“You agree with that?” she asked.
Gordon’s smile was suggestively grim. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I guess our friend now and then says some rather forceful things. Anyway, he has hit it with this one. For instance, there was that little matter of the man who was sick at his mill. A surgeon with nerve and hands could have fixed him up. We”––and he made an expressive gesture––“packed him out to Victoria.”
He laughed harshly as he went on: “Well, that’s partly why we’re going to set our mark on this cañon, if it’s only to make it clear that we’re not quite played out yet. You’ll ram that hole full of your strongest powder, Derrick.”
Nasmyth turned and waved his hand to a man at the foot of the gully.
“Bring me down the magazine!” he ordered. “We’re going to split that rock before supper.”
The man, who disappeared, came back again with an iron box, and for the next few minutes Nasmyth, who scrambled about the rocks above the fall, taking a coil of thin wire with him, was busy. When he rejoined his companions, he led them a little further down the cañon until he pointed to a shelf of rock from which they had a clear view of the fall. A handful of men had clambered down the gully, and now they stood in a cluster upon the strip of shingle. Nasmyth indicated them with a wave of his hand before he held a little wooden box with brass pegs projecting from it up to Laura.
“It’s the first big charge we have fired, and they seem 237 to feel it’s something of an event,” he said. “In one way, it’s a declaration of war we’re making, and there is a good deal against us. You fit this plug into the socket when you’re ready.”
“You mean me to fire the charge?” inquired Laura.
“Yes,” answered Nasmyth quietly. “It’s fitting that you should be the one to set us at our work. If it hadn’t been for you, I should certainly not have taken this thing up, and now I want to feel that you are anxious for our success.”
A faint flush of colour crept into Laura Waynefleet’s face. For one thing, Nasmyth’s marriage to the dark-eyed girl whom Gordon had described to her depended on the success of this venture, and that was a fact which had its effect on her. Still, she felt, the scheme would have greater results than that, and, turning gravely, she glanced at the men who had gathered upon the shingle. They looked very little and feeble as they clustered together, in face of that almost overwhelming manifestation of the great primeval forces against which they had pitted themselves in the bottom of the tremendous rift. It seemed curious that they did not shrink from the roar of the river which rang about them in sonorous tones, and then, as she looked across the mad rush of the rapid and the spray-shrouded fall to the stupendous walls of rock that shut them in, the thing they had undertaken seemed almost impossible. Wheeler appeared to guess her thoughts, for he smiled as he pointed to the duck-clad figures.