Chapter 35 - Page 2

next I looked
behind, it was upon a turbulent loch, the further bank lost in
darkness. I was about to shout to Waster Lunny, when a monster
rose in the torrent between me and the spot where he had stood. It
frightened me to silence until it fell, when I knew it was but a
tree that had been flung on end by the flood. For a time there was
no answer to my cries, and I thought the farmer had been swept
away. Then I heard his whistle, and back I ran recklessly through
the thickening darkness to the school-house. When I saw the tree
rise, I had been on ground hardly wet as yet with the rain; but by
the time Waster Lunny sent that reassuring whistle to me I was
ankle-deep in water, and the rain was coming down like hail. I saw
no lightning.

For the rest of the night I was only out once, when I succeeded in
reaching the hen-house and brought all my fowls safely to the
kitchen, except a hen which would not rise off her young. Between
us we had the kitchen floor, a pool of water; and the rain had put
out my fires already, as effectually as if it had been an
overturned broth-pot. That I never took off my clothes that night
I need not say, though of what was happening in the glen I could
only guess. A flutter against my window now and again, when the
rain had abated, told me of another bird that had flown there to
die; and with Waster Lunny, I kept up communication by waving a
light, to which he replied in a similar manner. Before morning,
however, he ceased to answer my signals, and I feared some
catastrophe had occurred at the farm. As it turned out, the family
was fighting with the flood for the year's shearing of wool, half
of which eventually went down the waters, with the wool-shed on
top of it.

The school-house stands too high to fear any flood, but there were
moments when I thought the rain would master it. Not only the
windows and the roof were rattling then, but all the walls, and I
was like one in a great drum. When the rain was doing its utmost,
I heard no other sound; but when the lull came, there was the wash
of a heavy river, or a crack as of artillery that told of
landslips, or the plaintive cry of the peesweep as it rose in the
air, trying to entice the waters away from its nest.

It was a dreary scene that met my gaze at break of day. Already
the Quharity had risen six feet, and in many parts of the glen it
was two hundred yards wide. Waster Lunny's corn-field looked like
a bog grown over with rushes, and what had been his turnips had
become a lake with small islands in it. No dike stood whole except
one that the farmer, unaided, had built in a straight line from
the road to the top of Mount Bare, and my own, the further end of
which dipped in water. Of the plot of