He was the sole custodian of his secret.  The morality of the question, while it profoundly disturbed him, was rather in reference to its effect upon the chances of Captain Jack and the power it gave his enemies than his own conscience.  He would rather that his friend should have proven the proscribed outlaw who retained an unselfish interest in him than the superior gentleman who was coldly wiping out his gratitude.  He thought he understood now the reason of his visitor’s strange and varying moods—­even his bitter superstitious warning in regard to the probable curse entailed upon one who should save a drowning man.  Of this he recked little; enough that he fancied that Captain Jack’s concern in his illness was heightened by that fear, and this assurance of his protecting friendship thrilled him with pleasure.

There was no reason now why he should not at once go back to his farm, where, at least, Captain Jack would always find him; and he did so, returning on the same boat.  He was now fully recovered from his illness, and calmer in mind; he redoubled his labors to put himself in a position to help the mysterious fugitive when the time should come.  The remote farm should always be a haven of refuge for him, and in this hope he forbore to take any outside help, remaining solitary and alone, that Captain Jack’s retreat should be inviolate.  And so the long, dry season passed, the hay was gathered, the pasturing herds sent home, and the first rains, dimpling like shot the broadening surface of the river, were all that broke his unending solitude.  In this enforced attitude of waiting and expectancy he was exalted and strengthened by a new idea.  He was not a religious man, but, dimly remembering the exhortations of some camp meeting of his boyhood, he conceived the idea that he might have been selected to work out the regeneration of Captain Jack.  What might not come of this meeting and communing together in this lonely spot?  That anything was due to the memory of the murdered sheriff, whose bones were rotting in the trench that he daily but unconcernedly passed, did not occur to him.  Perhaps his mind was not large enough for the double consideration.  Friendship and love—­and, for the matter of that, religion—­are eminently one-ideaed.

But one night he awakened with a start.  His hand, which was hanging out of his bunk, was dabbling idly in water.  He had barely time to spring to his middle in what seemed to be a slowly filling tank before the door fell out as from that inward pressure, and his whole shanty collapsed like a pack of cards.  But it fell outwards, the roof sliding from over his head like a withdrawn canopy; and he was swept from his feet against it, and thence out into what might have been another world!  For the rain had ceased, and the full moon revealed only one vast, illimitable expanse of water!  It was not an overflow, but the whole rushing river magnified and repeated a thousand times, which, even as he gasped for breath and clung to the roof, was bearing him away he knew not whither.  But it was bearing him away upon its center, for as he cast one swift glance toward his meadows he saw they were covered by the same sweeping torrent, dotted with his sailing hayricks and reaching to the wooded foothills.  It was the great flood of ’54.  In its awe-inspiring completeness it might have seemed to him the primeval Deluge.