"He is all right," said Thorpe."I wish I had more like him.The others are good boys, too."Five men were at the moment tugging futilely at a reluctant timber.
They were attempting to roll one end of it over the side of another projecting log, but were continually foiled, because the other end was jammed fast.Each bent his knees, inserting his shoulder under the projecting peavey stock, to straighten in a mighty effort.
"Hire a boy!" "Get some powder of Junko!" "Have Jimmy talk it out!""Try that little one over by the corner," called the men on top of the jam.
Everybody laughed, of course.It was a fine spring day, clear-eyed and crisp, with a hint of new foliage in the thick buds of the trees.
The air was so pellucid that one distinguished without difficulty the straight entrance to the gorge a mile away, and even the West Bend, fully five miles distant.
Jimmy Powers took off his cap and wiped his forehead.
"You boys," he remarked politely, "think you are boring with a mighty big auger.""My God!" screamed one of the spectators on top of the cliff.
At the same instant Wallace Carpenter seized his friend's arm and pointed.
Down the bed of the stream from the upper bend rushed a solid wall of water several feet high.It flung itself forward with the headlong impetus of a cascade.Even in the short interval between the visitor's exclamation and Carpenter's rapid gesture, it had loomed into sight, twisted a dozen trees from the river bank, and foamed into the entrance of the gorge.An instant later it collided with the tail of the jam.
Even in the railroad rush of those few moments several things happened.Thorpe leaped for a rope.The crew working on top of the jam ducked instinctively to right and left and began to scramble towards safety.The men below, at first bewildered and not comprehending, finally understood, and ran towards the face of the jam with the intention of clambering up it.There could be no escape in the narrow canyon below, the walls of which rose sheer.
Then the flood hit square.It was the impact of resistible power.
A great sheet of water rose like surf from the tail of the jam;a mighty cataract poured down over its surface, lifting the free logs; from either wing timbers crunched, split, rose suddenly into wracked prominence, twisted beyond the semblance of themselves.
Here and there single logs were even projected bodily upwards, as an apple seed is shot from between the thumb and forefinger.Then the jam moved.
Scotty Parsons, Jack Hyland, Red Jacket, and the forty or fifty top men had reached the shore.By the wriggling activity which is a riverman's alone, they succeeded in pulling themselves beyond the snap of death's jaws.It was a narrow thing for most of them, and a miracle for some.
Jimmy Powers, Archie Harris, Long Pine Jim, Big Nolan, and Mike Moloney, the brother of Bryan, were in worse case.They were, as has been said, engaged in "flattening" part of the jam about eight or ten rods below the face of it.When they finally understood that the affair was one of escape, they ran towards the jam, hoping to climb out.Then the crash came.They heard the roar of the waters, the wrecking of the timbers, they saw the logs bulge outwards in anticipation of the break.Immediately they turned and fled, they knew not where.
All but Jimmy Powers.He stopped short in his tracks, and threw his battered old felt hat defiantly full into the face of the destruction hanging over him.Then, his bright hair blowing in the wind of death, he turned to the spectators standing helpless and paralyzed, forty feet above him.
It was an instant's impression,--the arrested motion seen in the flash of lightning--and yet to the onlookers it had somehow the quality of time.For perceptible duration it seemed to them they stared at the contrast between the raging hell above and the yet peaceable river bed below.They were destined to remember that picture the rest of their natural lives, in such detail that each one of them could almost have reproduced it photographically by simply closing his eyes.Yet afterwards, when they attempted to recall definitely the impression, they knew it could have lasted but a fraction of a second, for the reason that, clear and distinct in each man's mind, the images of the fleeing men retained definite attitudes.It was the instantaneous photography of events.
"So long, boys," they heard Jimmy Powers's voice.Then the rope Thorpe had thrown fell across a caldron of tortured waters and of tossing logs.
Chapter XLIX
During perhaps ten seconds the survivors watched the end of Thorpe's rope trailing in the flood.Then the young man with a deep sigh began to pull it towards him.
At once a hundred surmises, questions, ejaculations broke out.
"What happened?" cried Wallace Carpenter.
"What was that man's name?" asked the Chicago journalist with the eager instinct of his profession.
"This is terrible, terrible, terrible!" a white-haired physician from Marquette kept repeating over and over.
A half dozen ran towards the point of the cliff to peer down stream, as though they could hope to distinguish anything in that waste of flood water.
"The dam's gone out," replied Thorpe."I don't understand it.
Everything was in good shape, as far as I could see.It didn't act like an ordinary break.The water came too fast.Why, it was as dry as a bone until just as that wave came along.An ordinary break would have eaten through little by little before it burst, and Davis should have been able to stop it.This came all at once, as if the dam had disappeared.I don't see."His mind of the professional had already began to query causes.
"How about the men?" asked Wallace."Isn't there something I can do?""You can head a hunt down the river," answered Thorpe."I think it is useless until the water goes down.Poor Jimmy.He was one of the best men I had.I wouldn't have had this happen---"The horror of the scene was at last beginning to filter through numbness into Wallace Carpenter's impressionable imagination.
