“Looks as if the water risks we took ain’t goin’ to cover earthquakes,” drawled Dick Frisney; “still that wasn’t a bad shot, if we only knew what they were aiming at.”

“Do be quiet,” said Virginia Piper, her cheeks pink with excitement.  “Listen, can’t you?  What’s that funny murmuring you hear now and then up there?”

“It’s only the snow-wind playin’ with the pines on the summit.  You girls won’t allow anybody any fun but yourselves.”

But here a scream from “Georgy,” who, assisted by Captain Fairfax, had mounted a camp-stool at the mouth of the valley, attracted everybody’s attention.  She was standing upright, with dilated eyes, staring at the top of the trail.  “Look!” she said excitedly, “if the trail isn’t moving!”

Everybody faced in that direction.  At the first glance it seemed indeed as if the trail was actually moving; wriggling and undulating its tortuous way down the mountain like a huge snake, only swollen to twice its usual size.  But the second glance showed it to be no longer a trail but a channel of water, whose stream, lifted in a bore-like wall four or five feet high, was plunging down into the devoted valley.

For an instant they were unable to comprehend even the nature of the catastrophe.  The reservoir was directly over their heads; the bursting of its wall they had imagined would naturally bring down the water in a dozen trickling streams or falls over the cliff above them and along the flanks of the mountain.  But that its suddenly liberated volume should overflow the upland beyond and then descend in a pent-up flood by their own trail and their only avenue of escape, had been beyond their wildest fancy.

They met this smiting truth with that characteristic short laugh with which the American usually receives the blow of Fate or the unexpected—­as if he recognized only the absurdity of the situation.  Then they ran to the women, collected them together, and dragged them to vantages of fancied security among the bushes which flounced the long skirts of the mountain walls.  But I leave this part of the description to the characteristic language of one of the party:—­

“When the flood struck us, it did not seem to take any stock of us in particular, but laid itself out to ‘go for’ that picnic for all it was worth!  It wiped it off the face of the earth in about twenty-five seconds!  It first made a clean break from stem to stern, carrying everything along with it.  The first thing I saw was old Judge Piper, puttin’ on his best licks to get away from a big can of strawberry ice cream that was trundling after him and trying to empty itself on his collar, whenever a bigger wave lifted it.  He was followed by what was left of the brass band; the big drum just humpin’ itself to keep abreast o’ the ice cream, mixed up with camp-stools, music-stands, a few Chinamen, and then what they call in them big San Francisco processions ‘citizens generally.’  The hull thing swept up the canyon inside o’