As Bruce balanced himself on the raft while the Swede poled slowly toward the rock that now arose from the water the size of a small house, he was thankful that the face can be made at times to serve as so good a mask. Not for the world would he have had John Johnson guess how afraid he was, how actually scared to death when the raft bumped against the huge brown rock and he knew that he must look over the side. Holding the raft steady, Johnson kept his eyes on Bruce's face as he peered into the river and searched the bottom. Not a muscle of Bruce's face moved nor an eyelid flickered in the tense silence. Then he said quietly-- "John, she's gone." A look of sympathy softened the Swede's homely face. Bruce straightened up. "Gone!" he reiterated--"gone." Johnson might guess a little but he could never guess the whole of the despair which seemed to crush Bruce like an overwhelming weight as he stood looking at the sun shining upon the back of the twisting green snake of a river that he had thought he could beat; Johnson never had risked and lost anybody's money but his own, he never had allowed a woman he loved to build her hopes upon his judgment and success. To have failed so quickly and so completely--oh, the mortification of it! the chagrin! Finally Johnson said gently: "Guess we might as well go back." Bruce winced. It reminded him what going back meant. To discharge the crew and telegraph his failure to Helen Dunbar, Harrah and the rest, then to watch the lumber dry out and the cracks widen in the flume, the rust take the machinery and the water-wheel go to ruin--_that's_ what going back meant--taking up his lonely, pointless life where he had left it off, growing morbid, eccentric, like the other failures sulking in the hills. "There were parts of two dynamos, one 50 horse-power motor, a keeper, and a field, beside the fly-wheel in the boat." Bruce looked absently at Johnson but he was talking to himself. "I wonder, I wonder"--a gleam of hope lit up his face--"John, go up to Fritz Yandell's and borrow that compass that he fished out of the river." Johnson looked puzzled but started in a hurry. In an hour or so he was back, still puzzled; compasses he thought were for people who were lost. "It's only a chance, John, another forlorn hope, but there's magnetic iron in those dynamos and the needle might show it if we can get above the boat." Johnson's friendly eye shone instantly with interest. Starting from the spot of the wreck, he poled slowly down the river, keeping in line with the rock. Ten, twenty, thirty--fifty feet below the rock they poled and the needle did not waver from the north. "She'd go to pieces before she ever travelled this far." The glimmer of hope in Bruce's eyes had died. "Either the needle won't locate her or she's drifted into the channel. If that's the case we'll never get her out."