He turned away and walked down the grade apart from them, hardly seeing what lay before him, hardly hearing the rush of the waters down the canyon. When men began to question as to the cause of the disaster, it became plain that some man, whose name no one will ever know, must have crept along the side of the river bank below the road grade, and have fired the fuse of a heavy charge of rack-rock, which, none might know how long, had been hid between the buttresses and back of the apron of the dam. Doctor Barnes reasoned now that that man in all likelihood had come from below. If so, in all likelihood he was one of the Dorenwald party. His face lighted grimly. There were but few places where they could have found a place in the canyon for an encampment. If they had found one of these places--where were they now? Their fate could now be read in this flood forcing its way down through the crooked gorge of the mountain range. The flag staff had not been swept down--the flag still fluttered now, triumphant over the attempted ruin--the answer of America to Anarchy! And the flag had been avenged. Dorenwald and his "free brothers," leaders of the "world's revolt," would revolt no more. The sponge of the slate had wiped off their little marks. No one would ever trace them. They would find no confessional and no shriving, for their way back to that underworld of devil-fed minds, out of which they had emerged to do ruin in a country which had never harmed them, but which on the contrary had welcomed them and fed them in their want. CHAPTER XXXIV AFTER THE DELUGE In one elemental instant there was loosed in the soul of Mary Gage a pent flood of emotion. She let her heart go, let in the wilderness of primitive things again. She was alive! She could see! She could be as other women! The flood of relief, of joy, of yearning, was a thing cosmic, so strong that regret and grief were for the time swept on and buried in the welter of emotions running free. It was as though she had stepped absolutely from one world into another. Suddenly, the people of her old world were gone. There had been a shadow, a strange, magnified shadow of a soul, this man who had been called her husband. But now with astonishing swiftness and clarity of vision she knew that he never had been a husband to her. What another had told her was the truth. He never had allowed her to touch his hand, his face, he never had laid a hand on hers, never had called her by any name of love, never had kissed her or sought to do so. And he was gone now, so absolutely that not even the image of him could remain had she ever owned an image of him. She never had known him, and now never could.