And then, as if the blow had fallen equally on all, the men of the Cross stormed and raved, and clambered over the ruins and anathematized their unknown enemy; all but one known as Jack Rogers, the boss millman, who silently, as if his business had rendered him mute as well as deaf, stood looking up and down the gulch. While the others continued their inspection of the damage, he drifted farther and farther away, intent on the ground about him, and the edge of the stream. Suddenly he stooped over and picked up something water-stained and white. He came back toward them.
“Whoever did the one job,” he said tersely, “did both. Probably one man. Set the fuses at the power-house, then came on here and set these. Then he must have got away by going to the eastward.”
“For heaven’s sake, how do you figure that out?” Dick asked eagerly, while the others gathered closer around, with grim, inquiring faces, 204 and leaned corded necks forward to catch the millman’s words.
“I found a piece of fuse down at the power plant,” he said. “See, here it is. It’s a good long one. The fellow that did the job knew just how long it would take him to walk here; and he knew fuse, and he knew dynamite. The proof that he did it that way is shown by this short piece of fuse I found down there at the edge of the wash. He cut the fuse short when he shot the dam. He wanted the whole thing, both places, to go up at once. Now it’s plain as a Digger Indian’s trail that he didn’t intend to go back the way he came, so he must have gone eastward. And if he went that way, it shows he didn’t intend to hit it back toward Goldpan, but to keep on goin’ over the ridge cut-off till he hit the railroad.”
Dick was astonished at the persistent reasoning of the man whom hitherto he had regarded as a singularly taciturn old worker, wise in milling and nothing more.
“Now, if there’s any of you boys here that know trails,” he said, “come along with me, and we’ll section the hillside up there and pick it up. If you don’t, stay here, because I can get it in time, and don’t want no one tramplin’ over the 205 ground. I was––a scout for five years, and––well, I worked in the Geronimo raid.”
Dick and Bill looked at him with a new admiration, marveling that the man had never before betrayed that much of his variegated and hard career.
“You’re right! I believe you’re right,” the superintendent exclaimed. “I can help you. So can Dick. We’ve lived where it came in handy sometimes.”
But two other men joined them, one a white-headed old miner called Chloride and the other a stoker named Sinclair who had been at the Cross for but a few weeks, and admitted that he had been a packer in Arizona.
Slowly the men formed into a long line, and began working toward one another, examining the ground in a belt twenty feet wide and covering the upper eastward edge of the cañon. Each had his own method of trailing. The white-headed man stooped over and passed slowly from side to side. Bill walked with slow deliberation, stopping every three or four feet and scanning the ground around him with his brilliant, keen eyes. The stoker worked like a pointer dog, methodically, and examining each bush clump for broken twigs.