“We’ll just put our heads together and get out a little circular
letter, talking to the boys just as you’d talk to a bunch of them
in your office. Tell ’em it’s all off, and the bar is closed and
padlocked, and you’ll have ’em all eating out of your hand again,
same as they used to. You don’t believe it can be done? You let me
write the letter and I’ll show you. All you have to do is to apply the
scientific principle; surround the whole subject and look at it calmly
and dispassionately, and--ye-ow! Say, I’m going to chance another
guess--the last in the box. If you don’t head me over to the hotel and
my room, you’ll have to carry me over and put me to bed. And that’s no
joke, with a man of my size. Let’s go.”
V
The Cloud-Bursters
IT was an article in the news columns of _The Brewster Morning
Tribune_ which first called attention--the attention of the
Brewsterites and the inter-mountain world in general--to the plans and
purposes of the Mesquite Valley Land and Irrigation Company.
Connabel, a hard-working reporter on _The Tribune_, had been sent
over to Angels, the old head-quarters of the Red Butte Western on the
other side of the Timanyonis, to get the story of a shooting affray
which had localized itself in Pete Grim’s place, the one remaining
Angelic saloon. Finding the bar-room battle of little worth as a news
story, and having time to kill between trains, Connabel had strolled
off up the gulch beyond the old copper mines and had stumbled upon the
construction camp of the Mesquite Company.
Being short of “copy” on the fight story, the reporter had written up
the irrigation project, taking the general outlines from a foreman on
the job whose tongue he loosened with a handful of Brewster cigars. A
big earth dam was in process of construction across the mouth of the
rather precipitous valley of Mesquite Creek; and the mesa below, which,
to Connabel’s unrural eye, seemed to be a very Sahara of infertile
desolation, was to be made to blossom like the rose.
Kendall, managing editor of _The Tribune_, had run the story,
partly because real news happened to be scarce at the moment, and
partly out of sheer astonishment that an enterprise of the magnitude
of the Mesquite project had not already flooded the country with the
brass-band publicity literature which is supposed to attract investors.
That a land and irrigation company should actually wait until its dam
was three-fourths completed before it began to advertise was a thing
sufficiently curious to call for editorial comment. Why Editor Kendall
did not comment on the news item as a matter of singular interest is a
query which had its answer on the loggia porch of the Hotel Topaz in
the evening of the day on which Connabel’s write-up appeared.
It was Kendall’s regular habit to close his desk at seven o’clock and
to spend a leisurely hour over his dinner at the Topaz before settling
down to his night’s work. On the evening in question he had chanced to
sit at table with Maxwell, the general superintendent of the railroad,
and with Maxwell’s friend and college classmate, Sprague. After dinner
the three had gone out to the loggia porch to smoke, and it was the
big chemistry expert who spoke of the Mesquite news story which had
appeared that morning in _The Tribune_.
“Yes,” said the editor; “Connabel got on to that yesterday. I sent him
over to Angels to write up a shooting scrape, and he had more time on
his hands than he knew what to do with. We’ve all known, in a general
way, that an Eastern company was doing something over there, but I had
no idea that they’d got their dam pretty nearly done and were about
ready to open up for business.”
“It’s wild-cat, pure and unadulterated!” cut in the railroad man
snappily. “What they are going to do to a lot of woolly investors will
be good and plenty. That Mesquite Mesa land is just about as fertile as
this street pavement here.”
Kendall was a dried-up little wisp of a man, with tired eyes and a face
the color of old oak-tanned leather.
“That is what you would think--that they are out for the easy money,”
he agreed. “But there is something a little queer about it. They
haven’t advertised.”
“Not here,” supplemented Maxwell. “It would be a trifle too rank.
Everybody in the Timanyoni knows what that land is over in the edge of
the Red Desert.”
“They haven’t advertised anywhere, so far as I can ascertain,” put
in the editor, quietly. “What is more, Jennings, who is the engineer
in charge of the dam-building and who seems to be the only man in
authority on the ground, came in this afternoon and raised sand with
me for printing the news story. He said they were not exploiting the
scheme here at all; that their money and their investors were all in
the East, and they were asking no odds of the Brewster newspapers.”
“Bitter sort of devil, that fellow Jennings,” was Maxwell’s comment;
but it was the big chemist who followed the main thread of the argument.
“What reason did he give for making such an extraordinary break as
that, Mr. Kendall?”
