ith the fright. Even Colonel Witham, mindful now of the
situation, was there to let them in and allow them the warmth of the
fire.

"You're soaking wet," he said to Henry Burns. "There's some old clothes
that Jim Ellison left, hanging in that closet on the floor above.
They'll swallow you, but they're dry."

Henry Burns darted up the stairs.

As he did so, the stairs trembled and shook beneath his feet. The whole
mill seemed to be quivering on its foundations. At the same moment, a
cry went up from the outside that the dam had given way. The crowd
gathered on the bank saw a piece of the dam suddenly collapse, through
which aperture a mass of logs, grinding blocks of ice and debris from up
stream tore its way.

Then screams came from the mill. Terrified, the crowd, gazing, saw one
side of it totter and sway. The sound of wrenching timbers, collapsing
frame-work and the twisting of iron filled the air.

Henry Burns, clutching a window frame, saw the panorama of the stream in
tumult, of the shattered dam, and of the distant shore, suddenly open up
before his eyes, as a great mass of the mill, its foundations torn away,
sagged off and plunged into the waters. He, on the upper floor, and his
companions on the floor below, found themselves at once upon the brink
of the swift-running waters of the stream, saved, as by a miracle, by
the other half of the mill remaining firm.

Looking now upon the wreck, Henry Burns espied a strange thing. Three
pair of the huge grinding stones had gone with the destruction of that
part of the mill. One pair alone remained, just before him. It was that
pair upon which, on one occasion, James Ellison had placed his foot, in
satisfaction, and remarked that all was safe; stones that had ground no
grist for years before James Ellison's death, but which had been
disconnected from the shafting.

Now they were half upset, and one lay wrenched from the steel thread
that had held it down close to the lower one. Thus there was disclosed a
space cut in the lower stone, that held a small tin box, such as
merchants use for papers.

Henry Burns stared, for one brief moment, in amazement. Then, crawling
cautiously over, he seized the box and darted back to the window. He
swung himself out on to a small roof that covered the door below; hung
from that for a moment, and dropped into a heap of snow that had been
shovelled into a pile there. At the same moment, the little party on the
lower floor rushed