“What is it?” I says, getting to the door. And I see men begin to come out of the stores and get in knots and groups that you can tell mean trouble of some kind, just as plain as you can tell that some portraits of total strangers is the portraits of somebody that’s dead. They look dead. And them groups looked trouble. And then I see Timothy Toplady come tearing down the road in his spring wagon, with his horse’s check reins all dragging and him lashing out at ’em as he stood up in the box. Then I run right out in the road and yelled at him. “Timothy,” I says, “what’s the matter? What’s happened?” He drew up his horses, and threw out his hand, beckoning angular. “Come on!” he says, “get in here--get in quick....” Then he looked back over his shoulder and see Mis’ Merriman that had come out to her gate with Mis’ Sykes, and they was both out on the street, looking, and he beckoned, wild, to them; and they come running. “Quick!” says Timothy. “The dam’s broke. They’ve just telephoned everybody. The Flats’ll be flooded. Come on and help them women load their things....” I don’t remember any of us saying a thing. We just clomb in over the back-board of Timothy’s wagon, him reaching down to help us, courteous, and we set down on the bottom of the wagon--Mis’ Holcomb and Mis’ Sykes, them two enemies, and Mis’ Merriman and me--and we headed for the Flats. I remember, on the ride down there, seeing the street get thick with folks--in a minute the street was black with everybody, all hurrying toward what was the matter, and all veering out and swarming into the road--somehow, folks always flows over into the road when anything happens. And men and women kept coming out of houses, and calling to know what was the matter, and everybody shouted it back at them so’s they couldn’t understand, but they come out and joined in and run anyway. And over and over, as he drove, Timothy kept shouting to us how he had just been hitching up when the news come, and how his wagon was a new one and had ought to be able to cart off five or six loads at a trip. “It can’t hurt Friendship Village proper,” I remember his saying over and over too, “that’s built high and dry. But the whole Flats’ll be flooded out of any resemblance to what they’ve been before.”