“Where man?” demanded Jennie Stone.
“Running this way. Why! what can have happened?” Helen pursued. “Look, Tom, has there been an accident?”
A hatless man came running from the far end of the bench. He was swinging his arms and his mouth was wide open, though they could not hear what he was shouting. The noise of the spurting water and falling rubble drowned most other sounds.
“Why, girls,” shouted Ann Hicks, and her voice rose above the noise of the hydraulic, “that’s the feller that guided us up here. That’s Peters!”
“Flapjack Peters?” repeated Tom. “The man acts as if he were crazy!”
The bewhiskered and roughly dressed man gave evidence of exactly the misfortune Tom mentioned. His eyes blazed, his manner was distraught, and he came on along the bench in great leaps, shouting unintelligibly.
“He is intoxicated. Let us go away,” Miss Cullam said promptly.
But the excitement of the moment held the girls spellbound, and Miss Cullam herself merely stepped back a pace. A crowd of men were chasing the irrepressible Peters. Their shouts warned the fellow at the nozzle of the hydraulic machine.
He turned to look over his shoulder, the stream of water still plowing down the wall of gravel and soil. It bored directly into the hillside and down fell a huge lump, four or five tons of debris.
“Git back out o’ here, ye crazy loon!” yelled the man, shifting the nozzle and bringing down another pile of rubble.