It was a trying moment for the two who stood alone on the threatened barrier. True enough, their way of escape was still open. All they had to do was to run back to the Main Street bridge and so gain the street and sprint to safety up the hill to higher ground. But, on the other hand, there were people on the lower ground, drenched groups lingering in the hope of still being able to save something from their dwellings. And on the rising lake, paddling to and fro among the slowly submerging houses, were a number of the Sheddon rescuers, all unconscious of the fate that was reaching for them. “Hi, there, you fellows!” shouted Dick, being the first to find his tongue, “paddle for it and drive those people up the hill!――the levee’s breaking!” The shouted-out warning didn’t do a bit of good. What with the crackling roar of the bonfires, the shouts of the rescuers, and the growling thunder of the flood, nothing short of a steam siren could have made itself heard from the top of the embankment. “It’s no use!” Larry bawled in Dick’s ear. “They can’t hear, and we’ve got to get ’em out of there quick. Come on!” Running quickly down the inner slope of the levee, they yelled the warning to the nearest boat-load. “Levee’s going! Get out――get out and warn the others!” they shouted, running along close to the water’s edge, and as they ran they saw the warned ones turning tail and paddling like mad for the landward shore, spreading the warning as they went. But even so, the pair who had started the thing could not have covered the entire area if they hadn’t had the good luck to find a stranded canoe that had gotten away from its owner and drifted over to the levee shore of the flooded district. “Here’s what we need!” gasped Larry, fairly falling into the treasure-trove canoe. “Grab that paddle and dig for it! There are more of the fellows up there among those shacks just ahead!” As he spoke, a row-boat, loaded to the gunwales with refugees and their dunnage and pulled by Welborn and another of the Aggies, came through an opening between two of the houses. Welborn and his partner had already got the warning and were hurrying for all they were worth, but they backed water long enough to shout to the two in the canoe. “All out but a couple o’ the fellows over in that farther house. Their canoe’s stove. We hadn’t room for ’em: go get ’em!” At the word, Larry and Dick dipped the paddles and sent their light craft spinning toward the outlying house, a story-and-a-half frame with the water already lapping over the window sills on the main floor. Approaching it from the rear, they saw no signs of the marooned ones. As they backed water at the kitchen door another rumbling slump and a splash told them that more of the levee had been carried away by the river. Their time was frightfully short, and they knew it.