CHAPTER XVII

THE MISSING HEIRESS

Mr. Emerson’s investigations proved that Stanley Clark had left Brownsville several days previously and had gone to Millsboro, farther up the Monongahela.

He had left that as his forwarding address, the hotel clerk said.  This information necessitated a new move at once, so the next morning, bright and early, Mr. Emerson led his party to the river where they boarded a little steamer scarcely larger than a motor boat.

They were soon puffing away at a fair rate of speed against the sluggish current.  The factories and huge steel plants had disappeared and the banks looked green and country-like as mile after mile slipped by.  Suddenly Roger, who was sitting by the steersman’s wheel, exclaimed, “Why, look! there’s a waterfall in front of us.”

So, indeed, there was, a wide fall stretching from shore to shore, but Roger, eyeing it suspiciously, added in an aggrieved tone, “But it’s a dam.  Must be a dam.  Look how straight it is.”

“How on earth,” called Ethel Blue, “are we going to get over it?”

“Jump up it the way Grandpa told me the salmon fishes do,” volunteered Dicky.

Everybody laughed, but Mr. Emerson declared that was just about what they were going to do.  The boat headed in for one end of the dam and her passengers soon found themselves floating in a granite room, with huge wooden doors closed behind them.  The water began to boil around them, and as it poured into the lock from unseen channels the boat rose slowly.  In a little while the Ethels cried that they could see over the tops of the walls, and in a few minutes more another pair of big gates opened in front of them and they glided into another chamber and out into the river again, this time above the “falls.”

“I feel as if I had been through the Panama Canal,” declared Ethel Blue.

“That’s just the way its huge locks work,” said Mrs. Morton.  “The next time your Uncle Roger has a furlough I hope it will be long enough for us to go down there and see it.”

“I wonder,” asked Roger, “if there are many more dams like this on the Monongahela.”

“There’s one about every ten miles,” volunteered the steersman.  “Until the government put them in only small boats could go up the river.  Now good sized ones can go all the way to Wheeling, West Virginia.  If you want to, you can go by boat all the way from Wheeling to the Gulf of Mexico.”

“The Gulf of Mexico,” echoed the two Ethels.  Then they added, also together, “So you can!” and Ethel Brown said, “The Indians used to go from the upper end of Lake Chautauqua to the Gulf in their canoes?  When they got to Fort Duquesne it was easy paddling.”

“What is that high wharf with a building on it overhanging the river?” asked Helen.

“That’s a coal tipple,” said her grandfather.  “Do you see on shore some low-lying houses and sheds?  They are the various machinery plants and offices of the coal mine and that double row of small houses a quarter of a mile farther up is where the employes live.”