The fugitives climbed up higher, followed by the cat and dog, and the burros which had been left in the corrals; but the flood bore swiftly on, leaving the ranch unsullied by its burden of brush and mud. The jamb broke down again, letting out a second gush of water which crept up among the lower trees, but just as the Gorge opened up for the third time the flood-crest struck the lower gorge and stopped. Once more the trees and logs which had formed the jamb above bobbed and floated on the surface of a pond; and while the Campbells gazed and wept the turbid flood swung back swiftly, inundating their ranch with its mud. First the orchard was overflowed, then the garden above the road, then the corrals and the flowers by the gate; and as they ran about distracted the water crept up towards the house and out over the verdant alfalfa. But just when it seemed as if the whole ranch would be destroyed there was a smash from the lower point; the jamb went out, draining the waters quickly away and rushing on towards the Sink. The great mass of mud and boulders which had been brought down by the flood ceased to spread out and cover their fields, and as the millrace of waters continued to pour down the canyon it began to dig a new streambed in the débris. Then the thunder of its roaring subsided by degrees and by sundown the cloudburst was past. Where the creek had been before there was a wider and deeper creek, its sides cumbered with huge boulders and tree-trunks; and the mixture of silt and gravel which formed its cut banks already had set like cement. It _was_ cement, the same natural concrete which Nature combines everywhere on the desert--gravel and lime and bone-dry clay, sluiced and mixed by the passing cloudburst and piled up to set into pudding-stone. And all the mud which had overlaid the garden and orchard was setting like a concrete pavement. The ancient figs and peach-trees, half buried in the slime, rose up stiffly from the fertile soil beneath; and the Jail Canyon Ranch, once so flamboyantly green, was now shore-lined with a blotch of dirty gray. Only the alfalfa patch remained, and the house on the hill--everything else was either washed away or covered with gravel and dirt. And the road--it was washed away too.