Chapter EIGHT

That star of stage, screen and _brissim_ shouted fuzzily at the door: "Go to hell! Let me sleep!"

"Dave!" It was Mr. Semmel's voice. "There's some men here. They want to talk to you."

Dave Wax made an obscene suggestion to Mr. Semmel. He was a tummeler, not the manager of the hotel; let Mrs. Goudeket come back and talk if somebody should do it--"Wait a minute. What'd you say, Semmel?"

The concessionaire repeated it. "The flood's over?" demanded Dave Wax. "The roads are dry?" He staggered over to the window to see the miracle for himself.

Semmel let himself in. "They came in a boat."

"Oh." But it was no surprise. It was still raining. "All right. I'll come down."

He found himself hurrying in spite of himself. It was only a couple of minutes before he was hurrying through the lobby. He saw with a shock that the sofas and chairs in the lobby were occupied--guests too panicky to sleep in their rooms, too exhausted to stay awake; they were sprawled and snoring.

The men from the boat were in the kitchen drinking coffee that the cooks had somehow contrived to make. "I'm Brayer--Hebertown police chief. You people all right here?"

"All right?" You call a hundred and sixty scared, sore guests all right? You call wondering if the whole damn place is going to float away all right? "I guess so," Dave Wax said slowly. He was almost afraid to ask: "How--how is it outside?"

The man rubbed at his mustache. "It's a flood," he said succinctly. "Ask me in the morning. Anyway, we're beginning to get a little organized." His voice took on a mechanical, rehearsed quality. "Don't let anybody drink water unless it's been boiled for ten minutes. Use up everything you can that's in the refrigerators tomorrow morning. What's in the freezers ought to be good till tomorrow night, if you don't open them too often. What you don't eat by then, _don't eat_. Throw it away. You probably don't have any water pressure, do you? Your own electric pump, I guess? All right; you'll have to set up latrines--use chamber pots if you have to. Dump them in the river to empty them--you're far enough away from everything here."

"Wait a minute." Dave was a little slow to grasp the implications of it. "You mean even by tomorrow night we won't have the power back?"

"I'll consider us very lucky," the police chief said heavily, "if Hebertown ever has power again."

He got up. "They say that by daybreak the weather will be clear enough for helicopters. If you need anything--a doctor if there's an emergency, anything like that--hang a white sheet out of a window and keep somebody standing by. When a helicopter or boat patrol comes by they'll see it and investigate; then you wave another sheet at them and they'll see that somebody gets here."

Dave Wax and Mr. Semmel watched Brayer and his boatman chug away. "Hebertown Chief of Police," said Wax. "Isn't he a little out of his jurisdiction?"

"He said they were looking for somebody. Wanted to know if we'd picked up any refugees. God forbid." Mr. Semmel shook his head firmly. "A mess. Now, in New Hampshire there would _never_--"

* * * * *

It was cracking daylight when Brayer got back to Hebertown. He sat down in the police station, now an emergency shelter with men, women and children sprawled all over everywhere, and dazedly pushed away the coffee somebody offered him. He hoped he would never see another cup of coffee again.

He said heavily, "Henry'll turn up. I have a lot of confidence in Artie Chesbro's instinct for self-preservation; he'll find a place to hole up in."

"Sure, Red." The head of Hebertown's Civil Defense Squad, an organization with an honorable history extending back nearly four hours, dug his fingers into the bags under his eyes and tried to stay awake. He owned a ready-to-wear establishment on North Front, and he had once allowed the Red Cross to use his second-floor storeroom as a fund-drive headquarters, a record of achievement which had done very little to fit him for staying up all night. "I went down at eleven o'clock to look at the water," he said meditatively. "I didn't want my cellar flooded again, like in thirty-nine, so I shoveled dirt up against the windows, and then I went home to bed." He laughed. He had gone by his store again two hours later--in a boat--and had had to bend down to look through the windows of the loft the Red Cross once had used. "I heard on the radio a list of all the cities that were hit--the worst ones. They didn't even mention Hebertown.... Say, what are you going to tell Bess Starkman?"