The roar of the safety-valve continuing, and seeming to increase in stridency rather than to diminish, Tregarvon leaned forward to shout in Rucker’s ear:
“Are you sure you left the fire-box door open, Billy?”
The mechanician struggled to his feet. “I thought I was, but I’ll go see. She’s howlin’ a little bit too loud to suit me.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the earthquake crash came. With a sound that was oddly like the tearing of a hundred saws through dry timber, followed by a reverberating thunderclap, the boiler and engine vanished in a thick cloud of steam, and the air was filled with flying missiles. One piece of the boiler tore the heart out of the sheltering oak-tree; another fragment ripped a corner from the tool-house; a third mowed a swath through a thicket of young pines.
Tregarvon and Carfax were both up and out before the nimbus cloud of steam had blown aside, and their first thought was for their men. Rucker had escaped only by a hair’s-breadth. The twisted fire-box sheet which had knocked a corner out of the small building had passed so close that the wind of it had bowled him over. Tregarvon left Carfax to help the machinist to his feet, and ran shouting across the glade. The drill gang answered and came hurrying in, a man at a time. When all were accounted for, the material loss was inventoried. It was total, so far as it went. The engine and boiler were reduced to a tangled heap of scrap; one end of the drill beam was shattered, and one leg of the derrick had suffered loss.
For the moment Tregarvon was torn by conflicting emotions; a huge thankfulness that no life had been lost and bitter disappointment that the catastrophe had come at the instant when all the doubts as to the value of the Ocoee were to be either confirmed or swept away. He held himself together long enough to tell the men that they might go home—that there would be nothing more done until a new power-plant could be bought; but when Rucker had gone out to the wood road to see if the yellow car had been hit, and the disappointed one was left alone with Carfax, the flood-gates gave way.
“Isn’t it enough to make an angel out of the blue heavens swear himself black in the face, Poictiers?” he raged. “Just on the very edge of things—just as we were going to find out, once for all, what this cursed mountain is going to do to us——”
“One thing at a time,” Carfax broke in soothingly. “The wrecked engine isn’t fatal—not by many parasangs: it came just in the nick of time, when I was wondering what under the sun I should do with the dividend draft that I got in the mail yesterday. Take a fresh grip on yourself and remember that you have a good bit to be thankful for. If your men had been sitting around on the job to eat their dinners, as laborers do up North, there’d be another story to tell.”
“Yes, I know; but think of it—it will be days and maybe weeks before we can get a new power-plant installed, and all that time we’ll be hanging, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth; won’t know any more than we do now.”
Rucker had come back to report that the motor-car had escaped as by a miracle. A square yard of the boiler shell had been hurled over it to fall accurately in the middle of the road a rod or two farther on. While he was telling about it, a goodly portion of the faculty of Highmount College, followed by a bevy of young women, came upon the scene. Doctor Caswell was heading the column of reconnaissance, and Hartridge also was with it.