AHEAD OF THE FLOOD
Each one in the little group at the main entrance to the munition
factory had cried out--no doubt of that! Indeed, Torry said afterward
that he forgot to shut his mouth until his jaws were positively stiff.
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 mass 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
hoarse.
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 hoarse 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 snatched 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?"
"By the way," Whistler suddenly observed, drawing an official looking
letter from his pocket. "Did I tell you I got this?"
"No," said Torry. "What is it?"
"Hurray!" yelled Frenchy, the quick-witted. "It's our assignment to the
_Kennebunk_, I bet you!"
"Is that right, Whistler?" asked Torry.
"That's what it is," admitted Morgan. "We're to report, however, to Mr.
MacMasters at Rivermouth day after to-morrow. But our ultimate
destination is the _Kennebunk_, superdreadnaught, just built and fitted
out for her first cruise. You know, she was only christened a month
ago."
Even the Elmvale disaster and the mystery regarding the German spy,
Franz Linder, were at once ousted from the minds of the Navy boys. Their
first cruise in a superdreadnaught was of much greater importance.