Raymond S. Spears

“ Out on the bottoms there were houses with water up to the second-story windows. On the roof of one of the houses a flock of chickens sat huddled together along the ridge-pole. A dog, sitting on a tree branch to which he had made his way, howled; but he was a long way off from Sibley and the howl but added another phase to the boy’s dreams.
It was the most dismal thing imaginable—that vast flood, with the rain spattering down on the surface and blackening the wet drift. The gloomy day ended, shade by shade, the distant woods blended into a dark mass and the far-off hills faded from sight. ”

“ Miles to the right, miles to the left, miles away in any direction he might look, he could see, beyond whole sections of open water and flat acres of drift, the submerged woodlands of bottoms, the river banks two or three or four hundred feet high—so they looked—and great expanses of open water in which lone trees stood to mark places that on a hot summer day must offer grateful shade to cattle, or to grain reapers, or whoever came there when those bottoms were not covered with ten feet or so of water. ”

“ The top of the snag was broken away by drift that lodged against the trunk, pressing heavily. Down the lower end of the creek the snag moved slowly out into the great flood.
A fork of the roots pressed against the side of the little house-boat, so softly that the craft did not jar enough to awaken Sibley; but the whole weight of the oak snag was behind the touch. Irresistibly but slowly the current carried the snag and other drift against the hull, and with a sudden low pop the ash stake in the clay sprang up several feet and fell to the wet bank. ”