Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns | Page 7

do. We fellows
came near getting poor Seven Knott into trouble, thinking him a
German spy," he added, referring to an incident mentioned in "Navy
Boys After the Submarines."
Thus meditating he drew nearer to the place where the flashboard was
down and the water poured into the rocky river bed. There were
stepping stones here, so it was easy for an agile person to get across the
stream.
A blue haze of spray rose from the foaming water on the rocks, and
there sounded a pleasant murmur from the falling water. Birds darted in
and out of this spray, fluttering their pinions in the bath thus provided.
On this side of the waterfall Whistler could discover nothing on the
face of the dam nor along its foot that seemed in the least suspicious.
The masonry was perfect.
He crossed the river bed, leaping from stone to stone, and stepped up so
close to the falling water that the spray splashed him. It was somewhere
about here, he thought, that the man, Blake, had focused his field-glass
from the roadside.
There was absolutely nothing out of the way here that he could see. The
brush was kept cleared out at the foot of the dam for a dozen feet or so;
there seemed to be no cover here. Not a stone had been overturned
along this cleared path.
The water splashed and bubbled at the foot of the fall. Did it seem to
splash more vigorously just here at the edge of the pool, hidden by the

spray in part, and partly by the overhang of a great rock on which
Whistler stood?
The observant youth stooped, then knelt beside the stream. The rock
was wet and his garments were fast becoming saturated. But he paid no
attention to this.
There was something down there in the pool, at its edge, struggling
beneath the surface. Not a fish, of course!
Suddenly he thrust in his hand, wetting his sleeve to the elbow. Quickly
he made sure that his suspicion was correct. There was some kind of
water wheel whirling down there.
He moved a flat stone which seemed to have lain for ages in its present
position. Yet under that stone was the end of the wheel's axle with
cogwheels rigged to pass on the power engendered by the wheel to
some mechanical contrivance not yet placed.
Whistler returned the flat rock back to its former position, and moved
slowly back from the place on hands and knees. Then he stood up and
looked all around to see if he had been observed. Particularly did he
look through the break in the trees toward the spot where Blake, the
stranger, had stood when Whistler and his friends had first spied him.
There was nobody in sight as far as the young fellow could see. He
moved back into the shelter of a clump of brush. He heard an
automobile chugging up from the village and believed Al and the
others were approaching the bridge where he had asked his chum to
wait for him.
But he lingered a bit. He was deeply moved by his discovery. This was
no boy's plaything. The mechanism was the effort of a mature mind,
perhaps the result of inventive genius of high quality.
Some inventor might be secretly experimenting with water power here;
and if Whistler told of his discovery he might be doing the unknown a
grave wrong.

Yet Blake's peculiar actions and the fact that the foot of the dam had
been chosen for the experiment troubled the young fellow vastly.
There was nothing along the wall, as far as he could see, or upon its
face, that excited Whistler's further suspicion. Just that little water
wheel under the rock whirling and splashing by the power of the falling
stream. It was perfectly innocent in itself; yet Philip Morgan had never
been more excited and troubled in his life.
He went slowly back to the road and found the car waiting on the
bridge. The other boys were loud in their demands as to what he had
been doing, and Frenchy and Ikey did their best to pump information
out of him.
"What for did you go up there to the dam yet?" demanded Ikey.
"Cat's fur, to make kittens' breeches," declared Whistler. "Because I
couldn't get any dog fur. Now do you know?"
And this was all the satisfaction there was to be got out of their leader
at this particular time.
CHAPTER IV
S. P. 888
The result of the boys' campaign for recruits to the Navy was very
encouraging. They had been to places besides Elmvale; and several of
their old friends in Seacove were getting into one branch or another of
the service.
Many of the young men in the