came running out from their quarters, and gathered in front of the veranda. The wind suddenly turned cold, dropped, and ceased. The dust settled. The sun blazed as before. There was not a cloud in the sky. The herders all looked at Lieber. They did not talk. They were waiting. Lieber shrugged his shoulders.

Some

'Somewhere," he said, with a wave of his hand to the southwest, "there has been rain and hail and that sort of thing. Temperature fell and drove the hot air off the desert." He told the men, but they did not go away. They stood about, their eyes sweeping the horizon to the south west. At last one of them grunted. His eyes were fixed on a distant pillar of dust. It came toward them. Lieber used his field-glasses. Without taking them from his eyes he spoke. "It's a man, riding. Looks like he 's riding for life. thing is up. He 's riding to kill his horse." As the man approached, a dull rumbling filled the ears of the watchers. So gradual was its crescendo that they did not notice it. The rider spurred and beat his horse to a final effort. They could see he was shouting. He drew nearer and they heard him: "Flood! Flood!" Then they noticed the rumbling. It became a roar. Far away on the horizon rose a white, advancing mist. The rider rolled off his staggering horse. "The flood!" he gasped. "Never before has there been such a flood."

Before the words were out of his mouth there was a frenzied rattle of hoofs, and Gerry on True-Blue tore off in a mad gallop down the trail toward Fazenda Flores. Almost at his heels followed the first mounted of the herders, riding all they knew to cut across to Piranhas ahead of the wall of water.

Lieber's eyes followed Gerry's flight. Then he turned them on Alan.

"That hollow down there," he said, "will be turned into a rushing river in half an hour, perhaps less. We 're just safe here, and that 's all. You see Mr. Lansing? He's the spot farthest down the trail. I'm thinking we 'll never see him again."

A faint flush came into Alan's cheeks. It was a flush of pride-pride in Gerry. Gerry had not hesitated. He had not ridden off like a laggard. Even now they could see that he was riding for life-rid

ing with all his might for the lives that shackled him.

CHAPTER XXXII

GERRY had never ridden a horse to death before. When True-Blue first staggered, he put spurs to him and laid on his quirt.

The roar of the river was so loud that he could not tell if he had really beaten the flood or not, though he could see just before him the long, snaky ridge of the main ditch-banks. He must get on.

But True-Blue only came to a staggering stop under the quirt. With his fore feet he still marked time, as though with them he would drag his heavy body and master one step nearer home. From his loins back he was paralyzed.

With a last desperate effort he straddled his fore legs, but he could not brace himself against the backward sag of dead weight. Gerry felt him sinking beneath him, and suddenly found himself standing over his prostrate horse. Of True-Blue, his fore feet outstretched, his head and breast still held high, there was left only a great spirit chained to a fallen and dying body.

A cry escaped Gerry's lips-a cry of horror at what he had done. Then he remembered why he had done it, and ran not for the sluice-gate, but for the bridge. As he reached it the roar became deafening. There was a splintering, crackling sound that, measured by the great commotion, seemed like the tinkle of a tiny bell. But there was something in the sound that called to his brain. He cast a glance over his shoulder. The monster beams of his sluice-gate, hurled, splintered, into the air, were still hanging against the blue sky. Under them surged an angry white wall of racing water.

Below him Fazenda Flores lay peaceful, still, under the blazing sun. The cotton was a little wilted, but high and strong; the cane stunted, but alive. Only in the pasture bottoms the stock had gathered in frightened clumps. Their instinct had told them that danger hovered near. Suddenly from the quiet house burst Margarita, carrying her son on one arm. She had seen Gerry from a window. While the others watched the rising river, and now this terrifying torrent bursting down upon them from above, she had slipped out to run to him.

The house at Fazenda Flores stood on a domed mound. Behind the mound was a slight hollow before the steady rise to the bridge began. Gerry caught sight of Margarita as she ran down toward this hollow. Terrified, he cast a glance at the descending flood, and his eye measured its pace against hers.

"Go back!" he shouted with all the strength of his lungs, and waved his arms. It was as though he had not spoken. Through the din and roar of the flood the sound of the words scarcely reached his

own ears.

At the very bottom of the hollow Margarita felt that she was stepping in water. She took her eyes from Gerry, who, she thought, was beckoning to her, and looked down. A hurrying rivulet the swift flow of which carried it before the churning crest of the flood, tugged at her ankles. She looked up toward the thundering wall of oncoming water and knew that she was lost.

She stopped and fixed her eyes on Gerry, who was plunging down the slope in a mad effort to reach her. She called to him, but she knew he could not hear her. With arms stretched to their highest she held up the Man. The Man was not frightened. His black eyes were fixed on his running father. Margarita could feel him gurgling with joy in the new game. Then suddenly he cried out. It was a wail of fright.

