A STORM AND A MADMAN
Scott sat for some minutes gazing absently at the rugged mountains. He
felt tired and his mind wandered listlessly from one vague something to
another, none of them connected with the present situation. The peace
and quiet of his surroundings began to soak into him and a lassitude
crept over him. He had been under a much greater nervous strain than he
had realized and the reaction made him sleepy. He wanted to curl up
right where he was and sleep. He had no interest in anything else. His
heavy eyes closed wearily and he sank down beside the still unconscious
man.
Scott dreamed that he was lying on the battlefield with other wounded
and dying men groaning all around him. The ambulance corps picked him up
and carried him far back of the lines to a peaceful little French
village surrounded by high mountains and put him in a little cabin
beside a lake. He could hear the babbling of many small streams and the
gentle lapping of tiny waves on a pebbly shore. They were soothing,
lulling sounds but woven through them he could still hear the groans of
the dying. The cabin was becoming unbearably warm and oppressive. He
writhed about on his burning couch until the discomfort awoke him.
The groaning continued and Scott sat up suddenly to find that Dawson had
regained consciousness. His jaw was badly broken, and it was his moaning
that Scott had heard in his dreams. The sun was shining directly on them
both with a blistering heat unusual for that time of the year. Scott did
not know how long he had been asleep but it must have been a long time.
The sun had shifted to the western half of the sky, a warm breeze was
ruffling the surface of the reservoir, and black clouds were peeping
over the horizon. Dawson was half delirious from suffering and lack of
water in the blazing sun. He was moaning constantly and talking
incoherently. He did not seem to recognize Scott or to know where he
was.
Scott picked up the suffering man as carefully as he could and carried
him into the cabin. All his feeling against Dawson was gone now and he
saw only a human being in agony. He reproached himself for going to
sleep and leaving him in such a condition. He realized now how
panic-stricken he must have been to bind the wrists of a crippled man
when he himself was armed with the cripple’s revolver. He removed the
belt from Dawson’s wrists and ran out to get some water from the
reservoir. He poured some of it on the parched lips and the injured man
swallowed eagerly though every movement of his mouth seemed to cause new
agony. Scott bathed his fevered brow, gave him a little more water to
drink and then bound up his jaw with his handkerchief. He wondered how
he could get him home. There were two horses there now, but Jed was not
well enough trained to be trusted with one end of a stretcher. A
trailing pole stretcher on Dawson’s horse would be too rough. He decided
that his best move would be to ’phone down to Baxter or Benny for help.
His anxiety to aid the suffering man had so completely occupied Scott’s
attention that he had not noticed what was going on outside. A sudden
gust of wind forced his attention. He ran to the door. The little black
clouds which were just peeping over the horizon a short time before had
spread over half the sky. The heat was oppressive and a warm, sultry
wind which was blowing half a gale seemed only to accentuate it. Angry
little waves were beating on the shore now and the growing streams on
the other side of the reservoir were beginning to roar ominously.
Scott ran down to the edge of the reservoir to look at the mark he had
set on the dam the day before. The water had already risen a foot since
he had noticed it that morning and he knew from the rush of waters in
the cañons that it was rising now at an alarming rate. He glanced at his
watch. It was five o’clock. Ordinarily the cool of the approaching
evening had begun to tie up the springs of ice and snow in the hidden
cañons before that time and the streams would be drying up, but to-day
that hot wind was searching its way into every cranny of the rocks and
melting the winter’s store of ice at a tremendous rate. Nor would they
cease to melt even with the setting of the sun as long as that wind
continued. A warm rain on top of that was almost sure to be disastrous.
Even while Scott looked the last patch of blue was blotted from the sky
and the little basin was thrown into semi-darkness. The swiftness of the
onrushing storm was bewildering. He would ’phone Baxter for help to get
Dawson out of there and then open the sluice gates without waiting for
the level of the reservoir to reach the danger point. He feared that it
would reach it all too quickly even with the sluice gates open.
Scott rushed up the bank to the little camp and grabbed the telephone.
He gave Baxter’s ring and waited what seemed an age. He tried three
times without getting any answer. Baxter must be either out on the range
or out of hearing of the ’phone. He tried Benny. Benny was always there.
“Hello,” came the prompt answer.
“That you, Benny? This is—”
He was interrupted by a blinding flash followed instantly by a deafening
explosion. The receiver was apparently wrenched from his hand and he
stood dazed while the reverberations of the mighty report were hurled
crashing from peak to peak. The storm was on them. He grasped the ’phone
again desperately but the fuses were burned out and the line was dead.
