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 his scouting above the flood country, he had now and again glimpsed a few of these great tawny creatures of the cat tribe that the waters had driven from their forest haunts. Out in the open these others had merely slunk off, hiding from even the shadow of the airplane that passed over them.

But cornered, the panther was a different beast. He was ferocious, and fought to kill.

This one, sides sunken with hunger, flat ugly head weaving back and forth, jaws snarling open, crouched tense in its corner.

A sudden ague shook Hal's hand till the spotlight wavered up and down the walls. The next instant he controlled himself, held the torch glow again on the beast before him. In the space of that instant, the panther had glided out from his corner. The light flung into his fiery eyes sent him motionless again--but how long would the spell-binding of the torchlight last?

Hal Dane moistened dry lips, shaped his mouth to whistle, and at last forced out a shrill sound. He had seen steady whistling charm small animals like rabbits and foxes into a momentary "freeze". He prayed, that it would work now. Dry-mouthed or not, he must keep up this shrilling ten seconds, twenty seconds--till his hand could lift his revolver from its hip holster, till he could take aim.

It was a six-shooter, but he remembered, with a chilling to his very marrow, that there was only one shot left. He had used the other five picking off rattlesnakes that had seemed determined to move into the dry haunts of the human refugees.

A sudden switching of tail tip, a lower crouching of the powerful tawny body, told that the spring was imminent.

Steady! Because the head hung low, he must aim at the brain through the eye.

But before Hal's gun could belch forth its one shot, the great beast had leaped. 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 flung himself backwards out of the window. Instead of landing in a waiting boat, he plunged into the cold, yellow depths of flood water.

He came up sputtering and choking. But after the first shock of his submersion, he felt no alarm. He was a strong swimmer and could keep afloat for hours if necessary. He bumped into what he thought was a drifting log, but it turned out to be a derelict canoe upside down. He clung to that and shouted. His electric torch and revolver had been lost as he leaped from the window, almost under the impact of the panther's downward slashing claws.

Hal's lusty shouting soon produced results. The rescue launch which had drifted down stream, put about and with its headlight spraying the water surface with its searching glare, nosed cautiously back up alongside of him and his float. Strong hands hauled him aboard and a warm blanket was flung around him.

Colonel Wiljohn was storming up and down the little craft in a rage at his crew for deserting Hal in his time of peril.

The fellow at the steering wheel was rather shamefaced over letting a gunshot and panther caterwauls shake his hand so that the boat shot from his control and into midstream.

"D-don't blame you," chattered Hal, drawing the blanket tighter about his dripping person, "if it s-s-sounded half as awful to you all outside as 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 to suffer lingeringly, or perhaps to injure someone else who might enter the place, the boat was drawn again within sight-range of the drifting old house. Lights were played over the upper story room, now so nearly submerged.

The long tawny form lay stretched on the floor, without sign of movement. Hal's one shot had done its work.

Hope died hard in Colonel Wiljohn's breast. His mind told him that the shrill "woman screams" that had lured Hal to this place could only have been the panther's call--so like a woman crying in distress. To satisfy himself, however, the Colonel searched every possible part of the floating, careening old house. With an axe he forced an entrance through the warped, swollen doors to the three upper rooms, searched closets and cupboards. He found no woman and child hiding away from that other passenger,--the great, tawny panther cat. A pitiful litter of clothes, books, a few small toys, deserted when the home-dwellers had to flee for their 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 his bones. After his report was made out, he flung himself down in his tent to snatch a bit of sleep. With thirty-six hours of steady strain and flying behind him, slumber claimed him the instant he hit his bunk. But tired 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 the motor to his strange gyroscope plane. He found the radio installed. Workmen from headquarters had done it while he used the seaplane the day before. Everything was in working order. He tested the instruments and found that they were of the best. A few taps and a message would go speeding through the air.

Even this early in the day, a small crowd gathered to watch the squat old hen, the newfangled plane, make its rise. As the rotors stiffened with their power whirl and the thing took off, Hal heard a sound of cheering drift up to him faintly. For all its awkward look, this thing did 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 his own. In the dusk of yesterday, as he clung to the drifting, upside-down canoe, and the lights from the launch had played over it, the name painted on the battered derelict had seemed to sear into his brain. The letters had been inverted and he had read them but subconsciously at first, then their meaning had suddenly seemed to burn into his brain in letters 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 riverside resort. Malden was miles below where he and the drifting boat had collided yester evening. So that meant someone had gone up-river in the canoe and let it get away to come drifting back down. That someone could be the Wiljohns. What had happened to them? Were they alive after all this time? More likely, dead!

