Chapter XII: The Rising Flood

Stumbling, slipping, sliding, half-falling, bruising themselves on the sharp rocks, but ever leaping forward toward the sides of the tunnel, and away from the depressed centre down which they could see the rush of waters coming, the boy ranchers at last managed to reach the granite wall. Nort had succeeded in grabbing up one of the lanterns, but there was no time for Dick or Bud to take one, and the food had to be abandoned.

"Climb up! Climb up, if there's a ledge!" shouted Bud. "We'll be drowned if we can't get above the water!"

He had, somehow or other, brought up in the rear. Though he did not admit it, this was because he had shoved his cousins ahead of him, hoping thus to enable them to gain a safe place.

And as Nort and Dick glanced back they saw, in the gleam of the one lantern left alight, a white mass of water bearing down on them, and, seemingly, filling the tunnel from wall to wall, as it rushed foaming and murmuring onward.

It was as though a dam had suddenly burst, or some obstruction had been removed, allowing the pent-up waters to rush along the accustomed channel. And if you have ever noticed a dammed-up stream, say in some gutter, thus quickly released, you can imagine what happened on a larger scale in the tunnel where the boys were.

The water, normally, flowed only in the four-foot channel. But now it spread out on either side, and, of course, was much deeper in the centre. But as the tunnel sloped from either wall, in a sort of V shape to the centre channel, naturally the parts nearest the side walls were less covered by water than the others.

It was because of this that Bud, Nort and Dick were enabled to maintain a footing, though they were knee-deep in water in an instant, and the one remaining lantern had to be held up to prevent it from being engulfed and extinguished in the sudden flood.

"Climb up! Climb up!" shouted Bud. "Isn't there some place--some rocky ledge--where you can find a footing? The water's getting deeper!"

And this was true. Either the flood was growing at its source (a place as yet unknown to the boys) or it was running too rapidly, and in too great a volume, to accommodate itself to the tunnel channel, and was thus piling up in the vicinity of the boys.

"What happened? What caused it?" cried Nort.

"Never mind that--now!" shouted Bud. "Find the highest place you can, and stick!"

"Suppose the whole tunnel fills?" asked Dick, trying to pierce the semi-gloom, and look for a refuge on the rocky wall.

"If it does we'll have to swim for it," grimly said Bud. "But isn't there some place where you can climb up?"

"This looks like a ledge," Dick answered, as he caught sight of a darker shadow on the rocky wall of the tunnel, above his head, when his brother swung the lantern.

"Just what we need!" exclaimed Bud, as he waded through the ever-deepening water to the side of his cousins. "Up with you! Here, Nort, I'll hold the lantern until you make it!"

Thus, again, Bud was seeing that his cousins reached a place of comparative safety before he looked to himself. For they found the ledge, once they had scrambled up to it, well above the water, and wide enough to give shelter and a safe perch for all three.

"Whew! That was touch and go!" murmured Bud, as he leaned back, half exhausted, against the rocky wall at the rear of the ledge.

"I should say so!" gasped Dick. "It all happened so suddenly that I don't know yet what it was all about."

"The stream suddenly started flowing again," spoke Bud. "That's all there was to it. Must have been dammed up some place, and suddenly released. It's still rising, too," he added, as he leaned forward and held the lantern down over the ledge where he and his cousins had taken refuge.

"Rising?" sharply inquired Nort, and there was a tone of anxiety in his voice.

"Yes," remarked Bud, as he swung the lantern to and fro. "We didn't get up here any too soon, fellows! Look, the water would be up to our waists down there now, in the most shallow place, and it's got speed like one of Christy Mathewson's curves!"

His cousins could see that he had not exaggerated the matter. The waters were rising. Inch by inch, and foot by foot, the flood was approaching the crest. Where the boy ranchers had sat in the almost dry bed of the stream, to eat their lunch, there was now a mad race of swirling waters. Where they had stood, before climbing up to the ledge of safety, there was now three feet depth of water. And, as Bud had said, it was flowing along so swiftly, like the stream which turns a mill-wheel, that the boys could hardly have been able to keep their feet had they been down in the current, or even on the weakest edge of it.

But, as they were, they were safe for the time being. How long that would be the case none could tell. They could see, in the gleam of the one lantern saved in the mad rush, that the stream was coursing along as it had never coursed before.

"There must be a powerful lot of water coming out of the reservoir pipe," Nort remarked.

"Biggest ever, with all this water behind forcing it out," agreed Bud. "I hope the pipe holds."

"It isn't as if the pipe were the only outlet," said Dick. "You know the water can flow out of the tunnel above, and on either side of the conduit."

"Yes," agreed Bud, "and dad had it put in that way on purpose, so if ever a big flood did come, the tunnel could relieve itself without ripping away the pipe and reservoir. There's a sort of spillway at one side of the reservoir, you know."

The boys from the east had noticed this. Up to now no water had run off through this auxiliary channel, but it was there for emergencies such as now had occurred. And the water could find a vent and outlet down the middle of Flume Valley, as, indeed, the surplus from the reservoir itself did, when there was any.

"Well, it sure is queer, and we had a mighty narrow escape," remarked Nort, as Bud leaned back again with the lantern. "But the fellows back at the camp will be scared."

"I reckon they will," admitted Bud. "They'll see the water spouting out, in a greater volume than ever before, and they'll imagine all sorts of things have happened to us."

"Well, nothing has happened yet--except we've lost two perfectly good lanterns, and what grub we didn't eat," asserted Nort.

"But something else may happen," said Bud in a low voice, as, once more, he leaned forward, and again held the lantern over the edge of the rocky ledge.

"What?" Dick wanted to know.

"Look," was what Bud replied. And his cousins, glancing down, saw that the waters were rising, rising, rising!

When would they stop?