way, all the houses and all the
fences and roads and bridges were wiped out as though they had never
been. But this was fifty, sixty, seventy miles away, and much later in
the morning. Those below could only guess what had happened far up in
the great Two Forks canyon. The big dam was broken!

The face of the giant dam, more solidly coherent than granite itself,
slowly, grandiose even in its ruin, passed out and down in a hundred
foot crevasse where the spill gates were widened by the high explosive.
A vast land slip, jarred from the cut-face mountain side above,
thundered down and aided in the crumbling of the dam. A disintegrated
mass of powdered concrete fell out, was blown apart. The face of the
dam on that part slowly settled down into a vast U. Then the waters
came through, leaping--a solid face of water such as no man may
comprehend.

An instant, and the canyon below the dam was fifty feet deep with a
substance which seemed not water, but a mass of shrieking and screaming
demons set loose under the name of no known element. There came a vast
roar, but with it a number of smaller sounds, as of voices deep down
under the flood, glass splintering, rocks rumbling. The gorge seemed
inhabited by furies. And back of this came the pressure of twenty
miles of water, a hundred feet deep, which would come through. The
river had its way again, raving and roaring in an anvil chorus of its
own, knocking the great bowlders together, shrieking its glee. The Two
Forks river came through the Two Forks canyon once more! Against it
there stood only the fragmental ruin of the great, gray face,
buttressed with concrete more coherent than granite itself, but all
useless here.

The tide rose very rapidly. The canyon was too crooked to carry off
the flood. The lower part of the town, where the street grade sank
rapidly, went under water almost at once. Horses, cows, sheep,
chickens, the odds and ends of such an encampment, gathered by vagrant
laborers, were swept down before opportunity could be found to save
them. Men and the few women in that part of town, employees of the
cook camp, abandoned their possessions and ran straight up the mountain
side, seeking only to get above the tide. Their houses were swept away
like cheese boxes. Logs were crushed together like straws. The sound
of it all made human speech inaudible anywhere close to the water's
edge.

The east half of the dam, that closer to the camp, still h