“Well,” sighed the stricken youth, “that must remain to be tested; all that I can now do is to ask you to suspend judgment, as they say.”
“You can give me your hand on it, Jim.”
It was a strange sight, when the two boys clasped hands on the bank of the subsiding flood, with the lifeless body at their feet, and one of them uttered his solemn promise that from that hour he would strive to follow the right path and shun the wrong one.
But that pledge, uttered years ago, remains unbroken to this day.
Dick Halliard was thrilled by the scene, which will always remain vivid in his memory. Despite the sorrowful surroundings a singular pleasure crept through his being, for conscience whispered that he had done a good deed in thus exhorting the wayward youth, and that it was on record in the great book above.
It was not the impressiveness of that silent form that so wrought upon the feelings of the youths, but the recollection of the missing one, whose body they believed was whirling about in the fierce currents of the torrent that was speedily exhausting itself in the deeper parts of the valley, or perhaps was lodged somewhere in the lower limbs of a tree, awaiting the morning for the shocked friends to claim it.
Considerable time had passed since the bursting of the dam, and the news of the calamity spread rapidly. People began flocking hither from the neighborhood, and before long there were arrivals from Piketon itself. These gathered at the scene of destruction and viewed it with bated breath. Some brought lanterns, but the broad space where the waters had reposed for so many years was clearly shown in the moonlight and made a striking sight.
The striking feature about the calamity, which, as we have stated, was never satisfactorily explained, was that the dam, which looked strong enough to resist tenfold the pressure, had not yielded in a single spot, as would be supposed, but had been carried away almost bodily. That is to say, three-fourths of the structure was gone, its foundations being on a level with the bottom of the pond in the immediate vicinity.
Perhaps the most probable explanation of the accident was that offered by an old fisherman, to the effect that muskrats had burrowed under and through the dam until it had been so weakened throughout most of its extent that when a giving way began at one point it was like knocking the keystone from an arch. Its results resembled those often shown by the explosion of a steam boiler, when only a few fragments remain to show what it once has been.
Before long a party reached the place where Dick and Jim were standing by the dead body of Wagstaff. When it was proposed to remove it the suggestion was made that it should not be disturbed until the arrival of the coroner, who could be called by morning to view the body. This practice, as the reader doubtless knows, prevails in nearly every portion of the country, and was adopted in the instance named.