ill lay. His heart was heavy with the hardest duty he had
ever known in all his life.

But as he reached a point half way between the two houses he suddenly
stopped. At that moment every man on the little street stopped also.

The routine of the patrol had been relaxed in the excitement of these
late events. Indeed, it seemed tacitly agreed that the climax had
come, so that there was no need now for further guardianship of the
property. It was not so.

The sound was a short, heavy moan, as nearly as it may be described,
and not a sharp rending note; a vast, deep groan, somewhere deep in the
earth, as though a volcano were about to erupt. It was not over in an
instant, but went on, like the suppressed lamentations of some creature
trying to break its chains. It might have been some prehistoric,
tremendous creature, unknown to man, unknown to these times. But it
was our creature. It was of our day. Else it could never have been.

Then the ground under the feet of every man on the little street
lifted, gently, slowly, and sank down again. As it did so a tremendous
reverberation gathered and broke out, ran up and down the canyon, up
the opposite cliff face, echoing and rising as dense and thick as smoke
does. The rack-rock charge, of no one may know how many hundreds of
pounds, had done its work.

And then all earth went back to chaos. A new world was in the making.
There arose in that narrow, iron-sided gorge a havoc such as belike
surpassed that of the original breaking through of the waters. That
first slow work of nature might have been done drop by drop, a little
at a time. But now all the outraged river was venting itself in one
epochal instant. Its accumulated power was rushing through the wall
that held it back from the seas--the vast vengeance of the waters,
which they had sought covertly all this time, now was theirs.

An uncontrollable and immeasurable force was set loose. No man may
measure the actual horse power that lay above the great dam of the Two
Forks--it never was a comprehensible thing. A hundred Johnstown
reservoirs lay penned there. That there was so little actual loss of
life was due to the fact that there were few settlements in the sixty
miles below the mouth of the great canyon itself. A few scattered dry
farms, edging up close to the river in the valley far below, were
caught and buried. Hours later, under the advancing flood, all the
live stock of the valley was swept a