s interest leapt to a pitch of wonderment that
set his nerves thrilling and filled his thoughtful eyes with an
unaccustomed light of excitement. One arm shot out mechanically,
pointing at the black rocks, and a deep sigh escaped him.

"Mackinaw!" he cried, pulling his horse almost on to its haunches.
"Look at that!"

Buck swung round, while Caesar followed the mare's example so abruptly
that his master was almost flung out of the saddle.

He, too, stared across in the direction indicated. And his whispered
exclamation was an echo of the other's astonishment.

"By the----!"

Then on the instant an almost unconscious movement, simultaneously
executed, set their horses racing across the open in the direction of
the suspended lake.

The powerful Caesar, with his lighter burden, was the first to reach
the spot. He drew up more than two hundred yards from where the domed
roof forming the lake bed hung above the waters of the creek. He could
approach no nearer, and his rider sat gazing in wonder at the
spectacle of fallen rock and soil, and the shattered magnificence of
the acres of crushed and broken pine woods which lay before him.

The whole face of the hill for hundreds and hundreds of feet along
this side had been ruthlessly rent from its place and flung broadcast
everywhere, and, in the chaos he beheld, Buck calculated that hundreds
of thousands of tons of the blackened rock and subsoil had been
dislodged by the tremendous fall.

Just for an instant the word "washout" flashed through his mind. But
he dismissed it without further consideration. How could a washout
sever such rock? Even he doubted the possibility of lightning causing
such destruction. No, his thoughts flew to an earth disturbance of
some sort. But then, what of the lake? He gazed up at where the rocky
arch jutted out from the parent hill, and apprehension made him
involuntarily move his horse aside. But his observation had killed the
theory of an earth disturbance. Anything of that nature must have
brought the lake down. For the dislodgment began under its very
shadow, and had even further deepened the yawning cavern beneath its
bed.

The Padre's voice finally broke his reflections, and its tone
suggested that he was far less awed, and, in consequence, his thoughts
were far more practical.

"Their works are gone," he said regretfully. "I'd say there's not a
sluice-box nor a conduit left. Maybe even their tools are lost. Poor
devils!"

The m