Dick braced and Larry shoved. There was a tearing of screws from their holdings and the door swung open. Wading into the kitchen they made their way to the front of the house and got to the porch in time to see their canoe, with two swaying figures in it paddling for dear life, disappear among the half-submerged houses. Larry slipped out of his rain coat and began to get rid of everything down to shirt and trousers, and Dick quickly followed his example. The flooded area behind the levee was now completely deserted, and there was little hope that they would be missed and sought for in time to do any good. “What’d we better do?” Dick asked. “Shall we swim for it? Or would it be safer to take a chance with the house when it floats off its foundations?” They were saved the trouble of making the decision. While they were still stripping to be prepared for the worst there was an earthquake upheaval somewhere in the background, followed instantly by the onsweep of a wall of water that toppled the house sidewise from its underpinning and heaved it over into a street which had suddenly become a seething millrace of mud, water and wreckage, and the catastrophe had climaxed. Going over it afterward, neither one of them could give any connected account of the battle for life into which the breaking of the levee had flung them. With a thousand chances to one of being overwhelmed in the watery avalanche, they clung to one of the porch pillars of the overturned house; choked, climbed and clung again when the house was dashed against an embankment which they took to be the Main Street fill at the bridge end; had a passing glimpse of the bridge itself shuddering to its fall; were buried and half-drowned once more when the approach fill gave way before the onrushing flood; and finally emerged, gasping, in a tangle of trees, broken buildings and floating débris of all sorts caught against a barrier which they presently realized was the lower railroad bridge. Cautiously, and in darkness that was almost thick enough to be felt, and also in momentary fear that this second bridge would go out and leave them struggling again, they clambered over the floating islands of wreckage, pulled themselves up to the almost submerged railroad structure, and groped their way on hands and knees over the cross-ties until they found that they were crawling in the mud of the mainland. Here Dick dropped like a stone, and Larry had to work over him for quite a little while before he was able to get up and stumble on. Luckily, they found themselves on their own side of the river, and by making a long circuit over the railroad track, they got back to the college suburb.