CHAPTER XIX
WHEN LAND CRUMBLED
For a moment Hal Dane's heart seemed to cease beating.
The huge panther was the largest of its kind he had ever seen. In hisscouting above the flood country, he had now and again glimpsed a few ofthese great tawny creatures of the cat tribe that the waters had drivenfrom their forest haunts. Out in the open these others had merely slunkoff, hiding from even the shadow of the airplane that passed over them.
But cornered, the panther was a different beast. He was ferocious, andfought to kill.
This one, sides sunken with hunger, flat ugly head weaving back andforth, jaws snarling open, crouched tense in its corner.
A sudden ague shook Hal's hand till the spotlight wavered up and downthe walls. The next instant he controlled himself, held the torch glowagain on the beast before him. In the space of that instant, the pantherhad glided out from his corner. The light flung into his fiery eyes senthim motionless again--but how long would the spell-binding of thetorchlight last?
Hal Dane moistened dry lips, shaped his mouth to whistle, and at lastforced out a shrill sound. He had seen steady whistling charm smallanimals like rabbits and foxes into a momentary "freeze". He prayed,that it would work now. Dry-mouthed or not, he must keep up thisshrilling ten seconds, twenty seconds--till his hand could lift hisrevolver from its hip holster, till he could take aim.
It was a six-shooter, but he remembered, with a chilling to his verymarrow, that there was only one shot left. He had used the other fivepicking off rattlesnakes that had seemed determined to move into the dryhaunts of the human refugees.
A sudden switching of tail tip, a lower crouching of the powerful tawnybody, told that the spring was imminent.
Steady! Because the head hung low, he must aim at the brain through theeye.
But before Hal's gun could belch forth its one shot, the great beast hadleaped. Hal's hand flung up to new aim. In the ghastly white torchlight,a roaring tornado of teeth and claws rose above him.
The pistol shot its load straight up. And that instant, the boy flunghimself backwards out of the window. Instead of landing in a waitingboat, he plunged into the cold, yellow depths of flood water.
He came up sputtering and choking. But after the first shock of hissubmersion, he felt no alarm. He was a strong swimmer and could keepafloat for hours if necessary. He bumped into what he thought was adrifting log, but it turned out to be a derelict canoe upside down. Heclung to that and shouted. His electric torch and revolver had been lostas he leaped from the window, almost under the impact of the panther'sdownward slashing claws.
Hal's lusty shouting soon produced results. The rescue launch which haddrifted down stream, put about and with its headlight spraying the watersurface with its searching glare, nosed cautiously back up alongside ofhim and his float. Strong hands hauled him aboard and a warm blanket wasflung around him.
Colonel Wiljohn was storming up and down the little craft in a rage athis crew for deserting Hal in his time of peril.
The fellow at the steering wheel was rather shamefaced over letting agunshot and panther caterwauls shake his hand so that the boat shot fromhis control and into midstream.
"D-don't blame you," chattered Hal, drawing the blanket tighter abouthis dripping person, "if it s-s-sounded half as awful to you all outsideas it did to me inside--it was t-t-time to be leaving!"
To make sure that the great panther was not left merely wounded tosuffer lingeringly, or perhaps to injure someone else who might enterthe place, the boat was drawn again within sight-range of the driftingold house. Lights were played over the upper story room, now so nearlysubmerged.
The long tawny form lay stretched on the floor, without sign ofmovement. Hal's one shot had done its work.
Hope died hard in Colonel Wiljohn's breast. His mind told him that theshrill "woman screams" that had lured Hal to this place could only havebeen the panther's call--so like a woman crying in distress. To satisfyhimself, however, the Colonel searched every possible part of thefloating, careening old house. With an axe he forced an entrance throughthe warped, swollen doors to the three upper rooms, searched closets andcupboards. He found no woman and child hiding away from that otherpassenger,--the great, tawny panther cat. A pitiful litter of clothes,books, a few small toys, deserted when the home-dwellers had to flee fortheir lives, was the only reward for his search.
Back at the camp, Hal experienced all the comforts of being a "refugee".Good dry clothes and a draught of hot milk took the shivers out of hisbones. After his report was made out, he flung himself down in his tentto snatch a bit of sleep. With thirty-six hours of steady strain andflying behind him, slumber claimed him the instant he hit his bunk. Buttired as he was, he had left word that he should be called early.
Next morning before the sun rose, he was out on the field warming up themotor to his strange gyroscope plane. He found the radio installed.Workmen from headquarters had done it while he used the seaplane the daybefore. Everything was in working order. He tested the instruments andfound that they were of the best. A few taps and a message would gospeeding through the air.
Even this early in the day, a small crowd gathered to watch the squatold hen, the newfangled plane, make its rise. As the rotors stiffenedwith their power whirl and the thing took off, Hal heard a sound ofcheering drift up to him faintly. For all its awkward look, this thingdid rise like a lark on the wing. He turned her nose out over the flood.
