om what had been
the reservoir.

The partners stood, as if paralyzed, on the edge of the gulch, and
looked down. The catastrophe, coming on top of all that had gone
before, was a death blow, stupefying, stupendous, and hopelessly
irremediable.

"Well, you were right," Dick said despairingly. "They've got us at
last!"

Bill nodded, without shifting his eyes from the ruin below. They stood
for another minute before scrambling down the canyon's steep side to
inspect more closely the way the vandalism had been effected. Slipping
down the muddy bank, heedless of their clothing or bruised hands, they
clambered over the broken pieces of wall, and looked upward through
the great hole and into the daylight beyond. The blow was too great to
permit of mere anger. It was disaster supreme, and they could find no
words in that time of despondency.

"I'll give a hundred dollars toward a reward for the man who did
that," shouted a voice, hoarse with indignation, above them; and they
looked up to see the smith on the bank, shaking his smudged and
clenched fist in the air.

"And I'll take a hundred more," growled one of the drill runners in
the augmenting group behind him.

And then, as if the blow had fallen equally on all, the men of
the Cross stormed and raved, and clambered over the ruins and
anathematized their unknown enemy; all but one known as Jack
Rogers, the boss millman, who silently, as if his business had
rendered him mute as well as deaf, stood looking up and down the
gulch. While the others continued their inspection of the damage,
he drifted farther and farther away, intent on the ground about him,
and the edge of the stream. Suddenly he stooped over and picked up
something water-stained and white. He came back toward them.

"Whoever did the one job," he said tersely, "did both. Probably one
man. Set the fuses at the power-house, then came on here and set
these. Then he must have got away by going to the eastward."

"For heaven's sake, how do you figure that out?" Dick asked eagerly,
while the others gathered closer around, with grim, inquiring faces,
and leaned corded necks forward to catch the millman's words.

"I found a piece of fuse down at the power plant," he said. "See, here
it is. It's a good long one. The fellow that did the job knew just how
long it would take him to walk here; and he knew fuse, and he knew
dynamite. The proof that he did it that way is shown by this short
piece of fuse I found dow