“Oh, he had his reason pat enough,” rejoined the editor, with his tired
smile. “He said he realized that we have irrigated land of our own over
here in the Park upon which we are anxious to get settlers, and that
public sentiment here would naturally be against the Mesquite project.
He asked, as a matter of fairness, that we simply let the desert
project alone. He claimed that it had been financed without taking a
dollar out of the Timanyoni, so we could not urge that there were local
investors to be protected.”
“Umph! that argument cuts both ways; it’s an admission that the Eastern
investors might need protection,” scoffed the railroad superintendent.
Then he added: “They certainly will if they expect to get any of the
money back that they have been spending in Mesquite Valley. Why,
Kendall, Mesquite Creek is bone-dry half the year!”
“And the other half?” inquired Sprague.
“It’s a cloud-burst proposition, like a good many of the foot-hill
arroyos,” Maxwell explained. “Once, in a summer storm, I saw a wall
of water ten feet high come down that stream-bed, tumbling twenty-ton
bowlders in the thick of it as if they had been brook pebbles. Then,
for a month, maybe, it would be merely a streak of dry sand.”
“Perhaps they are counting upon storing the cloud-burst water,”
commented Kendall dryly. Then as he rose to go back to his work: “As
you say, Maxwell, it has all the ear-marks of the wild-cat. But so long
as it doesn’t stick its claws out at us, I suppose we haven’t much
excuse for butting in. Good-night, gentlemen. Drop in on me when you’re
up my way. Always glad to see you.”
The two who remained on the hotel porch after the editor went away
smoked in comradely silence for a time. The night was enchantingly
fine, with a first-quarter moon swinging low in a vault of velvety
blackness, and a gentle breeze, fragrant with the breath of the
mountain forests, creeping down upon the city from the backgrounding
highlands. Across the plaza, and somewhere in the yards behind the long
two-storied railroad head-quarters building and station, a night crew
was making up trains, and the clank and crash of coupling cars mingled
with the rapid-fire exhausts of the switching engine.
The big-bodied chemistry expert was the first to break the
companionable silence, asking a question which had reference to the
epidemic of disaster and demoralization which had recently swept over
Maxwell’s railroad.
“Well, how are things coming by this time, Dick? Are the men responding
fairly well to that little circular-letter, man-to-man appeal we
concocted?”
“They are, for a fact,” was the hearty assurance. “I have never seen
anything like it in railroading in all my knocking about. They’ve been
coming in squads to ’fess up and take the pledge, and to assure me that
it’s the water-wagon for theirs from now on. By George, Calvin, it’s
the most mellowing experience I’ve ever had! It proves what you have
always said, and what I have always wanted to believe: that the good
in the mass definitely outweighs the bad, and that it will come to the
front if you only know how to appeal to it.”
“That’s right,” averred the chemist. “It is the strong hope of the
country that there is justice and fairness and sane common-sense at the
American bottom of us, if you can only get at it. I think you can call
the booze-fight and demoralization round-up a trouble past and begin
to look around you for the signs and symptoms of the next biff you’re
going to get.”
The stockily built little man who stood as the railroad company’s chief
field-officer on the far-western fighting line moved uneasily in his
chair.
“I have been hoping there wasn’t going to be any ‘next time,’” he said,
chewing thoughtfully upon his cigar.
“I should hope with you, Dick, if we had been able, in any of the
former scrimmages, to secure good, indubitable court evidence against
the men who are backing these buccaneering raids on your securities.
The one thing that big money really fears to-day is the law--the law as
the Federal courts are likely to construe and administer it. But to
obtain your day in court you’ve got to have evidence; and thus far we
haven’t been able to sweat out anything that would implicate the man
or men higher up. Therefore, you may continue to sleep on your arms,
keeping a sharp eye out for surprises.”
“I guess that is pretty good advice,” was the ready admission; “but
it is rather difficult to put into practice, Calvin. There are five
hundred miles of this railroad, and my job of operating them is big
enough to keep me busy without doing any detective stunts on the side.”
“I know,” Sprague nodded reflectively, “and for that reason I’ve been
half-way keeping an eye out for you myself.”
“You have? Don’t tell me you’ve been finding more grief!”
Sprague threw away his outburned stub and found and lighted a fresh
cigar.
“I don’t want to pose as an alarmist,” he offered at length, “but I’d
like to dig a little deeper into this Mesquite irrigation scheme. How
much or little do you know about it?”