It was all too frail a clew to build any hopes on. Hal could not bear to mention it to Colonel Wiljohn. He had suffered too much already, to have another castle of hope built up, only to have it crash into bitter disappointment.

Young Dane flew his craft southward with the flood to a location he had noted the day before, marked by a gnarled oak on a ridge lifting its battered branches slightly above the torrent. It was near here that he had first sighted the house of the panther screams. This big piece of drift and the derelict canoe must have entered the main flood out of the mouth of Tanabee Creek--or what had once been Tanabee Creek. That humble stream was now a mile-wide torrent, filling a valley. The overflow from the burst dam at Nelgat Lake had swamped this broad level.

Here the devastation had been terrible. As Hal pushed farther in this direction than he had been before, he constantly came upon sights that taxed his every sympathy. Many times he saw the bodies of men, women and children floating with the current. With a sinking heart, he swept low over those sightless faces turned toward the sky--searching, searching, but he had not found them yet. Numberless dead animals drifted down with the flood. Shattered homes rocked to and fro on the pull of currents, followed often by a welter of broken furniture,--chairs, a baby carriage, a cupboard that had once held dear family possessions.

Deeper into this desolation he pressed. About him everywhere, life seemed to have been smothered out under the waters.

He had been flying slowly, searchingly, for more than an hour, when his hawklike gaze focused upon a tiny rim of land, a crescent-shaped island barely showing above the torrent. The force of currents was eating steadily at the thin line of land. As Hal watched, a portion crumbled and toppled into the flood.

And then as he swooped down nearer, he saw to his horror that there was a human figure on that slender stretch of ground. He dropped closer, closer, the spread wings of the rotor above his machine letting him down as gently as though he hung in a great parachute. He dropped to a mere forty feet above the flood, to thirty. He could see a white dress, a woman's long hair flung out on the ground. She was apparently dead.

With every moment the rim of land was submerging. Soon the ravening yellow torrent would sweep over the last vestige. It seemed utter folly to risk a life and a plane for one already dead. Still there might be a flickering spark of vitality in that still body.

No use to tap radio messages for help. No help beyond himself could reach this doomed spot in time.

He must land on this narrow bit of earth already crumbling from the wash of the waves.

Under its strange whirl of wings, the gyroscope plane dropped straight as a plummet. A deviation to the right or to the left, and aircraft, aviator and all would have been engulfed in a roaring torrent without one chance in a thousand of escape.

But his trained eye had measured distances carefully. In that straight drop he landed well in the middle of the tiny land crescent, and where it was least narrow.

In the drawing of a breath, he was out of the cockpit and running toward the prostrate figure. Even at the thump of the machine to earth, that one had not stirred. But now, out from under a shelter of brush a child came creeping, a little boy that even this much effort seemed to exhaust, for he slumped down weakly.

It was Jacky Wiljohn!

"Jacky! Jacky!" shouted Hal Dane, "run for the plane, quick, while I bring your mother!" As he spoke, he could feel the rim of land trembling beneath him, crumbling to the awful power of the waters.

But the child lay where he had dropped. It was as though his last faint store of energy had been used in his effort to creep into the open.

Hal had already lifted the woman across his shoulder where she hung limp. He was staggering under this burden, yet he must add more. With a quick swoop, he seized one of the child's hands and dragging him, took a few swaying steps forward.

Ten paces, twelve paces! Would he ever make it?

He sagged against the cockpit, slid the woman in; with another motion he swept the child in beside her.

Like mad, he spun the motor and leaped for the fuselage as the great horizontal wings began their first slow whirl.

Before him a whole end of the narrow island broke off and the flood foamed and roared across the place where land had been a moment ago.

Behind, there was a crash and sound of the torrent pouring over. Hal could not turn to look, but he knew what was happening. Earth toppling into the flood!

Would those four rotor blades above him ever stiffen with enough lifting power for flight?

Within ten feet of the gyroscope's nose water poured over the crumbled land edge. No room for even the slightest run now. Those rotors must lift straight up with their extra burden--or it would mean the end.

Centrifugal force was whirling the limp flimsiness of the rotors into an engine of mighty lifting power. Flexible steel stiffened as it spun a thousand, two thousand whirls to the minute.

The gyroscope was rising, slowly, not straightly as it should. Wrong balance of its burden shifted the take-off climb from perpendicular to an 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 was no island at all, merely a surging waste of waters where he had just been. The last of the land rim had crumbled.

Now that he was above it all, his heart beat to the zooming roar of his rotors.

Speed! Speed! He must wing it back before life force ebbed entirely from those limp bodies behind him. Already his tapping fingers had flung the message of his find into the ether.