For the time being, Hal Dane wanted to follow out a clew entirely on hisown. In the dusk of yesterday, as he clung to the drifting, upside-downcanoe, and the lights from the launch had played over it, the namepainted on the battered derelict had seemed to sear into his brain. Theletters had been inverted and he had read them but subconsciously atfirst, then their meaning had suddenly seemed to burn into his brain inletters of fire. "M-a-l-d-e-n, Malden"--the name of the hotel where Mrs.Wiljohn and Jacky had stayed. This was a boat from that riversideresort. Malden was miles below where he and the drifting boat hadcollided yester evening. So that meant someone had gone up-river in thecanoe and let it get away to come drifting back down. That someone couldbe the Wiljohns. What had happened to them? Were they alive after allthis time? More likely, dead!
It was all too frail a clew to build any hopes on. Hal could not bear tomention it to Colonel Wiljohn. He had suffered too much already, to haveanother castle of hope built up, only to have it crash into bitterdisappointment.
Young Dane flew his craft southward with the flood to a location he hadnoted the day before, marked by a gnarled oak on a ridge lifting itsbattered branches slightly above the torrent. It was near here that hehad first sighted the house of the panther screams. This big piece ofdrift and the derelict canoe must have entered the main flood out of themouth of Tanabee Creek--or what had once been Tanabee Creek. That humblestream was now a mile-wide torrent, filling a valley. The overflow fromthe burst dam at Nelgat Lake had swamped this broad level.
Here the devastation had been terrible. As Hal pushed farther in thisdirection than he had been before, he constantly came upon sights thattaxed his every sympathy. Many times he saw the bodies of men, women andchildren floating with the current. With a sinking heart, he swept lowover those sightless faces turned toward the sky--searching, searching,but he had not found them yet. Numberless dead animals drifted down withthe flood. Shattered homes rocked to and fro on the pull of currents,followed often by a welter of broken furniture,--chairs, a babycarriage, a cupboard that had once held dear family possessions.
Deeper into this desolation he pressed. About him everywhere, lifeseemed to have been smothered out under the waters.
He had been flying slowly, searchingly, for more than an hour, when hishawklike gaze focused upon a tiny rim of land, a crescent-shaped islandbarely showing above the torrent. The force of currents was eatingsteadily at the thin line of land. As Hal watched, a portion crumbledand toppled into the flood.
&nb
sp; And then as he swooped down nearer, he saw to his horror that there wasa human figure on that slender stretch of ground. He dropped closer,closer, the spread wings of the rotor above his machine letting him downas gently as though he hung in a great parachute. He dropped to a mereforty feet above the flood, to thirty. He could see a white dress, awoman's long hair flung out on the ground. She was apparently dead.
With every moment the rim of land was submerging. Soon the raveningyellow torrent would sweep over the last vestige. It seemed utter follyto risk a life and a plane for one already dead. Still there might be aflickering spark of vitality in that still body.
No use to tap radio messages for help. No help beyond himself couldreach this doomed spot in time.
He must land on this narrow bit of earth already crumbling from the washof the waves.
Under its strange whirl of wings, the gyroscope plane dropped straightas a plummet. A deviation to the right or to the left, and aircraft,aviator and all would have been engulfed in a roaring torrent withoutone chance in a thousand of escape.
But his trained eye had measured distances carefully. In that straightdrop he landed well in the middle of the tiny land crescent, and whereit was least narrow.
In the drawing of a breath, he was out of the cockpit and running towardthe prostrate figure. Even at the thump of the machine to earth, thatone had not stirred. But now, out from under a shelter of brush a childcame creeping, a little boy that even this much effort seemed toexhaust, for he slumped down weakly.
It was Jacky Wiljohn!
"Jacky! Jacky!" shouted Hal Dane, "run for the plane, quick, while Ibring your mother!" As he spoke, he could feel the rim of land tremblingbeneath him, crumbling to the awful power of the waters.
But the child lay where he had dropped. It was as though his last faintstore of energy had been used in his effort to creep into the open.
Hal had already lifted the woman across his shoulder where she hunglimp. He was staggering under this burden, yet he must add more. With aquick swoop, he seized one of the child's hands and dragging him, took afew swaying steps forward.
Ten paces, twelve paces! Would he ever make it?
He sagged against the cockpit, slid the woman in; with another motion heswept the child in beside her.
Like mad, he spun the motor and leaped for the fuselage as the greathorizontal wings began their first slow whirl.
Before him a whole end of the narrow island broke off and the floodfoamed and roared across the place where land had been a moment ago.
Behind, there was a crash and sound of the torrent pouring over. Halcould not turn to look, but he knew what was happening. Earth topplinginto the flood!
Would those four rotor blades above him ever stiffen with enough liftingpower for flight?
Within ten feet of the gyroscope's nose water poured over the crumbledland edge. No room for even the slightest run now. Those rotors mustlift straight up with their extra burden--or it would mean the end.
Centrifugal force was whirling the limp flimsiness of the rotors into anengine of mighty lifting power. Flexible steel stiffened as it spun athousand, two thousand whirls to the minute.
The gyroscope was rising, slowly, not straightly as it should. Wrongbalance of its burden shifted the take-off climb from perpendicular toan angle.
But at that, it cleared land and rose up and up into the sky.
Hal Dane looked down. It had been a fearfully close thing. Below him wasno island at all, merely a surging waste of waters where he had justbeen. The last of the land rim had crumbled.
Now that he was above it all, his heart beat to the zooming roar of hisrotors.
Speed! Speed! He must wing it back before life force ebbed entirely fromthose limp bodies behind him. Already his tapping fingers had flung themessage of his find into the ether.