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.