But Doctor Barnes was looking at the foam-flecked surface of the water, eddying against the mountain side, crawling up and up. The little log house where Sim Gage's soul had passed was no more to be seen. It had gone. The house where the women had stopped was swept down but a short time later. Doctor Barnes could not speak the cruel truth.
"Annie!" called out Mary Gage, sobbing openly, imploringly. "Tell me, won't I ever see him? You said he was a good soldier."
"One of the best," said Doctor Barnes at last. "Listen to me, please. Your husband died believing he had saved the dam. And so he had, so far as his work was concerned. It was he who discovered their work last night. He took care of two of them—it makes three for him. It was he that killed Big Aleck, up on the reserve, and avenged you, and never told you. He was shot—you heard the firing. He died before we came up here. I couldn't bring his body till you were cared for. Now it's too late. He's gone. Well, it's as good a way for a good man to go."
"Blow 'Taps,'" he ordered of the bugler near by. It was done. And then, at his order, the rifles spoke in unison over a soldier's grave.
"But I've never seen him!" she said to him piteously, after the echoes of the salutes had passed. It was as though she was unable to comprehend.
"No," said Allen Barnes. "But keep this picture of him—think that he died like a gentleman and a soldier. A good man, Sim Gage."
He turned away and walked down the grade apart from them, hardly seeing what lay before him, hardly hearing the rush of the waters down the canyon.
When men began to question as to the cause of the disaster, it became plain that some man, whose name no one will ever know, must have crept along the side of the river bank below the road grade, and have fired the fuse of a heavy charge of rack-rock, which, none might know how long, had been hid between the buttresses and back of the apron of the dam.
Doctor Barnes reasoned now that that man in all likelihood had come from below. If so, in all likelihood he was one of the Dorenwald party. His face lighted grimly. There were but few places where they could have found a place in the canyon for an encampment. If they had found one of these places—where were they now? Their fate could now be read in this flood forcing its way down through the crooked gorge of the mountain range. The flag staff had not been swept down—the flag still fluttered now, triumphant over the attempted ruin—the answer of America to Anarchy! And the flag had been avenged. Dorenwald and his "free brothers," leaders of the "world's revolt," would revolt no more. The sponge of the slate had wiped off their little marks. No one would ever trace them. They would find no confessional and no shriving, for their way back to that underworld of devil-fed minds, out of which they had emerged to do ruin in a country which had never harmed them, but which on the contrary had welcomed them and fed them in their want.