mountains. And
Conniston, dragging Argyl after him, cried out brokenly. Upon the dam
he had toiled for weeks, and now there was no one stone left of it!
And the first day of October was but five days off.

"Look!" Argyl was clinging to him wildly, her arm trembling as it
pointed. "Look! Oh, God!"

She did not point toward the dam. Her quivering finger found out a
moving figure far below it in the creek-bed. It was Hapgood. The
explosion which had demolished the work of weary weeks had shaken the
ground under his flying feet so that the loose soil no longer held
him. He had cried out aloud, had fought and clawed, had even bit with
blackened teeth into the steep bank. And it mocked him and slipped
away from him and hurled him, bruised and cut, to the bottom of the
canon.

Even as Conniston looked the freed waters which had chafed in the
great dam leaped forward, a monster river of churning white water and
whirling debris, and like a live thing, wrathful, vengeful, was
charging downward through the steep ravine. Hapgood had heard. They
had seen his white face turned for an instant over his shoulder. And
then his shriek rose high above the thunder of waters as he ran from
the merciless thing which his own hands had unchained.

They saw his one hope; saw that he, too, had seen it. With the water
hurling itself almost upon him, he gained the bank ten feet farther
downstream, where the sides were more gently sloping. They saw him
climb to a little shelf of rock a yard above the bottom of the creek.
They saw his hands thrust out above his head, grasping at the root of
a stunted tree. One more second--

But the fates did not grant the one single second. The churning,
frothing, angry maelstrom had caught at his legs, whipping them from
under him. They heard his shriek again, throbbing with terror, vibrant
with a fear which was worse than despair. They saw his face, white and
horrible, as he glanced again for a moment at the thing behind him.
And then the swirling water leaped up at him, snarling like some
mighty beast, and clutched at his throat, at his hands, and flung him
like a thing of no weight far down into its own tumultuous bosom. For
a moment they saw his arms, then they saw his hands clutching at the
foam-flecked face of the water--and then even the hands disappeared.

CHAPTER XXVII

"Who was it?"

It was Mr. Crawford's voice, calm, expressionless. Conniston and Argyl
swung about, the horror of the th