“Next to nothing. About two months ago Jennings, the construction
engineer, made application for the through handling, from Copah, of a
train-load of machinery, tools, and camp outfit. He asked to have the
stuff delivered at the end of the old copper-mine spur above Angels. We
put the spur in shape for him and delivered the freight.”
“Well, what else?”
“That is about all we have had to do with them in a business way. Two
weeks ago, when we had that wreck at Lobo, they were asking Benson
for an extension of the copper-mine spur to a point nearer their job,
chiefly, I think, so they could run a hand-car back and forth between
the camp and the saloon at Angels. Benson didn’t recommend it, and the
matter was dropped.”
“Without protest?”
“Oh, yes; Jennings didn’t make much of a roar. In fact, I’ve always
felt that he avoided me when he could. He is in town a good bit, but I
rarely see him. Somebody told me he tried once to get into the Town and
Country Club, and didn’t make it. I don’t know who would blackball him,
or why; but evidently some one did.”
The ash grew a full half-inch longer on Sprague’s fresh cigar before he
said:
“Doesn’t it occur to you that there is something a bit mysterious about
this dry-land irrigation scheme, Dick?”
“I had never thought of it as being mysterious. It is a palpable
swindle, of course; but swindles are like the poor--they’re always with
us.”
“It interests me,” said the big man, half-musingly. “A company, formed
nobody knows where or how, drops down in the edge of the Red Desert
and begins--absolutely without any of the clatter and clamor of
advertising that usually go with such enterprises--to build what, from
all reports, must be a pretty costly dam. If they have acquired a title
to the Mesquite Mesa, no one seems to have heard of it; and if they are
hoping to sell the land when the dam is completed, that, too, has been
kept dark. Now comes this little newspaper puff this morning, and Mr.
Jennings promptly turns up to ask Kendall to drop it.”
“It is rather queer, when you come to put the odds and ends of it
together,” admitted the railroad man.
“Decidedly queer, I should say.” So far the Government man went on the
line which he himself had opened. Then he switched abruptly. “By the
way, where is your brother-in-law, Starbuck? I haven’t seen him for
three or four days.”
“Billy has been in Red Butte, figuring on a little mining deal in which
we are both interested. But I am looking for him back to-night.”
“Good. If you should happen to see him when the train comes in, ask
him to come over here and smoke a pipe with me. Tell him I’m losing my
carefully acquired cowboy accent and I’d like to freshen it up a bit.”
The superintendent promised; and, since he always had work to do, went
across to his office in the second story of the combined head-quarters
and station building.
Some hour or so later the evening train came in from the west, and at
the outpouring of passengers from it one, a man whose air of prosperous
independence was less in the grave, young-old face and the loosely
fitting khaki service clothes than in the way in which he carried his
shoulders, was met by a boy from the superintendent’s office, and the
word passed sent him diagonally across the grass-covered plaza to swing
himself lightly over the railing of the hotel porch.
“Dick made motions as if you wanted to smoke a peace pipe with me,” he
said, dropping carelessly into the chair which had been Maxwell’s.
“Yes,” Sprague assented; and then he went on to explain why. At the end
of the explanation Starbuck nodded.
“I reckon we can do it all right; go up on the early-morning train to
the canyon head, and take a chance on picking up a couple of bronc’s
at Wimberley’s ranch. But we could hoof it over from Angels in less
than a quarter of the time it’ll take us to ride up the river from
Wimberley’s.”
“For reasons of my own, Billy, I don’t want to ‘hoof it,’ as you say,
from Angels. To mention one of them, I might ask you to remember that I
tip the scale at a little over the half of the third hundred, just now,
and I’m pretty heavy on my feet.” And therewith the matter rested.
At an early hour the following morning, an hour when the sun was
just swinging clear over the far-distant blue horizon line of the
Crosswater Hills which marks the eastern limit of the great desert, two
men dropped from the halted eastbound train at the Timanyoni Canyon
water-tank and made their way around the nearest of the hogbacks to the
ranch house of one William Wimberley.
As Starbuck had predicted, two horses were obtainable, though the
ranchman looked long and dubiously at the big figure of the Government
chemist before he was willing to risk even the heaviest of the horses
in his small _remuda_.
“I reckon you’ll have ter set sort o’ light in the saddle, Mister,”
he said at the mounting; and then, apparently as an after-thought:
“By gollies, I wouldn’t have you fall over ag’inst me f’r a farm in
God’s country, stranger! Ef you was to live round here, we’d call you
Samson, and take up a c’lection fer the pore, sufferin’ Philistines. We
shore would.”