The water had felled Margarita and the Man. Gerry saw them flung down against the ground and then high on the crest of the wave. They became suddenly a twirling, sodden mass, inanimate save for the fling of a loose limb into clearer view against the blue sky or the uncoiling of long black hair on the seething water.

Gerry reached the torrent. Margarita and the Man had already been whirled far toward the great river. He plunged into the flood. The water was thick with earth, sticks, up-rooted plants, and debris of every sort.

Gerry's struggling body was hurled hither and thither. A stray current shot him to the surface, but, before he could take breath, other currents sucked him down and dragged him along the rough surface of the crumbling soil.

Then suddenly he was cast into an eddy that, in comparison with the maelstrom,

was almost peaceful. From head to toe he was battered and bruised. His cotton clothes were in tatters. His chest heaved in great, spasmodic gasps. His head ached till it seemed on the verge of bursting. But to his mind pierced a thought sharper than pain-the thought of Margarita and the Man. With clenched teeth he struck out for the current.

Far, far away rose a dusty line of mist. It marked the head of the flood, the meeting of water with the accumulated dust of rainless months. Gerry recognized the meaning of that line. Somewhere there in the turmoil of the first rush of the mad flood were Margarita and the Man-what was left of them. The distance dismayed him, but he swam on. Then he felt the fast approaching end of endurance. sob choked him.

A

It was only minutes till his arms refused to answer to his will. They moved so weakly that more than once his gasping mouth sank below the water. Then an up-rooted tree brushed by him. He clutched its branches.

When all else in the world has passed from a man's brain there remains the life instinct-the will to fight for the last minute of his allotted being. It urged Gerry to a last effort. He dragged his body upon the tree where the branches forked from the main trunk. Utterly exhausted, he sank into their embrace. They held him as though in a cradle.

The rush of the waters began to slacken. They stretched out over the valley and crept up its sides. They did not flow so much now as rise. The valley became a moving sea. On its flowing surface beasts, fowls, and reptiles struggled, mad-eyed, for life.

From the middle of the sea rose the old plantation house, still high and dry on its mound. It seemed very tiny, a toy house on a lonely islet.

From the mouth of the cleft in the river gorge issued a thundering cataract. It had burst through the walls of the ditch and even unseated a section of the rocky crag against which the sluice-gate had been buttressed. The ditch was gone. The turbid flood devoured the silt of the valley, accumulated since man was, and carried it, seething, out toward the river. The valley would be left naked, stripped of the source of life.

Gerry's tree had crawled away from the main current. In a vast eddy it approached the mound whereon squatted the old plantation house. Dona Maria stood at the edge of the waters. Her two hands were clenched and held above her gray head. Thin wisps of hair hung about her face. Her face was distorted. She was cursing Gerry, cursing the day of his birth, the day of his coming, the day he had opened. his ditch. She swept her arms over the terrible scene and called down the curse of all the ruin and death on his head. But Gerry was beyond hearing. In all the world there was none to hear the old woman. She stood alone, about her the silent waters, above her the blazing blue sky. The roof was crowded with fowl and a strange medley of heavy flying birds, glad of a perch on which to rest. Dona Maria went into the house. She closed the great board shutters. The house looked as though it had closed its eyes in a last renunciation.

Gerry's tree floated down the river. It swung slowly along near the north shore. Just below it were houses. They were perched on the cliff. Below them were more houses, and under these the tiled roofs of still other houses just topped the flood. The houses were what was left of Piranhas.

From the shore canoes in search of loot began to shoot out on to the quietening waters. One of them happened upon Gerry's tree and then upon Gerry. Gerry's eyes opened and then closed again. He scarcely felt the arms that lifted him. They carried him to the old inn, the miserable little inn he had left behind on that glorious morning so long ago.

CHAPTER XXXIII

A SHARP attack of fever followed Gerry's exposure and immersion. The old woman of the inn knew no medicaments, but she knew fever. She piled blankets on Gerry and let him sweat it out. On the third day nature, assisted by his magnificent physique, finally routed the attack. Gerry began to feel hungry. He called the old woman and ordered food. For once food in Piranhas was plentiful. Manioc, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, as well as fowl, marooned on trees and wreckage, had stocked the town as it had never been stocked before. Gerry ate heartily.

Then he began to think. The nightmare was all true. From his window he looked out on the slowly receding waters of the greatest flood the San Francisco had ever seen. Fazenda Flores was no more. With it three years of his life had been wiped out. Outwardly he was back where he had begun, but inwardly he was eons away from the starting-point of three years ago. Alix had waited for him, but he had not waited for her. He had given himself to Margarita and to Margarita's son. Margarita and the Man were dead, but the fact of his gift of himself remained. What had he but the shell, the husk of himself, to take back to Alix?

