“We’ll soon find out,” said Rick for, as they advanced they heard the strange sound more plainly.
And then, as they pushed their way through a fringe of bushes growing close to the edge of the stream the lads made a strange discovery.
They had solved the secret of Lost River!
CHAPTER XXIII
CARRYING THE GOOD NEWS
“Chot, would you look at that!” exclaimed Rick.
“I am looking at it!” Chot fairly shouted. No longer was it necessary to subdue their voices. They were far enough away from the strange camp so that no sound they made could be heard in it. “What do you reckon that is, Rick?”
Without answering, Rick and Ruddy, followed by Chot, drew nearer to some form of rude, rough-and-ready engineering work built across a place where the stream took a sharp turn, curving down through a channel that nature, or perhaps Lost River itself, had carved out through the long centuries.
And right at the curve was a sort of dam, fitted with water gates and levers, like those of a mill, or canal lock, so the water, at will, could be diverted into a new channel.
And that Lost River was now flowing into a new channel could not be doubted. Even in the moonlight, veiled as it was now and then by clouds, could be seen where the stream had once flowed. There was the rocky bed—now dry—but evidence enough that had the stream been left to itself it would have come through the various tunnels and so reach Uncle Tod’s camp.
But the dam had changed its course—had switched the stream so that it ran into the flume of the strange men just at the point where it should have gone into the long tunnel through which the boys had made their perilous way.