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."

Then Johnson poled back and forth, zig-zagging from bank to bank,
covering every foot of space, and still the needle hung steadfastly to
its place.

They were all of fifty feet from where the boat had sunk and some