Lee did not know just what had happened in that brief interval when he nodded at his post, but he awoke to find himself sprawled in the midst of radio wreckage on the floor of his cabin, which was reeling and rocking, adrift in the flood. Water swishing over his face had brought him around. It was coming in fast now, and the cabin was sinking. He would have to get out.

Something must have struck him when the flood swept off the cabin, for his head throbbed dizzily. Nevertheless he managed to climb to the rafters, dragging with him his little shoulder-pack radio though he feared the fall had ruined it. Hacking with his pocket-knife, he tore off enough shingles to let himself out on the roof.

All about him stretched a horrible yellow sea. On its drift were other flood-loosed buildings, tangle of house furnishings, swollen dead animals, bellies up, and now and then a human corpse.

Like some frail skiff sucked into the wake of a great ocean liner, Lee's sodden little roof rolled smashingly against a big two-story cupolaed dwelling that was careening magnificently on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. The boy was catapulted into the air, then down into the flood, and came up, swimming for life. When the waves flung him against the big derelict again, he clung desperately to the ragged planking of what once must have been the porch, caught his breath, and began to draw himself up into this new haven of doubtful safety.

Heavy with weariness and the weight of water, it was a momentous matter to inch himself up the house wall to gain a high window sill and to crawl over. Half-fainting from exhaustion, he fell inside on the slippery floor.

A voice beat in his ears. It was startling to have words come out of that shadowy corner across the room.

"Hi, stranger! A perilous ride we're having!" Lying on the floor was a heavy-built man with iron-gray hair, and skin bronzed almost to mahogany. His face was drawn with pain and one leg was stiffly bound in crude splints made of broken chair slats. "Captain Jan Bartlot, explorer, welcomes you to his home." A hand was extended as Lee crawled across the floor. "Devil of an exploration we're on now! Looks like our last one, though I've been in worse fixes and come out-once in Egypt, another time in Borneo."

Lee felt that this was some mysterious dream he was having. The flood, the drifting, this man with bronzed face and queer accent-all seemed part and parcel of the dream. It was too strange to be true.

But it was true. And this did look to be the last voyage in this life for the man and the boy unless rescue came to them. But how could they get help-how let people know of their perilous position?

His radio could do it! If only he could make it work.

Lee's whole body was a mass of weariness; his head was still dizzy. But as his senses cleared, he mechanically set to work to repair his little shoulder-pack radio. On the wave-rocked floor he spread out the parts. The heavy little cogwheels, the crankshaft, the coil of stout wire-these could be patched together. Lee rummaged through the derelict house for repair material. He smashed open the swollen doors of closets and cupboards and found glass jars, some tins, nails and pieces of wire. With these he went forward with his task. But it was hopeless! He could find nothing to replace the delicate network of minute wiring that had crossed the little selenized sheets in the transmitter and receiver. The blow that had torn this fragile meshwork away had destroyed all usefulness of the radio. There was nothing for Lee to do except wait and watch the flood wastes for some rescue boat.

Meantime he would try to keep the stranger with the broken leg as comfortable as possible on that dipping, careening house floor. It is remarkable how, in times of dire stress, two utter strangers can be drawn together. In a short time they are as old friends. Friendship made and cemented by danger! Lee Renaud and Captain Bartlot talked of many things.

One could almost forget present danger in listening to Captain Bartlot, mining explorer, tell of the weird, out-of-the-way places of the world where he had gone in search of the rare stones and minerals that were his hobbies. He had prospected down in tropic jungles, where one had to dodge the poison darts of black head-hunters, where one encountered monster animals and reptiles. He had gone into the Arctic wastes, into the underground treasure-houses of buried cities, into the tombs of the ancients.

"If this ark of ours would only stop pitching so, why, boy, I'd show you some of the specimens I have in this case," Bartlot said, his hand touching a leather roll that lay beside him on the floor. "There's one of those rare green fire-diamonds from out of an Aztec king's tomb, and a piece of nickel-iron star stone from a meteor that fell in frozen Greenland. Rather far extremes, eh? A New York museum wants to buy my collection. I came back to my old home where I could catalog my specimens in peace and write up their histories for museum records. And after all my travels and close calls, here I am in my own living-room, my leg smashed by a cabinet sliding across the floor, and the whole house adrift on the flood tide of my native Alabama River."

