The men understood the helpfulness of this. Neglected wounds meant blood-poisoning, one of the most painful scourges a prospector or miner working far beyond the reach of surgeon and hospital, can have. It was well to know, too, how to make a proper tourniquet, and how to lay a bandage so that it would hold well. The whistle blew and the great engine was started. The men drifted away to their several jobs. There were three pipes at work tearing down the bank on the upper bench at the Eureka Washings, and others below. The force of the water thrown from the nozzles of these pipes rocked the mighty hydraulic “guns” and caused the men astride of them to hold on with both hands. It took a husky fellow to guide that stream spouting from between his knees. Hunt had returned the kit to the superintendent’s office and climbed to the upper bench, intending to go over the highland to the Great Hope Mine, which was nearer the West Fork River. Hi Brownell, who straddled the middle gun up here, risked waving a cordial hand at the parson when he saw the latter departing. The noise of the hurtling streams drowned Hi’s voice, of course. Just as Hunt returned a smiling salute to the young fellow—one in whom the parson was deeply interested, for Hi was really a worth-while boy—the accident happened that was fated to mark this day as one long to be remembered at Canyon Pass. Incidentally the occasion, more than any other one thing, brought about the establishment of the new hospital. The whine and splash of the streams of water drowned most other sounds. But of a sudden, as Hunt was turning his back on the scene, he heard a sharp crack—a sound that would have penetrated the thunderous rumble of a railroad train. Hunt wheeled. He saw Hi Brownell thrown high into the air as though from a viciously bucking broncho, come down sprawling, and the savage stream from his pipe strike the man and carry him, as though he were a leaf on a torrent, into the cavity in the bank, against which the nozzle of the pipe was aimed. The flapping limbs and struggling torso of Brownell were visible for a moment only; then down upon the spot roared soil, gravel, and larger stones, of which the bank’s strata were built. Unguided, the shooting stream from the gun swept first one way along the bench, then the other. It corrugated the face of the bank deeply for yards in either direction. For a moment Hunt saw again the struggling body of the injured man at the edge of the fallen rubble. Then came another slide to cover it completely! The broken hydraulic gun fell over on its side. The parting of some section of it was what had thrown Brownell into the air and into the path of its stream.