The words were hardly out of his mouth before the car shot around the final curve and raced into the small basin where the Pine Gulch camp was pitched. With a shock of astoundment they saw that the basin was rapidly becoming a lake, with the water already lapping at the tie-ends of the single short side-track. In the camp the men of the night shift had turned out as if at a fire alarm and were hastily carrying everything portable to higher ground.
Jackson, the night boss, explained the astonishing thing when the push-car party of four ran up to add four pairs of hands to the work of salvaging the company property. “It’s that blithering O. C. outfit!” he gritted. “They’ve gone and shot half a mountain into the river a little ways below here, and it’s made a dam. We’re goin’ to be swamped out!”
The prophecy proved true in almost no time at all. With a good-sized river pouring into the narrow, dammed-up gorge, the water rose with incredible rapidity. The two boys, with their helpers, hurled themselves upon the engineers’ office tent, pulled it down and dragged it and its contents up among the hillside pines, and while they were at it they saw the two tracks, the main line and the siding, disappear in the flood.
Martin, the driver of the big 815, was trying to save his engine. But to get it out on the main track so that it could be run up the canyon, he had first to back down to the switch, and at that point the water was by this time deep enough to put the fire out—which it did, killing the engine and leaving Martin to jump and wade up to his hips in getting away from it.
When the water stopped rising, which did not happen until the locomotive, sizzling and sputtering, showed nothing but its stack and the roof of its cab, there was time to look around and measure the extent of the disaster. It was discouragingly complete. Thanks to the hurried salvaging, most of the store-room supplies and other movables had been carried up out of the flood’s reach; but the shacks were swamped, all the rails and heavy material were at the bottom of the lake, and the park-line opening in the canyon was afloat with cross-ties, boards and timbers of all descriptions.
“Great murder!” Dick gasped, when the breath-taking interval had come, “wouldn’t that make you weep? I believe they did it on purpose—those O. C. people. That’s what they were so busy about when we came past a couple of hours ago. They were placing their dynamite, right then!”
But Larry was a bit more charitable.
“I don’t suppose they cared very much what might happen to us, but I can’t believe that they deliberately planned any such thing as this,” he objected. “What say if we climb up somewhere from where we can see the dam? There isn’t anything more to do here now.”
Making their way around the head of the side gulch from which the camp had been given its name they climbed to the summit of the great cliff below the park-like widening. This cliff was a rocky promontory called, from the likeness of its jagged front to the profile of a human face, “The Old Man of the Mountain.” From the high viewpoint they could look down upon the dam which was flooding the camp. As nearly as they could determine, it seemed that the whole of the opposing cliff face had been blown out bodily to fall into the stream bed.
Naturally, the huge, loose-rock dam was not nearly watertight. As they looked down upon it a dozen cataracting jets were spurting through it under the immense pressure of the backed-up river. But in a little time the flow wash of the river would fill up many of these outlets, and then the flood would rise higher.