“This is terrible, terrible, terrible!” a white-haired physician from Marquette kept repeating over and over.
A half dozen ran towards the point of the cliff to peer down stream, as though they could hope to distinguish anything in that waste of flood water.
“The dam's gone out,” replied Thorpe. “I don't understand it. Everything was in good shape, as far as I could see. It didn't act like an ordinary break. The water came too fast. Why, it was as dry as a bone until just as that wave came along. An ordinary break would have eaten through little by little before it burst, and Davis should have been able to stop it. This came all at once, as if the dam had disappeared. I don't see.”
His mind of the professional had already began to query causes.
“How about the men?” asked Wallace. “Isn't there something I can do?”
“You can head a hunt down the river,” answered Thorpe. “I think it is useless until the water goes down. Poor Jimmy. He was one of the best men I had. I wouldn't have had this happen—”
The horror of the scene was at last beginning to filter through numbness into Wallace Carpenter's impressionable imagination.
“No, no!” he cried vehemently. “There is something criminal about it to me! I'd rather lose every log in the river!”
Thorpe looked at him curiously. “It is one of the chances of war,” said he, unable to refrain from the utterance of his creed. “We all know it.”
“I'd better divide the crew and take in both banks of the river,” suggested Wallace in his constitutional necessity of doing something.