“The swollen flood was comparatively quiet now, rolling full and turbid over the drowned lands, and gleaming sullenly under a blaze of sun.  The bear having gone to sleep, the baby presently followed his example, her rosy face falling forward into his woodsy-smelling black fur.  At last the raft, catching in the trees of a submerged islet, came softly to a stop, so softly as not to awaken the little pair of sleepers.

“In the meantime two distraught mothers, quite beside themselves with fear and grief, were hurrying downstream in search of the runaway raft and its burden.

“The mother of the baby, when she saw the flood sweeping the raft away, was for some moments perilously near to flinging herself in after it.  Then her backwoods common sense came to the rescue.  She reflected, in time, that she could not swim—­while the raft, on the other hand, could and did, and would carry her treasure safely enough for a while.  Wading waist deep through the drowned fields behind the house, she gained the uplands, and rushed dripping along the ridge to the next farm, where, as she knew, a boat was kept.  This farmhouse, perched on a bluff, was safe from all floods; and the farmer was at home, congratulating himself.  Before he quite knew what was happening, he found himself being dragged to the boat—­for his neighbor was a strenuous woman, whom few in the settlement presumed to argue with, and it was plain to him now that she was laboring under an unwonted excitement.  It was not until he was in the boat, with the oars in his hands, that he gathered clearly what had happened.  Then, however, he bent to the oars with a will which convinced even that frantic and vehement mother that nothing better could be demanded of him.  Dodging logs and wrecks and uprooted trees, the boat went surging down the flood, while the woman sat stiffly erect in the stern, her face white as death, her eyes staring far ahead, while from time to time she muttered angry phrases which sounded as if the baby had gone off on a pleasure trip without leave and was going to be called to sharp account for it.

“The other mother had the deeper and more immediate cause for anguish.  Coming to the bank where she had left her cub in the tree, she found the bank caved in and the tree and cub together vanished.  Unlike the baby’s mother, she could swim; but she knew that she could run faster and farther.  In stoic silence, but with a look of piteous anxiety in her eyes, she started on a gallop down the half-drowned shores, clambering the heaps of debris, and swimming the deep, still estuaries where the flood had backed up into the valleys of the tributary brooks.

“At last, with laboring lungs and pounding heart, she came out upon a low, bare bluff overlooking the flood, and saw, not a hundred yards out, the raft with its two little passengers asleep.  She saw her cub lying curled up with his head in the baby’s arms, his black fur mixed with the baby’s yellow locks.  Her first thought was that he was dead—­that the baby had killed him and was carrying him off.  With a roar of pain and vengeful fury, she rushed down the bluff and hurled herself into the water.