He crossed the river bed, leaping from stone to stone, and stepped up so close to the falling water that the spray splashed him. It was somewhere about here, he thought, that the man, Blake, had focused his field-glass from the roadside.
There was absolutely nothing out of the way here that he could see. The brush was kept cleared out at the foot of the dam for a dozen feet or so; there seemed to be no cover here. Not a stone had been overturned along this cleared path.
The water splashed and bubbled at the foot of the fall. Did it seem to splash more vigorously just here at the edge of the pool, hidden by the spray in part, and partly by the overhang of a great rock on which Whistler stood?
The observant youth stooped, then knelt beside the stream. The rock was wet and his garments were fast becoming saturated. But he paid no attention to this.
There was something down there in the pool, at its edge, struggling beneath the surface. Not a fish, of course!
Suddenly he thrust in his hand, wetting his sleeve to the elbow. Quickly he made sure that his suspicion was correct. There was some kind of water wheel whirling down there.
He moved a flat stone which seemed to have lain for ages in its present position. Yet under that stone was the end of the wheel's axle with cogwheels rigged to pass on the power engendered by the wheel to some mechanical contrivance not yet placed.
Whistler returned the flat rock back to its former position, and moved slowly back from the place on hands and knees. Then he stood up and looked all around to see if he had been observed. Particularly did he look through the break in the trees toward the spot where Blake, the stranger, had stood when Whistler and his friends had first spied him.
There was nobody in sight as far as the young fellow could see. He moved back into the shelter of a clump of brush. He heard an automobile chugging up from the village and believed Al and the others were approaching the bridge where he had asked his chum to wait for him.
But he lingered a bit. He was deeply moved by his discovery. This was no boy's plaything. The mechanism was the effort of a mature mind, perhaps the result of inventive genius of high quality.