“It would,” said Larry quietly. “And after that—what would happen when that lake’s turned loose?”
“Gee!” Dick breathed, pushed on thus from cause to effect and after-effect—“their trestle down yonder; it would go out just like so much matchwood! And it would serve them mighty good and right, too!”
“Yes,” said Larry, still speaking quietly; “I suppose we might send them word to get their men off of it. You wouldn’t want to drown the men too, would you?”
“No-o,” Dick admitted, dragging the word as if it came rather reluctantly. “But they’re making it war, Larry, and they ought to be willing to take the consequences.”
For a time neither of them spoke again. Within their range of vision, looking up-stream, the dammed-up lake extended endlessly, as it seemed, winding away through the mountains like a sheet of molten silver. Presently they saw a line of men topping the high spur to the westward and descending, like a string of ants, into the flooded camp basin. Bannagher and his hard-rock men had been driven from their work in the Narrows by the rising waters.
“I suppose we may as well climb down,” Dick suggested at last. “Bob Goldrick may want to send us out with the news, now that we haven’t any wires left.”
In returning to the lower level they descended the back of the “Old Man,” zigzagging down until they reached the water’s edge in a finger of the flood which reached well back into the pine-forested side gulch. In dropping down the final declivity Larry was a few steps ahead, and when Dick caught up with him he was standing before a curious, timbered opening in the mountain side almost at the new water level.
“What is it—a mine?” Dick asked, pausing with a hand on Larry’s shoulder.
“No; just a prospect hole that somebody has dug some time, I guess,” was the reply. “These hills are full of ’em, so Bannagher says. After gold was discovered at the canyon head everybody came here to dig holes in the ground.”
Dick peered into the dark cavity.