He called the old woman. her if she remembered him. at him.

He asked She peered

"No, master," she said, "I do not remember you. You are like the foreigner who was drowned; but he is dead.”

Gerry shook his head.

"Not dead," he said, "only disappeared."

"You are not he," said the old woman. "He could not talk words that one could understand."

Gerry nodded gravely. He felt as though words could never make him smile. again.

"I have learned," he said. "Now, tell me what became of the things I left here?" He went through the list.

The old woman checked off each item and then shrugged her shoulders. She led him to a dark little room the only light of which came from the interstices of the tiled roof. As his pupils expanded he began to make out one after another of the bags that had made up his traveling-kit.

"There is a letter," she said, and went off to fetch it. Gerry dragged the bags out into the light. Their locks were all sealed with the seal of the American consulate at Pernambuco. He started knocking off the brittle wax. The old woman came back with the letter and handed it to him. He tore it open. It was a note from the consul, saying that by order of Gerry's wife his things had been sealed. and left at the inn, and telling him where to find the keys. The room, he learned from the old woman, had been paid for regularly, at first by the month, then by the year. She felt no resentment at his return, only resignation. "You are the

only guest I 've had since you went away," she said quaintly, and with a sigh.

"Fear nothing," said Gerry, kindly. "You have been faithful. You may consider the room engaged by me for the next ten years."

He carried his bags into the room overlooking the river and then lay down. He was too tired after the fever to open them. He knew that the opening of those dustcovered bags with their rusted metal fit tings was going to be another ordeal.

The next day Gerry sat before his unpacked bags. He had turned out all their contents. On the bed, the floor, the table, and the chairs was piled such an array of linen and shoes and suits of various cut and weight as he had once deemed the minimum with which a man could decently travel. Now they seemed to him wasteful and futile. The clothes did not carry his mind back, as he had expected. The starch in the linen had gone yellow. He had always hated yellow collars. The suits struck him as belonging to some one else-all except one. One sturdy suit of tweed had a cut that was different from the others. Of all the clothes it alone seemed to have a personal note-the note he had expected to find in the bags and had shrunk from.

Then he remembered. This suit had been made by his own tailor. He had worn it during a flying visit to Red Hill. He had had it on the day he left New York. He had worn it that morning in Alix's room. Red Hill came back to him, Alix stood before him. Through the suit he saw her room, the shimmering blue of her dressing-gown, her crown of hair, and her thin fingers busy with it. He felt again the nip of the clear air as it had streamed in through the open window. How calm Alix had been under his arraignment! How curious had been her eyes as he raved at her! Would she have been calm and curious like that if she had really loved Alan? He remembered the shameful things he had said before he could lash her into an answering temper. He heard again the scratching of a pen as he had heard it that morning, standing in the hall outside her door. How blind he had been! She had been writing to Alan -writing to him in the white heat of anger. He had driven her to it with his shameful words. He had left her no other

answer. And, after all, she had waited! Gerry put his hands to his forehead. It was wet with cold sweat. He got up and

went out.

The worst of the flood was over. Gerry engaged a search-party. All day long they sought for Margarita and her child. Toward night they found them, the little boy tightly clasped in his mother's arms. Gerry laid them tenderly in the canoe and in silence the party crawled back up the river to Piranhas. No one looked curiously at the burden they carried up through the main street. Eyes were tired of the familiar sight. The hour of weeping, the allotted tears, were long since spent. They buried them that night. Gerry went back to his room. He could not eat. He sat for a long time looking out on the starry river. Then unconsciously he picked up the old tweed suit and hung it carefully on a chair. The rest of his scattered things he swept unceremoniously upon the floor, and threw himself full length on the bed. He was exhausted and slept.

He was up early the next morning. He made the old woman bring water, and bathed in his room.

"It is wise," she said. "For many days there will be poison in the river." Gerry did not answer. He closed the door and went through his ablutions and toilet with great care. His beard he had always kept close-clipped. Now he shaved it off. The tan of his face looked like a mask above the fresh white of his newly shaved jowls and chin. He picked out the best of his linen and dressed. Lastly, he put on the old tweed suit. It fell naturally to the lines of his body, all except the waistband of the trousers. He drew the back strap as close as it would go. Still the trousers were a little loose at the waist. At first he was puzzled, then he understood. He looked at himself in the broken glass with a gorgeous, but sadly tarnished, frame that hung on the wall. His shoulders seemed to carry the coat better than before.

Gerry turned from the glass with a sigh. He was restless. The heavy tweeds seemed to bind his limbs and chest, but he would not take them off. He sat at the window and watched the little sternwheeler splash up to the bank. Luckily for her, she had been three days late in