The lurching of the drifting house ended the sentence in a groan, as the injured man, despite Lee's efforts, rolled across the floor.

"The water is coming in fast now," said Lee. "Do you think I could help you upstairs?"

With a bed slat for a crutch, Bartlot labored up the stairway, young Renaud lifting and tugging to the limit of his strength. Somehow they accomplished it though Bartlot fell unconscious when the last step was achieved. Diamonds in their leather roll and some useless radio junk had no particular value in a crisis like this. Nevertheless, Renaud returned to the first floor and carried these possessions, some tins of food, and a couple of soggy blankets up the slippery stair. Step by step, the hungry waters crept up and up behind him.

What would the end be? Would this sagging, sinking building last much longer? A booming detonation hurled a negative answer to the question.

A floating mass of logs and uprooted trees had crashed into a portion of the old house. Lower and lower in the flood tide rode the battered derelict. The water was coming up to the second floor.

There was still the cupola tower above the roof. If they could reach that! With a blanket knotted under the unconscious man's arms, Lee began to drag him up the narrow, ladder-like stair that led into this turret. His heart was sick at the horrible jolting he had to inflict on the injured man. A blessing on his unconsciousness! It must hold him in its pall until-until-now they were up!

Lee carried their belongings up this second flight, and wedged the trapdoor down between them and that creeping flood below. Here was safety until the house battered to pieces in the torrent.

Jan Bartlot came out of his stupor and lay very still, clenching his teeth against groaning.

Death lurked near. To keep his mind off the boom and thunder of the flood, off the lap of water creeping, creeping up toward their last refuge, Lee Renaud bent over his wrecked radio. His fingers straightened a loop of aerial here, made a connection there, cranked at the motor shaft for power. It was all no use. Too much of the selenized plate wiring missing! But he had to be doing something.

Crouching in this last lift of floor space, he idly drew his pencil point back and forth across the tiny receiver plate, outlining the mesh of missing wires-and almost screamed as a faint buzzing seemed to follow in the path of the pencil lines.

Extraordinary! Out of all reason! Electricity following a pencil line as though it were a wire!

A faint hope burned!

Like a madman, Lee cranked at the generator arm, adjusted transmitter and receiver, shot the buzzer.

And like a miracle sweeping over that yellow torrent, a sound came to him in the receiver:

"Renaud? That you? Been searching all night. First buzz signal just hit us. Where are you?"

"Stand by, Lem!" Renaud cranked frantically for more power. "Out in an old cupola top house-sinking fast. That double sugarloaf mountain peak looms just to the west of us."

"Airplanes searched there last night," wirelessed young Hicks. "Must a missed you. Coming again, two of 'em!"

But it wasn't an airplane that rescued them after all. To get an injured man out of a drifting house and aboard a ship of the air was beyond question. So Renaud stuck to his post till one of the rescue motor boats could thread the flood litter and circle in near enough to get a hawser to the derelict. Supporting the half-conscious Bartlot on life-preservers that had been flung to him, Lee kept his burden afloat till both could be drawn aboard.

* * *

In that night, when Lee had been swept adrift, the Sargon Sound district had seemed to progress a hundred years. Yesterday it had been a land on foot or on mule-back, without telephone or telegraph. Today on a height above the flood, a city of tents had sprung up. Motor trucks, muddy to the wheel top, showed how transportation had been accomplished. Supplies in stacks, a long hospital tent, doctors, nurses, a flotilla of seaplanes moored in the crescent-shaped harbor! A line of refugees filing into a field soup kitchen, and more refugees coming into safety aboard a bluntnosed steamer that had been scouring the islands!

Radio had done it! Radio had brought the assistance of a whole state to the relief of the flood sufferers down in this isolated district.

"Gosh!" Lee exclaimed as he stepped from the putt-putting little motor boat, "folks sure answered the call of that old Marconi 'brass pounder' in something like a-like a hurry!"

"Sho did!" Lem Hicks' voice was fervent. "And, boy, when you brought radio down here, you done something!"