Half the road was underwater now and Oliver could sit on his front porch and look off into a vast wet world, a stretch of muddy water reaching all the way across the field to the creek unbroken save by the treetrunks and the tips of the brush. He’d had to move the goats to higher ground and set pans and tincans under leaks he hadn’t even known his house had. He sat on his porch like some grim and hopedrained survivor awaiting rescue or the ultimate cessation of the waters.

Winer had followed the ridge down through the woods. “Did you ever see it rain like this?” he asked the old man.

“I expect I have,” Oliver said. “I don’t know as I’ve ever seen it keep it up this long though.”

Hardin watched the water in the branch rise. A thin line of foamy spray strung over the rim of the pit and increased even as he watched. When he came back out an hour later the hollow was filled with a rushing perpetual thunder and he could not even approach the abyss. A stream of muddy yellow water six or eight feet wide cascaded out of the hollow and he could hear it boiling and churning far down in the pit.

Later on the fourth day Hardin looked up toward the hillside where a quartet of dark and sodden figures hailed him. Four foolhardy souls driven by challenge or thirst to walk the six miles made twelve or more by twisting and turning required to keep to the ridges and out of the waterglutted roads and hollows.

These travelers were the three De Preist brothers and a young whore named Bledsoe they had picked up somewhere. They wanted something to drink.

“Wolf ain’t got a drop,” they told him. “Sold out to the last dram and can’t get no more.”

They drank up what money they had and then a halfpint. Hardin set the De Preists to gather firewood for when the day grew chill. While they cut lengths of rotten planking and last year’s beanstalks and old sodden rails deposited by floodwaters the whore sat steaming by the fire and plaited her hair with a kind of demure and drunken dignity.

The kept saying they guessed they’d better get on but they never left. Like cats they slept on the floor before the fire and like cats fell to fighting over the whore sometime deep in the night. Great thumpings arose, overturnings of furniture, chairs thrown against the wall. Outraged and squalling and swearing to Hardin leapt naked from the bed and drove them to the last brother into the rain at gunpoint, not even letting them shelter on the porch but backing them down the steps into the gray drizzle and going back inside thumbbolted the door.

They made peace among themselves and conspired to burn Hardin out but possessed not a dry match amongst them. The youngest spent a drunken hour trying to strike sparks with a pocketknife and piece of flint. At last they gave up and retreated to the barn and left at first light, sullen and hungover, the whore abandoned.

The old man was asleep worrying some old dream when the rain ceased and when it did he awoke immediately. Water was dripping sporadically into a coffee can he’d set under a leak, then that ceased too he could hear the creek. He arose from the swing he’d been catnapping in. In the west a band of clear sky lay above the treeline, a thin crescent of sun gleaming on the clouds above it. The clouds were the color of gold and they gleamed like something hammered from burnished metal.

Wearing an old black coat and a straw hat he’d resurrected from somewhere Oliver looked like a scarecrow made clumsily animate. Carrying an enamel waterbucket he crossed his juryrigged system of planks spanning the stream’s meanderings, at last just giving up and wading in, the water swirling cold as ice about his thighs. “Waistdeep in water and havin to tote a bucket for more,” he complained to himself. “If that ain’t the beat.”

Chestnut boards nailed in a V and shoved into an orifice in the limestone bluff fed the water into the springbox. The water was cold and virid. Mossgreen, it swirled against the lichened cedar planking of the springbox. Oliver stood immersed in the roar of water, the thousand seepings and drippings of a veritable mountain of water loosely contained by the fissured limestone, the continuous roar of the falls above him. It was deep shade here, cool, and dark. The perpetually wet earth was a ferment of watercress and the air drugged with peppermint.