At two o'clock the downpour ceased as abruptly as though it had been turned off at a spigot. Inside of twenty minutes the clouds had broken, to show beyond them a dazzling blue sky. Intermittent flashes and bands of sunlight glittered on the wet trees and bushes or threw into relief the black bands of storm clouds near the horizon. Immensely cheered, we threw aside our soggy blankets and sallied forth. "Great Christmas!" cried Johnny, who was in the advance. "Talk about your mud!" We did talk about it. It was the deepest, most tenacious, slipperiest, most adhesive mud any fiend ever imagined. We slid and floundered as though we had on skates; we accumulated balls of it underfoot; and we sank disconcertingly half-leg deep at every third step. Our first intention had been to go up to town; but we soon revised that, and went down to the Morena cabin instead, with the idea of looking after the two horses. The beasts, very shaggy underneath and plastered above, stood humped up nose to tail. We looked into the cabin. The roof had leaked like a sieve; and the interior was dripping in a thousand places. "Reckon even the tent was better after all," acknowledged Yank, looking with disfavour on the muddy floor. We returned to the tent and made shift to get a fire going. After cooking some hot food, we felt better, and set about drying our blankets. In the canon we could hear the river roaring away hollowly. "I'll bet she's on the rampage!" said Old. "I'll bet she's got my cradle and all of my tools!" I cried, struck with a sudden thought. And then, about as we commenced to feel cheerful and contented again, the scattered black clouds began to close ranks. One by one the patches of blue sky narrowed and disappeared. "Why!" cried Cal in astonishment, "I believe it's getting ready to rain again!" "Shucks!" replied Old, "It can't. There ain't no more rain." Nevertheless there was, and plenty of it. We spent that second night shifting as little as possible so as not to touch a new cold place in our sodden blankets, while the waters roared down in almost a solid sheet. This lasted the incredible period of four days! Nobody then knew anything about measuring rainfall; but, judging by later experience, I should say we must have had close to seven inches. There was not much we could do, except to get wetter and wetter, although we made shift to double up at night, and to use the extra blankets thus released to make a sort of double roof. This helped some. The morning of the fifth day broke dazzlingly clear. The sky looked burnished as a blue jewel; the sunlight glittered like shimmering metal; distant objects stood out plain-cut, without atmosphere. For the first time we felt encouraged to dare that awful mud, and so slopped over to town.