Page:Cy Warman--The express messenger and other tales of the rail.djvu/16

4 the flood, that grew in volume and increased in speed alarmingly. When all this water came rushing down into the main cañon, the song of the stream that rippled there was hushed, the bed of the creek was filled with big boulders that had been rolled down by the flood, and a great river went roaring toward the plain. Up through this narrow, crooked cañon a narrow-gauge railroad ran to Silver Cliff. Silver Cliff at one time had thirty thousand people, then thirty hundred, and now not more than thirty people live there, unless their business compels them to do so. It produced some silver, a sensational murder, one Congressman, and petered out.

When the flood had gone a mile in the main cañon, and picked up eight or ten rail road bridges and all the dead timber in the gulch, it presented a rolling front twenty-five feet high and reached from hill to hill.

Great spruce trees were uprooted, the track, with the cross ties still hanging to the rails, was ripped up, and the rails, bending like wire, wound about the rolling débris and clogged the cañon. Then the welling flood would fill the