Sprague laughed good-naturedly as he followed Starbuck’s lead toward
the river. He was well used to being joked about his size, and there
were times when he rather encouraged the joke. Big men are popularly
supposed to be more or less helpless, physically, and Sprague was
enough of a humorist to enjoy the upsetting, now and then, of the
popular tradition. In his college days he had held the record for the
heavy lift and the broad jump; there was no man of his class who could
stand up to him with the gloves or on the wrestling-mat; and in the
foot-ball field he was at once the strongest “back” and the fastest man
on the team--a combination rare enough to be miraculous.
“You say you want to follow the river?” said Starbuck, when they had
struck in between the precipitous hills among which the green flood of
the Timanyoni made its way toward the canyon portal.
“Yes, if it is at all practicable. I’d like to get some idea of the lay
of the land between this and the camp on the Mesquite.”
“I’m anticipatin’ that you’ll get the idea, good and plenty,” agreed
the superintendent’s brother-in-law dryly; and during the three-hour
jaunt that followed, the prediction was amply confirmed. There was no
trail, and for the greater part of the way the river flowed between
rocky hogbacks, with only the narrowest of bowlder-strewn margins on
either hand.
Time and again they were forced to dismount and to lead the horses
around or over the natural obstructions; and once they were obliged to
leave the river valley entirely, climbing and descending again by a
circuitous route among the rugged hills.
It was late in the forenoon when they came finally into the region of
upper basins, and, turning to the eastward, threaded a dry arroyo which
brought them out upon the level-bottomed valley known as the Mesquite
Mesa. It was not a mesa in the proper meaning of the term; it was
rather a vast flat wash brought down from the hills by the sluicing of
many floods. Here and there its sun-baked surface was cut and gashed
by dry gullies all pointing toward the river, and each bearing silent
witness to the manner in which the mesa had been formed.
At a point well within this shut-in moraine, Sprague dismounted, tossed
his bridle reins to Starbuck, and went to examine the soil in the
various gullies. Each dry ditch afforded a perfect cross-section of
the different strata, from the thin layer of sandy top-soil to the
underlying beds of coarse sandstone pebbles and gravel. Sprague kicked
the edges from a dozen of the little ditches, secured a few handfuls of
the soil, and came back shaking his head.
“I don’t wonder that these people don’t want to advertise their land,
Billy,” he commented, climbing, with a nimbleness astonishing in so
large a man, to the back of his mount. “As they say down in Tennessee,
you couldn’t raise a fuss on it. Let’s amble along and see what they
are doing at the head works.”
At the head of the wash the valley of Mesquite Creek came in abruptly
from the right. On a bench above the mouth of the valley they found the
construction camp of the irrigation company, a scattered collection of
shack sheds and tents, a corral for the working stock, and the usual
filth and litter characterizing the temporary home of the “wop.”
Across the valley mouth a huge earthwork was rising. It was the
simplest form of construction known to the dam-building engineer: a
mere heaping of earth and gravel moved by two-horse scrapers from the
slopes of the contiguous hills on either hand. There was no masonry,
no concrete, not even the thin core wall which modern engineering
practice prescribes for the strengthening member in an earth
embankment designed to retain any considerable body of water.
Moreover, there was no spillway. The creek, carrying at this season of
the year its minimum flow, had been stopped off without an outlet; and
the embankment upon which the force was heaping the scrapings from the
hillsides was already retaining a good-sized lake formed by the checked
waters of the stream.
Starbuck and Sprague had drawn rein at the outskirts of the
construction camp, and they were not molested until Sprague took a flat
black box from his pocket, opened it into a camera, and was preparing
to take a snap-shot of the dam. At that, a man who had been lounging in
the door of the camp commissary, a dark-faced, black-bearded giant in
brown duck and service leggings, crossed the camp street and threw up a
hand in warning.
“Hey, there; hold on--that don’t go!” he shouted gruffly, striding
up to stand squarely in the way of the camera. “You can’t take any
pictures on this job.”
“Sorry,” said Sprague, giving the intruder his most amiable smile, “but
you were just a half-second too late,” and he closed the camera into
its box-like shape and dropped it into his pocket.
The black-bearded man advanced threateningly.
“This is company property, and you are trespassers,” he rasped. “Give
me that camera!”
