Bill nodded, without shifting his eyes from the ruin below. They stood for another minute before scrambling down the canyon's steep side to inspect more closely the way the vandalism had been effected. Slipping down the muddy bank, heedless of their clothing or bruised hands, they clambered over the broken pieces of wall, and looked upward through the great hole and into the daylight beyond. The blow was too great to permit of mere anger. It was disaster supreme, and they could find no words in that time of despondency. "I'll give a hundred dollars toward a reward for the man who did that," shouted a voice, hoarse with indignation, above them; and they looked up to see the smith on the bank, shaking his smudged and clenched fist in the air. "And I'll take a hundred more," growled one of the drill runners in the augmenting group behind him. And then, as if the blow had fallen equally on all, the men of the Cross stormed and raved, and clambered over the ruins and anathematized their unknown enemy; all but one known as Jack Rogers, the boss millman, who silently, as if his business had rendered him mute as well as deaf, stood looking up and down the gulch. While the others continued their inspection of the damage, he drifted farther and farther away, intent on the ground about him, and the edge of the stream. Suddenly he stooped over and picked up something water-stained and white. He came back toward them. "Whoever did the one job," he said tersely, "did both. Probably one man. Set the fuses at the power-house, then came on here and set these. Then he must have got away by going to the eastward." "For heaven's sake, how do you figure that out?" Dick asked eagerly, while the others gathered closer around, with grim, inquiring faces, and leaned corded necks forward to catch the millman's words. "I found a piece of fuse down at the power plant," he said. "See, here it is. It's a good long one. The fellow that did the job knew just how long it would take him to walk here; and he knew fuse, and he knew dynamite. The proof that he did it that way is shown by this short piece of fuse I found down there at the edge of the wash. He cut the fuse short when he shot the dam. He wanted the whole thing, both places, to go up at once. Now it's plain as a Digger Indian's trail that he didn't intend to go back the way he came, so he must have gone eastward. And if he went that way, it shows he didn't intend to hit it back toward Goldpan, but to keep on goin' over the ridge cut-off till he hit the railroad." Dick was astonished at the persistent reasoning of the man whom hitherto he had regarded as a singularly taciturn old worker, wise in milling and nothing more.