“John, she’s gone.”
A look of sympathy softened the Swede’s homely face.
Bruce straightened up.
“Gone!” he reiterated—“gone.”
Johnson might guess a little but he could never guess the whole of the despair which seemed to crush Bruce like an overwhelming weight as he stood looking at the sun shining upon the back of the twisting green snake of a river that he had thought he could beat; Johnson never had risked and lost anybody’s money but his own, he never had allowed a woman he loved to build her hopes upon his judgment and success. To have failed so quickly and so completely—oh, the mortification of it! the chagrin!
Finally Johnson said gently:
“Guess we might as well go back.”
Bruce winced. It reminded him what going back meant. To discharge the crew and telegraph his failure to Helen Dunbar, Harrah and the rest, then to watch the lumber dry out and the cracks widen in the flume, the rust take the machinery and the water-wheel go to ruin—that’s what going back meant—taking up his lonely, pointless life where he had left it off, growing morbid, eccentric, like the other failures sulking in the hills.
“There were parts of two dynamos, one 50 horse-power motor, a keeper, and a field, beside the fly-wheel in the boat.” Bruce looked absently at Johnson but he was talking to himself. “I wonder, I wonder”—a gleam of hope lit up his face—“John, go up to Fritz Yandell’s and borrow that compass that he fished out of the river.”