The high ground had disappeared--the river--its banks the green area
beyond. They, and THEY alone, were afloat upon an inland sea.
He turned an astounded and serious face upon her mirth. "When did it
happen?" he demanded. She checked her laugh, more from a sense of polite
deference to his mood than any fear, and said quietly, "That gets me.
Everything was all right two hours ago when the wimmen left. It was
too early to get your breakfast and rouse ye out, and I felt asleep, I
reckon, until I felt a kind o' slump and a jar." Hemmingway remembered
his own half-conscious sensation. "Then I got up and saw we was adrift.
I didn't waken ye, for I thought it was only a sort of wave that would
pass. It wasn't until I saw we were movin' and the hull rising ground
gettin' away, that I thought o' callin' ye."
He thought of the vanished general store, of her father, the workers on
the bank, the helpless women on their way to the Bar, and turned almost
savagely on her.
"But the others,--where are they?" he said indignantly.
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