The echoes of the first crash of thunder had not died away in the
distant hills when the rain came down in torrents. A half hour of that
and the reservoir would overflow even if the dam itself did not go out
before that. The opening of the sluice gates was the only thing which he
could do. He could not imagine those sluice gates taking care of the mad
torrents which would soon be raging down the cañons from all those
encircling barren peaks, but the storm might possibly cease as suddenly
as it had begun.
Scott sprang to the gates and was already bending his back to the
old-fashioned windlass when he remembered that Jed was on the other side
of the meadow. Once he had opened those gates it would be impossible to
get him across to the trail. He had to have Jed to get help for Dawson
and carry the warning of the impending danger to the ranchers along the
course that the flood would take if the dam should burst.
The rain continued to fall in a deluge which almost blinded him, but he
managed to stagger across the meadow to the clump of willows where he
had left Jed. He feared that the horse might have been frightened by the
storm and run away. The booming of the thunder in those hollow cañons
was enough to terrify either horse or man. But Jed had spent his life in
the open. Thunder storms in the mountains were nothing new to him. Close
in the lee of the bushes, with his tail to the storm, he was waiting
patiently. He greeted Scott with a little nicker of recognition.
Scott jumped on to his slippery, wet back and rode across the darkening
meadow toward the place where he had hidden the saddle. He put on the
saddle while there was yet light and leaving Jed well up from the trail,
he dashed once more for the sluice gates. In the trail at the foot of
the dam he almost ran into a strange horse. The poor beast was saddled
and bridled and steaming in the rain from hard riding. Its breath was
coming in great gasps, its head hung down until its nose was almost on
the ground, and its feet were spread wide, a sign of total exhaustion.
Some one had ridden up that steep cañon trail at a killing pace.
“It must be Baxter,” Scott thought as he ran past the heaving horse and
made for the sluice gates. There was not enough daylight left to
recognize objects at any distance, but almost continuous lightning
flashes made things stand out momentarily with vivid distinctness. Scott
was just rounding a clump of bushes not more than ten yards from the
sluice gates, when one of these lurid flashes revealed a picture which
brought him to a sudden halt with his heart in his mouth.
Seated on top of the sluice gates was not Baxter, but Jed Clark.
He was crazy with drink. He was holding a forty-five in either hand.
After every flash of lightning he waved the revolvers wildly in the air
and shouted his vengeance against the forest service, the government and
all law in general. He seemed to revel in the wildness of the storm. He
was raving mad.
Scott stood as one stunned. He was in the shadow of the bushes and Jed
had not seen him. He knew that Jed had come up there with the original
intention of getting him. Failing to find Scott his crazed brain had now
hit on the still more devilish scheme of reeking his vengeance on the
forest service by bringing about the destruction of the dam. None knew
the country better than he. None knew better than he how impossible it
would be for that old dam to withstand the flood which was gathering
against it. Now utterly regardless of his own danger he was seated on
the sluice gates of the very dam he was planning to destroy, recklessly
chanting his vengeance in the face of the raging elements.
The whole thing seemed so fiendish, so utterly inhuman, that Scott
stared helplessly for a moment in an agony of dismay. His first impulse
was to rush the maniac, for the gates must be opened and that quickly.
But he gave up the idea almost as soon as he conceived it. Jed was well
known to be a dead shot, drunk or sober, and the experience of the
morning had shown Scott how perfectly helpless he would be.
There was only one way out. Dawson’s revolver. It had been in his way
when he was ministering to Dawson’s hurts and he had taken it off. He
started for the cabin and it suddenly occurred to him that Jed would
have gone there the first thing. He remembered the unrecorded mortgage
and Jed’s veiled threat at that night meeting below the chute. He
trembled to think what he might find in the cabin. Shivering he groped
his way across the room to the bed. He leaned over it and waited for the
next flash of lightning. It came and the frozen look of horror in the
wide staring eyes of the man before him made his blood run cold. He
wanted to run from the cabin but Dawson grabbed him by the sleeve. He
tried to tell Scott something but the mumbled words from the tightly
bound jaws were lost in the raging of the storm.
