He was rolled over, kicking, ten feet downhill to the next ledge. He squealed shrilly, as a root scraped his tender snout. He struck the ledge more or less on his feet, and indignantly started to scramble out almost as he lit. But to scramble he had to crouch first, the buoyancy of the water tricked him again, and its sweep carried him away.

This time he went farther, and hit on his back with a crash. For a moment he had another chance, but he was already bruised, half-stunned, and completely confused. His feet pawed the air uselessly for an instant; then a new wave slewed his forequarters around, washed him off the ledge, and dropped him head-foremost. Six feet down, he hit with a thud, all but smashing one shoulder; the shock took all the fight out of him. Convulsively sucking in for another squeal, he sucked water instead of air.

From then on, he was an inert mass. The torrent hurled him end over end, and cracked his rump on a boulder. Where the water might have grounded him, his momentum as a falling body carried him on; it hurled him downward through bushes and vines. For the last thirty feet he rolled, spinning like a log. At the bottom he crashed through the barbed-wire fence, rolled three times more, and came to rest as his midriff suddenly crushed against something solid.

His whole descent had not occupied ten seconds. He had hit against the place where the two big pipes of a culvert came together. The culvert passed under the railway; his forequarters sagged limply inside one pipe; his hindquarters inside the other.

He was not yet dead, but he was too battered to save himself. The position of his body obstructed the flow, the water quickly rose higher, covered mouth and nostrils, and drowned him.

•

Opening the sluice-gates unaided was something of a job; when Martley had finished, he was tired. He listened for just a moment to the water sweeping through beneath him. Then he thought of the leak in his living-room, and the road washing away, and a dozen greater emergencies which might arise any moment. He turned and went rapidly along the narrow passageway leading to the hole up which he must climb. “Gotta hurry,” he thought. “Sure is a busy day!”

The passageway was just high enough for a man to walk; now and then his shoulders brushed the sides. Seepage water dripped from the top and oozed through the walls; the air was so wet that he half seemed to be breathing water; he coughed. From above, from the sides, the concrete of the great dam—millions of tons—pressed in upon him.

Ahead in the passageway as far as the bottom of the hole one electric light after another sent out a feeble yellow gleam. Then—without a warning flicker—they all went out. Black as Hell’s basement and the fires out!