The Rival Campers Ashore: or, The Mystery of the Mill

He went at it more carefully; took time to arrange the coils so they would run free through the air; gave a hard swing to the coil in his right hand and let it fly. Henry Burns, reaching far forward to meet the rope, was almost on the point of grasping it; but it seemed to recede as it fell, losing force and splashing into the water a few feet away. The next moment, Henry Burns was overboard, in the icy water, seizing the end before it sank, upborne as it was by floating ice.

He fought his way back, and Harvey and Tim dragged him to safety, chilled, and his teeth chattering. Then the four grasped the rope and held hard. George Warren, with a sailor's instinct, had found a stout bush by the bank and taken a few turns of the rope about that.

The cake of ice, arrested in its course, brought up, while the swift running current overflowed it. The four were ankle deep in water. But the rope held. Slowly, but surely, the ice raft yielded to the strain. It came in, out of the rush of the current, into quieter water. It touched the shore – and the yawning brink of the dam was only a few rods away.

They were ashore now and running for the mill, where there was a fire that would warm them. They were half frozen, with the chilling of the water and with the fright. Even Colonel Witham, mindful now of the situation, was there to let them in and allow them the warmth of the fire.

"You're soaking wet," he said to Henry Burns. "There's some old clothes that Jim Ellison left, hanging in that closet on the floor above. They'll swallow you, but they're dry."

Henry Burns darted up the stairs.

As he did so, the stairs trembled and shook beneath his feet. The whole mill seemed to be quivering on its foundations. At the same moment, a cry went up from the outside that the dam had given way. The crowd gathered on the bank saw a piece of the dam suddenly collapse, through which aperture a mass of logs, grinding blocks of ice and debris from up stream tore its way.

Then screams came from the mill. Terrified, the crowd, gazing, saw one side of it totter and sway. The sound of wrenching timbers, collapsing frame-work and the twisting of iron filled the air.

Henry Burns, clutching a window frame, saw the panorama of the stream in tumult, of the shattered dam, and of the distant shore, suddenly open up before his eyes, as a great mass of the mill, its foundations torn away, sagged off and plunged into the waters. He, on the upper floor, and his companions on the floor below, found themselves at once upon the brink of the swift-running waters of the stream, saved, as by a miracle, by the other half of the mill remaining firm.

Looking now upon the wreck, Henry Burns espied a strange thing. Three pair of the huge grinding stones had gone with the destruction of that part of the mill. One pair alone remained, just before him. It was that pair upon which, on one occasion, James Ellison had placed his foot, in satisfaction, and remarked that all was safe; stones that had ground no grist for years before James Ellison's death, but which had been disconnected from the shafting.

Now they were half upset, and one lay wrenched from the steel thread that had held it down close to the lower one. Thus there was disclosed a space cut in the lower stone, that held a small tin box, such as merchants use for papers.

Henry Burns stared, for one brief moment, in amazement. Then, crawling cautiously over, he seized the box and darted back to the window. He swung himself out on to a small roof that covered the door below; hung from that for a moment, and dropped into a heap of snow that had been shovelled into a pile there. At the same moment, the little party on the lower floor rushed forth into safety.

What they found in this box, a half-hour later, when it was opened before all, in the Ellison dining-room, fairly took their breaths away; fairly made the old house creak with the whoops that filled it; made Mrs. Ellison weep a flood of joyous tears; nearly set John and James Ellison clear out of their wits.

The old mill – wrecked to be sure, but valuable still, and easily to be restored, with the rebuilding of the dam – the old mill was theirs. There was the deed from Colonel Witham back to James Ellison, to prove it. There were the deeds to the lands – all theirs now; no longer Colonel Witham's. And more, and greater still the surprise. The old inn, the Half Way House, was not Colonel Witham's, at all. It had been James Ellison's, and there were the papers to show that. It was theirs now, and all the land for acres around it. They were no longer poor. James Ellison's bank had been found at last. The old mill's secret had been torn from hiding by the freshet.

Some days later, following a protracted visit on the part of Lawyer Estes to the Half Way House, there emerged from the doorway of the same, at evening, a portly person that could not be mistaken. He brought out the horse from the barn, harnessed it to a carriage, and drove away down the road at a furious pace.

The next day, Colonel Witham was missing from the inn and from Benton.

"Have him arrested?" responded John Ellison, in answer to his brother's query; "I don't care about that. He's gone, and good riddance. Hello, there come Henry Burns and Jack Harvey. Let's all go down and take a look at what's left of the mill."

"Poor gran'," said Bess to Mrs. Ellison, half timidly, "what will become of her now?"

"We'll bring her up here, dear," said that motherly woman, "and take care of her during the little life she has left. We can't leave her all alone down there." And Bess danced gaily away to join the boys, her last trouble gone and nothing but joy ahead.