Starbuck’s right hand went softly under his coat and stayed there, and
his steady gray eyes took on the sleepy look that, in his range-riding
days, had been a sufficient warning to those who knew him. Sprague
lounged easily in his saddle and ignored the hand extended for the
camera.
“You are Mr. Jennings, I take it,” he said, as one who would temporize
and gain time. “Fine dam you are building there.”
“_Give me that camera!_”
Sprague met the angry eyes of the engineer and smiled back into them.
“I’ll take it under consideration,” he said, half-jocularly. “You’ll
give me a little time to think about it, won’t you?”
Jennings’s hand dropped to the butt of the heavy revolver sagging at
his hip.
“Not a damned minute!” he barked. “Hand it over!”
Starbuck was closing up slowly on the opposite side of his companion’s
horse, a movement which he brought about by a steady knee pressure on
the bronco’s off shoulder. Jennings’s fingers were closing around
the grip of his pistol when the astounding thing happened. Without so
much as a muscle-twitching of warning Sprague’s left hand shot out,
the fingers grappled an ample breast-hold on the engineer’s coat and
shirt-bosom, and Jennings was snapped from his feet and flung, back
down, across the horn of Sprague’s saddle much as if his big body had
been a bag of meal. Starbuck reached over, jerked the engineer’s weapon
from its holster, broke it to eject the cartridges, and flung it away.
“Now you can get down,” said Sprague quietly; and when he loosed the
terrible clutch, Jennings slid from the saddle-horn and fell, cursing
like a maniac.
“Stand still!” ordered Starbuck, when the engineer bounded to his feet
and started to run toward the commissary, and the weapon that made the
bidding mandatory materialized suddenly from an inner pocket of the
ex-cowman’s khaki riding-coat.
But the trouble, it seemed, was just fairly getting under way. Up
from the embankment where the scrapers were dumping came two or three
foremen armed with pick-handles. The commissary was turning out its
quota of rough-looking clerks and time-keepers, and a mob of the
foreign laborers--the shift off duty--came pouring out of the bunk
houses and shacks.
[Illustration: Sprague had unlimbered and focussed his camera again and
was calmly taking snap-shot after snap-shot.]
Sprague had unlimbered and focussed his camera again and was calmly
taking snap-shot after snap-shot: of the dam, of the impounded lake,
of the up-coming mob, and of the black-bearded man held hands-up in
the middle of the camp street. When he shut the box on the last of the
exposures he turned to Starbuck with a whimsical smile wrinkling at the
corners of his eyes.
“They don’t seem to be very enthusiastic about keeping us here, Billy,”
he said, with gentle irony. “Shall we go?”
Starbuck shook the reins over the neck of his mount and the two horses
wheeled as one and sprang away down the rough cart-road leading to the
end of the copper-mine spur above Angels. At the retreat, some one on
the commissary porch began to pump a repeating rifle in the general
direction of the pair, but no harm was done.
Starbuck was the first to break the galloping silence when an
intervening hill shoulder had cut off the backward view of the camp at
the dam, and what he said was purely complimentary.
“You sure have got your nerve with you, and the punch to back it up,”
he chuckled. “I reckon I’m goin’ to wake up in the middle of the night
laughin’ at the way you snatched that rustler out of his tracks and
slammed him across the saddle. I’d give a heap to be able to do a thing
like that; I sure would.”
“Call it a knack,” rejoined Sprague modestly. “You pick up a good many
of those little tricks when you’re training on the squad. Perhaps
you’ve never thought of it, but the human body is easier to handle,
weight for weight, than any inanimate object could possibly be. That is
one of the first things you learn in tackling on the foot-ball field.”
They were jogging along slowly by this time and had passed the
copper-mine switch on the road leading to the station at Angels.
Starbuck was not over-curious, but the experiences of the forenoon were
a little puzzling. Why had his companion wished to take the long, hard
ride up the valley of the Timanyoni? And why, again, had he taken the
chance of a fight for the sake of securing a few snap-shot pictures
of the irrigation company’s construction camp and dam? A third query
hinged itself upon the decidedly inhospitable, not to say hostile,
attitude of Jennings, the irrigation company’s field-officer. Why
should he object so strenuously to the common sight-seer’s habit of
kodaking anything and everything in sight?
Starbuck was turning these things over in his mind when they reached
Angels. As they rode into town Sprague glanced at his watch.