That is to say, Sim Gage, gentleman, soldier and patriot, had passed on to the place where men find reward for doing the very best they know with what God has seen fit to give them as their own.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE DAM
Doctor Allen Barnes turned slowly toward the house where the wife of Sim Gage still 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.