Scott realized that Jed had been to the cabin. He apparently had not in
his drunken search noticed Dawson, but the injured man, helpless as he
was, had been dreading his return. When Scott leaned over him he had
thought that it was Jed and felt that his time had come. He held onto
Scott now until the next flash could show him pointing to the dam.
“Jed,” he tried to say between his closed teeth.
Scott understood. He leaned close to Dawson’s ear and shouted above the
booming of the storm, “I saw him. I’m going after him now.”
He picked up the revolver from the table and started out of the cabin.
The last of the daylight was gone now and the frequent flashes of
blinding lightning were separated by short periods of Stygian darkness.
The recurring echoes of one mighty crash of thunder never died away till
there was another crash that seemed louder yet. The effect was
cumulative. It was as though all the storms of the ages had been dumped
into that little caldron in the midst of the mountain peaks.
If the ground had been more familiar it would have been an easy matter
for Scott to have utilized the lightning flashes to locate the next
patch of shelter and to have run to it in the ensuing darkness, but he
had not been there long enough for that. The vivid flashes confused him
and everything looked strange in the weird light. It did not matter how
much noise he made for nothing would be heard above the storm but he had
to keep under cover for the lightning made objects stand out with
uncanny clearness.
He trembled to think what he was going to do. It seemed the irony of
fate that he, who had always shunned the use of a revolver and shuddered
at the thought of shooting a man even in the heat of action, should now
be called upon to shoot a man in cold blood. But there was nothing else
to do. The lives of women and children in the valley below hung on the
chance of getting that maniac away from the sluice gates. Scott accepted
the call of fate, closed his senses to his own feelings, and crept on
with unwavering determination. His mind was made up. He would shoot this
man as he would shoot a mad dog to save the lives of others.
He had made his way almost to the clump of bushes where he had first
discovered Jed—he had to get close or he knew that he would miss—when a
flash of lightning revealed another object crawling around that same
clump of bushes. Surprised as he was he recognized it even in that brief
flash. He recognized the cautious snake-like crawl, and that gleaming
steel. It had been graven on his memory that evening at the cabin when
he had sat in the shadow of the forest and watched that same snake-like
object crawl toward his cabin window. He could recognize it instantly
anywhere.
But what was Dugan doing there at this out-of-the-way dam in a raging
storm, and crawling inch by inch with a gun in hand toward the man who
had been his friend? Either he had not recognized Jed and thought that
he was stalking Scott, or had some ulterior motive which Scott did not
know anything about for disposing of Jed. It was probably the former.
Scott noticed that Jed was no longer brandishing his guns and shouting
curses in the teeth of the storm. A fit of sullen depression had
apparently come over him and he was crouched in a heap so that it was
difficult even to recognize him as a man, to say nothing of determining
his identity.
Dugan evidently wanted to make sure. He could easily have picked the man
off from where he was, but he wormed his way steadily nearer. He was
beyond the last piece of cover now and was working his way across the
narrow open space which separated him from the sluice gates of the dam.
The storm instead of abating seemed to be increasing in fury. Flash
followed flash almost without cessation. The crashing of the thunder
sounded like a barrage of hundreds of big guns. And through it all there
sounded the rush of waters. There seemed to be but one inanimate object
in the whole scene. Trees and rocks and mountain peaks seemed to be
dancing in the fickle flashes of light. The man on the sluice gates only
seemed motionless. Perhaps he had gone to sleep in that perilous
position on those groaning sluice gates.
Scott watched with a curious fascination. It seemed to him that fate had
thought better of her irony and was sending this special agent to
relieve him of his odious task. He was perfectly willing to have it so.
It was like a reprieve from a horrible sentence. It had but one
disagreeable feature. It was so maddeningly slow. He dreaded lest he
should hear the dam giving way almost any minute.
Dugan did not seem to be in any hurry. He wanted to make sure. He
evidently doubted whether the motionless object on the sluice gates was
his man. He was lying perfectly still now watching it. He did not want
to risk a shot at a scarecrow and sound a warning. Convinced at last
that he was mistaken he rose to his feet and took a step toward the
sluice gates.
There was a spit of flame, the roar of a forty-five, accompanied by a
mocking laugh from the motionless object on the sluice gates, and Dugan
staggered. He was hard hit but he was not the man to go alone. He
steadied himself. There were two more reports almost simultaneously and
the flashes from the two revolvers almost met.
Jed pitched backwards into the deep boiling waters of the reservoir and
Dugan sank silently beside the sluice gates. Fate worked it out without
Scott’s aid.