Round a great fire in the Town Hall were huddled a number of half-naked creatures, who had been driven out of their dilapidated homes; some of them had seen children or relatives perish in the flood they had themselves so narrowly escaped, and were bemoaning them with chattering teeth.
Little spoke them a word of comfort, promised them all clothes as soon as the shops should open, and hurried off to the lower part of the town in search of Ransome.
He soon found the line the flood had taken. Between Poma Bridge and Hillsborough it had wasted itself considerably in a broad valley, but still it had gone clean through Hillsborough twelve feet high, demolishing and drowning. Its terrible progress was marked by a layer of mud a foot thick, dotted with rocks, trees, wrecks of houses, machinery, furniture, barrels, mattresses, carcasses of animals, and dead bodies, most of them stark naked, the raging flood having torn their clothes off their backs.
Four corpses and two dead horses were lying in a lake of mud about the very door of the railway station; three of them were females in absolute nudity. The fourth was a male, with one stocking on. This proved to be Hillsbro' Harry, warned in vain up at Damflask. When he actually heard the flood come hissing, he had decided, on the whole, to dress, and had got the length of that one stocking, when the flying lake cut short his vegetation.
Not far from this, Little found Ransome, working like a horse, with the tear in his eyes.
He uttered a shout of delight and surprise, and, taking Little by both shoulders, gazed earnestly at him, and said, "Can this be a living man I see?"
"Yes, I am alive," said Little, "but I had to work for it: feel my clothes."
"Why, the are dryer than mine."
"Ay; yet have been in water to the throat; the heat of my body and my great exertions dried them. I'll tell you all another day: now show me how to do a bit of good; for it is not one nor two thousand pounds I'll stick at, this night."
"Come on."
Strange sights they saw that night.
They found a dead body curled round the top frame of a lamppost, and, in the suburbs, another jammed between a beam and the wall of a house.
They found some houses with the front wall carried clean away, and, on the second floor, such of the inmates as had survived huddled together in their night-clothes, unable to get down. These, Ransome and his men speedily relieved from their situation.
And now came in word that the whole village of Poma Bridge had been destroyed.
Little, with Ransome and his men, hurried on at these sad tidings as fast as the mud and ruins would allow, and, on the way, one of the policemen trod on something soft. It was the body of a woman imbedded in the mud.
A little further they saw, at some distance, two cottages in a row, both gutted and emptied. An old man was alone in one, seated on the ground-floor in the deep mud.
They went to him, and asked what they could do for him.
"Do? Why let me die," be said.
They tried to encourage him; but he answered them in words that showed how deeply old Shylock's speech is founded in nature:
"Let the water take me--it has taken all I had."
When they asked after his neighbors, he said he believed they were all drowned. Unluckily for HIM, he had been out when the flood came.
Little clambered into the other cottage, and found a little boy and girl placidly asleep in a cupboard upstairs.
Little yelled with delight, and kissed them, and cuddled them, as if they had been his own, so sweet was it to see their pretty innocent faces, spared by death. The boy kissed him in return, and told him the room had been full of water, and dada and mamma had gone out at the window, and they themselves had floated in the bed so high he had put his little sister on the top shelf, and got on it himself, and then they had both felt very sleepy.
"You are a dear good boy, and I take you into custody," said Ransome, in a broken voice.
Judge if this pair were petted, up at the Town Hall.
At Poma Bridge the devastation was horrible. The flood had bombarded a row of fifty houses, and demolished them so utterly that only one arch of one cellar remained; the very foundations were torn up, and huge holes of incredible breadth and depth bored by the furious eddies.
Where were the inhabitants?
Ransome stood and looked and shook like a man in an ague.
"Little," said he, "this is awful. Nobody in Hillsborough dreams the extent of this calamity. I DREAD THE DAWN OF DAY. There must be scores of dead bodies hidden in this thick mud, or perhaps swept through Hillsborough into the very sea."
A little further, and they came to the "Reindeer," where he had heard the boon-companions singing--over their graves; for that night, long before the "cock did craw, or the day daw," their mouths were full of water and mud, and not the "barley bree."
To know their fate needed but a glance at the miserable, shattered, gutted fragment of the inn that stood. There was a chimney, a triangular piece of roof, a quarter of the inside of one second-floor room, with all the boards gone and half the joists gone, and the others either hanging down perpendicular or sticking up at an angle of forty-five. Even on the side furthest from the flood the water had hacked and plowed away the wall so deeply, that the miserable wreck had a jagged waist, no bigger in proportion than a wasp's.
Not far from this amazing ruin was a little two-storied house, whose four rooms looked exactly, as four rooms are represented in section on the stage, the front wall having been blown clean away, and the furniture and inmates swept out; the very fender and fire-irons had been carried away: a bird-cage, a clock, and a grate were left hanging to the three walls.
As a part of this village stood on high ground, the survivors were within reach of relief; and Little gave a policeman orders to buy clothes at the shop, and have them charged to him.