Adventure, August 1917 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

4 Adventure will give twenty thousand horse-power easily—why, it couldn’t be improved upon.” In his mind he pictured the course of the water slightly deflected, saw the giant tur- bines and the monster dynamos inplace. His eyes were dazzled by the glare of the sun on the galvanized roof of the power- house beneath him, and over the ridge, set in a wide lane cut through the thick spruce and pine, ran the poles and the wires that would steal this power and carry it away. And then, as always, when the last detail had been planned, when the sun was low and the evening chill had crept down, came the last, the greatest, emotion. Sometimes his chest swelled as though it would burst, a tingling sensation crept beneath his skin, his heart seemed to swell, and a feeling of infinite tenderness and compassion swept through him.’ He bowed his head so that he could no longer see the falls or the lake, and the emotions within shut out even the sound of the waterfall. “And they called you a dreamer, dad, and they laughed at you, and they sent you to your grave with a sense of failure. They broke you with their scorn and lack of sym- pathy and a hideous misunderstanding. But we'll show them, daddy, you and I. We'll show them.” Wallace Searles jumped to his feet, took one last, triumphant look at the lake, at the falls, at the deep gorge, and then turned back toward the brush. Only this evening he stopped suddenly and whirled. He had been so accustomed to dreaming there at the brink, so accustomed to having all the grandeur and all the possibilities and all the reveries of the place to himself he could not comprehend intrusion. Not once had he seen a human being since his arrival four days before. Nowhere had there been a sign that the place was ever visited. And yet, as he looked down at the great, flat table of rock across the river upon which only a few minutes before his imag- ination had pictured the shining roof of the power-house, he knew that he saw a woman hurrying across toward the edge of the whirlpool on the opposite shore. For a moment she stood looking down at the white-barbed jaws of the monster trap. The mist clouds swayed back and forth, hiding and revealing her, and then they swept in a rush about her, seeming to enfold her in their rolling, wheeling embrace. The next instant they rushed back as if in fright before a gentle current of air from down the gorge, and when they were gone, the rock where the woman had stood was bare. Wallace Searles jumped forward to the edge of the chasm and peered down through the mist into the furious kettle beneath him. He did not act because there was no action that could be taken. The efforts of a mil- lion men could not avail. He shivered a little as he thought of what death in such a place must be, and then, because there was nothing else to do, he turned and began to follow the edge of the cafion down stream, his eyes always on the twisting, struggling water beneath. . It was not until he had gone more than a hundred yards and had begun to realize that it was a quarter of a mile at least to the first place where he could get down to the river, that he suddenly stopped, suddenly realized how useless it was for him even to try to recover the body. Slowly he turned back to the falls, drawn as irresistibly to the spot as the current had swept the woman away. As he retraced his course through the brush and up the slope he hurried more and more until, emerging on the flat crest which afforded a view of the lake and of the falls, he stopped to stare incredulously at the boulder from which he had been accustomed to look at the scene. On the great, rounded rock, her back to him, sat a woman. She wore the same brown skirt, the same white waist, as the one who had disappeared in the swirling mist across the river. She, too, was hatless, and down her back hung a great rope of corn-colored hair. He remembered now that the sun had shone on such a head in the mist below. The clothing and the hair of the woman on the boulder sparkled with little beads of moisture, just such globules as would be deposited by the mist. But they were not soaked. She had not been in the water. And yet she was across the river. Unnerved by his relief, and in turn aroused by a growing indignation, Searles stood watching the figure on the boulder. Her attitude was not} like his had been. She did not look at the falls or at the lake beyond. Instead she swung a foot back and forth across the bare rock, carefully poking and turning something with her toe. Sud- denly she reached down, picked up a white cComicldsook © S|