The next morning showed the water still rising, while there was no abatement of the tremendous rain, and so with the day succeeding. The fearful downpour continued and the waters still rose. Then came something like a panic among men as fearless as any upon earth. The dark waters beneath which lay such multitudes of drowned, of man and beast, came ever lapping upward hungrily toward us, and none could tell when the rising would cease. How we longed for boats, we who could handle boats so well! Then, in our desperation, we would make rafts! The work was begun at once. Driftwood tossed up by the great tidal wave was dragged together, dead trunks lying further up the mountainside were hacked into lengths and bound side by side with withes and strips of skin, and the work went forward feverishly. We had made rafts before. It was good for us, this work with its faint promise, distracting our minds somewhat from the perils we were in. As for myself I was but a poor workman that day, despite my strength. All appeared so dismal and so hopeless. The whole world seemed like a bad dream and I had many thoughts such as had never come to me before. No longer did I care what might be our plunder from this raiding journey of the band into unknown regions. I thought of the clean sandy beaches and the pleasant huts by the distant great sea and of the people we had left there, and a great desire came upon me to be with them again. Would the waters never cease rising until even the mountain was overwhelmed and we would have no further refuge and must die strangling at its top? It seemed to me then as if it might be so, though of course the thought was foolish. Then there came before my eyes the face of a girl with a leaf of scarlet in her hair. The face would not go away from me, the face of Red Leaf, as she had come to be called, because in the autumn, when the colours of the leaves changed, she always gathered many of the brightest and kept them in a skin bag in the hut of her father and mother and always wore one braided somewhere in her hair, which was as black as the wing of the raven or the black panther of the woods, and against which the scarlet ever shone out brightly.