had his two little nephews drowned. The shepherd guessed then who the foundlings might be, but he kept quiet about it. The city was not too far away, and some one might be sent even yet to kill the twins. In the language of the country the word for river was Rumon, and the word for an oar was Rhem. He named the boys Romulus and Remus, and those were all the names they had. They grew up to be fine active fellows, afraid of nothing and good at all manly sports. As they grew up, they gathered other young men outside the villages into a sort of clan, to protect the countryside against robbers, and to fight and hunt and earn a living in one way and another. They had a rocky stronghold on the mountain, where they lived, and whenever strangers came that way, some one was sent to see who and what they were. That was how the two brothers came to the camp of the colonists.