Ruth Fielding Down in Dixie Part 21

"Whoo!" Helen cried. "How are _we_ going to get home?"

"By boat, maybe," laughed Ruth. "Don't worry. To-morrow is another day."

And just as she said this the hotel was jarred suddenly, throughout its every beam and girder! The fiddles had just started again. They stopped.

For a moment not a sound broke the startled silence in the ballroom.

Then the building shook again. There was an unmistakable thumping at the up-river end of the building. The thumping was repeated.

"Something's broken loose!" exclaimed Helen.

"Let's see what it means!" exclaimed Ruth, and she darted out of the long window.

Her chum and Nettie followed her. But when they found themselves splashing through water which had risen over the porch flooring, almost ankle deep, Nettie squealed and ran back. Helen followed Ruth to the upper end of the porch. The oil lamps burning there revealed a sight that both amazed and terrified the girls from the North.

The river had risen over its banks. It surged about the front of the hotel, but had not surrounded it, for the land at the back was higher.

In the semi-darkness, however, the girls saw a large object looming above the porch roof, and it again struck against the hotel. It was a light cottage that had been raised from its foundation and swept by the current against the larger building.

Again it crashed into the corner of the hotel. The roof of the porch was wrecked at this corner by the heavy blow. Windows crashed and servants began to scream. Ruth clutched Helen and drew her back against the wall as the chimney-bricks of the drifting cottage fell through the broken roof of the veranda.

CHAPTER XVII-THE FLOOD RISES

There was a doorway near at hand-the floor of the house being one step higher than the porch which was now flooded. Ruth was just about to drag her chum into this doorway when a figure plunged out of it-a thin, graceless figure in a rain-garment of some kind-and little else, as it proved.

"Oh! oh! oh!" screamed the stranger as she spattered into the water in her slippered feet. "I am killed! I am drowned!"

Helen began actually to giggle. It did not seem so tragic to her that the hotel on the island should become suddenly surrounded by water, or be battered by drifting buildings which the flood had uprooted. The surprise and fright the woman expressed as she halted on the porch, was calculated to arouse one's laughter.

"Oh, oh, oh!" said the woman, more feebly.

"Come right back into the house-do!" cried Ruth. "You won't get wet there."

"But the house is falling down!" gasped the woman, and as she turned the lamplight from the hall revealed her features, and Helen uttered a stifled cry.

She recognized the woman's face. So did Ruth, and amazement possessed both the girls. There was no mistaking the features of the irritable, nervous teacher from New England, Miss Miggs!

"Do come into the house, Miss Miggs," urged Ruth. "It isn't going to fall yet."

"How do you know?" snapped the school teacher, as obstinate as ever.

The cottage that had been battering the corner of the porch was now torn away by the river and swept on, down the current. There sounded a great hullabaloo from the ballroom. Although the river had not yet risen as high as the dancing floor, the frightened revelers saw that the flood was fairly upon them. At the back the darkies added their cries to the screams of the hysterical guests.

Another drifting object struck and jarred the hotel. Miss Miggs repeated her scream of fear, and darted into the hall with the same impetuosity with which she had darted out.

"Who are you girls?" she demanded, peering at Ruth and Helen closely, for she did not wear her spectacles. "Haven't I seen you before? I declare! you're the girls who stole my ticket-the idea!"

At the moment-and in time to hear this accusation-Mrs. Holloway appeared from down the hall. "Oh, Martha!" she cried. "Are you out of your bed?"

She gave the two girls from the North a sharp look as she spoke to the teacher; but this was no time for an explanation of Miss Miggs' remark.

The school teacher immediately opened a volley of complaints:

"Well, I must say, Cousin Lydia, if I were you I'd build my house on some secure foundation. And calling it a hotel, too! My mercy me! the whole thing will be down like a house of cards in ten minutes, and we shall be drowned."

"Oh, no, Cousin Martha," said the Southern woman. "We shall be all right. The river will not rise much higher, and it will never tear the hotel from its base. It is too large."

"Look at these other houses floating away, Lydia Holloway!" screamed Miss Miggs.

"But they are only the huts from along sh.o.r.e--"

Her statement was interrupted by a terrific shock the hotel suffered as a good-sized cottage-one of the nearest of the summer colony-smashed against the hotel, rebounded, and drifted away down stream.

The two women and the two girls were flung together in a clinging group for half a minute. Then Miss Martha Miggs tore herself away. "Let go of me, you impudent young minxes!" she cried. "Are you trying to rob me again?"

"Oh! the horrid thing!" gasped Helen; but Ruth kept her lips closed.

She knew anything they could say would make a bad matter worse. Already the hotel proprietor's wife was looking at them very doubtfully.

It had stopped raining, but the damp wind swept into the open door and chilled the girls in their thin frocks. Mrs. Holloway saw this and remembered that she had to answer to Mrs. Parsons for her guests' well being.

"Come back into this room," she commanded, and led Miss Miggs first by the arm into an unlighted parlor. The windows looked up the river, and as the quartette reached the middle of the room, the unhappy school teacher emitted another shriek and pointed out of the nearest unshaded window.

"What is the matter with you now, Martha Miggs?" demanded Mrs. Holloway, in some exasperation. "If I had known you were in such an hysterical, nervous state, I would not have invited you down here-and sent your ticket and all-I a.s.sure you. I never saw such a person for startling one."

"And lots of good the ticket did-with these girls stealing it from me,"

snapped Miss Miggs. "But look at that house next to yours. There! see it heave? And there's a lighted lamp in that room."

Everybody saw the peril which the school teacher had observed. A lamp stood on the center table in the parlor of the house next. This house was set on a lower foundation than the hotel and the rising river, surging about it, had begun to loosen it.

Even as they looked, the house tipped perceptibly, and the lighted lamp fell from the table to the floor.

The burning oil was scattered about the room. Although everything was saturated with rain outside, the interior of the cottage began to burn furiously and the conflagration would soon endanger the hotel itself.

Helen broke down and began to cry. Ruth put her arm about her chum and tried to soothe her. Some of the men came charging into the room, thinking by the sudden flare of the conflagration, that this end of the hotel was already on fire.

"Oh, dear! Goodness, me!" shrieked the school teacher, taking thought of her dishabille, and she turned at once and fled upstairs. Mrs. Holloway quietly fainted in an adjacent, comfortable chair. The men went out on the porch to see if they could reach the burning cottage; but the water was too deep and too swift between the two structures.

Ruth carefully attended the woman who had fainted. What had become of Miss Miggs she did not know. Mrs. Holloway regained consciousness very suddenly. She looked up at Ruth, recognized her, and shrank away from the girl of the Red Mill.

"Don't-don't," she gasped. "I'm all right."

Mrs. Holloway's hand went to the bosom of her gown, she fumbled there a minute, and then brought forth her purse. The feel of the money in it seemed to rea.s.sure her; but Ruth knew what the gesture meant. What she had heard her cousin say had impressed the hotel keeper's wife strongly.

Hearing the school teacher accuse the two Northern girls of stealing from her, Mrs. Holloway considered herself unsafe in Ruth's hands.

"Oh, come away," urged Helen, who had likewise observed the woman's action. "These people make me ill. I wish we were back North again among our own kind."