Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns Part 13

Their fright did not deprive them of action, however; everybody immediately did something.

Inside the door, in the hall, hung the bell rope. The bell swung in the cupola on the roof of the office building. The guard dropped his rifle and sprang to seize this rope. He slipped his foot in the loop and began to toll the bell as hard as he could.

"I'll get Central and tell them what's up!" gasped Mr. Santley, and turned to run back into his office to spread the news of the catastrophe by telephone.

Whistler plunged into the car, yelling to Torry:

"Turn around! Turn around! Down the valley road to warn 'em! Get a move on, boy!"

His chum was already starting the car. It wheeled perilously in a sharp curve, and with honking horn hurtled down the road which followed the course of the river.

Without doubt the wall of the dam had been burst through by the explosion. The immense ma.s.s of waiter held in leash would immediately pour through the opening. The valley would be flooded!

As the car plunged across the main street of Elmvale people were running out of their houses and out of the stores, shrieking that the dam had burst. They began to stream away toward the higher ground, stopping for none of their possessions. If they saved their lives they would be fortunate.

Torry speeded up the car until she vibrated like a motor boat--like the submarine chaser, No. 888! They whirled along the half-lit road, the horn sounding its raucous warning, and the boys shrieking themselves hoa.r.s.e.

People came to their doors and windows The flying Navy boys pointed behind them, repeating:

"The flood! The flood!"

The roar of the bursting dam was now in the ears of all the awakened people of the valley. In three great explosions the weakened wall burst, and the water roared through.

Spouting through the wrecked masonry, the boys could see it spread below the barrier, half as high as the dam itself. It would sweep the narrow valley clean of every small structure and of every living thing that could not get out of its path.

Half a mile was small leeway; the flood would pour down upon the village and the mills in two or three minutes. But the Navy boys in the big car were flying over the road at a forty-mile-an-hour pace.

They could have easily escaped to the high ground on one side or the other of the valley. There were many small farms down this river road, however, and although the valley widened a good deal before the outskirts of Seacove were reached, the flood might do a deal of damage in the lower town unless the people there were warned.

At least, the automobile and its occupants made noise enough as they flew along to arouse most people along the way to the menacing peril.

The explosion followed by the bursting of the dam had, in any case, shaken the valley to the very sea itself.

They saw men, women and children run screaming from their houses and mount through the fields toward the hilltops. Behind, the roar of the waters was like a high wind. In a moment all the lights in Elmvale went out.

"The powerhouse has gone!" shrieked Frenchy, when he saw this.

"And everything else, I guess!" quavered Ikey, clinging to the back of the automobile seat and hoa.r.s.e from shouting.

Dim as the light from the stars and the moon was, they could see the front of the wave of released water. When it struck the big mill buildings at Elmvale the foamy water sprang up in geysers.

Several of the big buildings went down under the impact of the flood.

The smaller hovels were swept off their foundations. Those people who had not escaped from the middle of the village must be overcome by the sweep of the flood.

Below the Main Street bridge in Elmvale, the channel of the river was much wider than above the bridge. It was navigable for small vessels, too, from Seacove to that point.

Schooners and barges moored to the docks below the bridge were cast up on the crest of the flood, their hawsers snapped like packthread, and they were whirled away, some to be cast later far back from the established bank of the stream.

It was tidewater below the bridge, and fortunately it was low tide. The channel of the river, therefore, could take the greater bulk of the flood, and the valley widening so quickly, the depth of the outflow of the dam was much decreased directly below the wrecked hamlet.

The rushing automobile was two-thirds of the way to Seacove in five minutes. Then the advance wave of the flood caught them.

They saw the saplings along the bank of the stream bend and snap under the force of the water. Some were uprooted. Chicken houses and other small structures were s.n.a.t.c.hed from their places and flung wildly along with the charging water.

With a roar and a cloud of spray the water surged around the automobile on the road. Running, as the car was, at top speed, the flood picked it up and drove it forward even more swiftly for several rods.

"Shut her off! Shut her off!" yelled Frenchy excitedly.

But Torry was wiser than that. The water flattened out, and the whirling wheels bit into the road again. They did not skid, and the car remained upright. For the next half mile they ran through more than a foot of water; but it was plain the danger was over.

Near the river bank the water flooded the first floors of the houses in the suburbs of Seacove; but there was little other damage done at this distance from the dam.

As the water subsided from about them, however, Torry turned the machine around and headed up the road again.

"Yes, we'll go back," Whistler agreed. "Drive slowly, Torry. Maybe we can help somebody. I'm afraid there were some people who did not get away in time."

They found enough to do, it was true, all that night. After getting back to the outskirts of Elmvale they could not drive the machine over the slime and mud in the roadway. There were deep washouts, too; and in some places the wreck of light buildings barred the way.

The Navy boys had done good service in warning the endangered people along one side of the river. Mr. Santley had done much more in sending the news of the broken dam broadcast by telephone. The girl at Central had stuck to her post while the water rose to the second floor of the telephone building, where the switchboard was situated.

Whistler and his three chums were carrying children to the high ground where it was dry, and packing bedding and blankets up to the "shipwrecked mess-mates," as Frenchy called them, until dawn.

When the sun crept up and showed the wreckage in the valley, and particularly about Elmvale, it was enough to make one heartsick. The lower floors of all mills, and of the munition factory, were wrecked.

Some of the buildings had fallen down.

Much machinery was destroyed. It would take months to repair the damage done to property by the flood. And there was a death list of twelve.

That was the hardest to bear and the saddest result of the catastrophe.

Until the ruins around Elmvale were searched and the last body brought to light, little was said about the cause of the disaster. But the following evening Whistler and his chums were called to the office of the sheriff of the county to tell what they knew about the stranger, Blake, who had disappeared just before the dam burst.

He had been seen getting off the train at Elmvale that evening. But he had disappeared immediately after. He had not returned to the munition factory, where the manager, Mr. Santley, was waiting for him; nor had he been observed at all after leaving the railroad station.

Later it was proved that he had obtained his position at the factory by the aid of forged credentials. It was believed that he was rather a famous German inventor who had been living in the United States for some years. He had an almost uncanny knowledge of mechanics, as well as of chemistry.

The ingenious little water wheel Whistler had seen at the foot of the dam had probably furnished power for some machine that had been fixed on the face of the dam with a charge of dynamite. This invention had been rigged to explode the dynamite after a certain length of time--time enough, without doubt, to enable the inventor to get well away from the vicinity of the dam.

"If Linder is his name," Whistler said, when the boys were afterward talking it over among themselves, "I hope I'll see him again some time.

He was never blown up with the dam, that is sure."

"You don't think he was 'hoist with his own petard, then?" suggested Torry.

"Hear the high-brow!" sniffed Frenchy.

"Oi, oi!" cried Ikey. "He means was he blown up, too? I bet not!"

"I ought to have told somebody about him before," sighed Whistler.

"I had a feeling he wasn't using his real name."

"Say! why should you worry? That Mr. Santley didn't think anything wrong of him until he found the letter in German in Blake's locker. And we did set Mr. MacMasters and the S. P. Eight-eighty-eight after him and the oil boat, didn't we?"