"If I'd known a thousand--" The sentence was never finished. The boat came to a sudden stop. Both occupants were thrown violently to the bottom where they floundered helplessly in their efforts to regain their feet. "What happened?" asked the girl, as she struggled to her knees, holding fast to the gunwale. "Oh, maybe we're ashore!" Both glanced about them as a distant flash of lightning threw its pale radiance over the surface of the flood. On every side was water--water, and the tossing branches of floating trees. The Texan was quieting the terrified horse that crouched at the farther end of the boat, threatening momentarily to become a very real menace by plunging and lashing out blindly in the darkness. "Struck a rock, I reckon," said the cowboy. "This cayuse'll be all right in a minute, an' I'll try to shove her off. Must be we've headed along some new channel. There hadn't ought to be rocks in the main river." The clumsy craft shifted position with an ugly grating sound as the current sucked and gurgled about it, and the whitecapped waves pounded its sides and broke in white foam over the gunwales. The Texan took soundings with the pole. "Deep water on three sides," he announced, "an' about a foot down to solid rock on the other. Maybe I can climb out an' shove her off." "No! No!" cried the girl, in a sudden panic of fear. "You can't swim, and suppose something should happen and the boat moved off before you could climb into it? You'd be washed off the rock in a minute, and I--I couldn't stand it alone!" "The way she's millin' around on the rock, I'm afraid she'll rip her bottom out. She's leakin' already. There's more water in here now, than when we started to bail." "Most of it splashed in over the side--see, when the waves break." "Maybe," assented the Texan, carelessly, but in the darkness he stooped and with his fingers located a crack where the planking had been forced apart, through which the river water gushed copiously. Without a word he stepped to the girl's saddle and took down the rope. "We've got to get off here," he insisted, "where'd we be if some big tree like the one that knocked me cold would drift down on us?" As he talked he passed the loop of the rope over his head and made it fast about his shoulders, and allowing ten or twelve feet of slack, knotted it securely to a ring in the end of the boat. "There, now I can get onto the rock an' by using the pole for a crow-bar, I can pry us off, then if I get left I'll just trail along on this rope until I can pull myself in."