there’s a piebald bronc’ hitched out beyond the freight shed,” was the
brief report.
“Who is the floor-walker?” asked Sprague.
“I couldn’t get a fair squint at him, but he looked mightily like the
fellow I been keepin’ cases on for the last two or three days.”
“Gentlemen, we’re in luck, for once,” Sprague said impressively.
“That’s Jennings, without doubt; and he is waiting for a wire--the
right kind of a wire--to come from Brewster. You remember what I told
Maxwell, as we were leaving? That was one time when a guess was as good
as a prophecy. Go on, Billy, and head straight for the Mesquite. And
you gentlemen back there, get your weapons ready. If there happens to
be a guard at the dam, we’ll have to rush it.”
Singularly enough, when the short run was accomplished they found that
there was no guard. The shack camp was deserted, with all the disorder
of a hasty evacuation strewn broadcast. But in the valley itself
there was a startling change. The lake, which, three days earlier,
had reached only half-way up the earth embankment, was now lapping
within a foot of the dam top, the result of the continued storms and
cloud-bursts reported by the Brewster weather station.
Starbuck eased the big car up to the dam head, and Williams and Tarbell
made a quick quartering of the deserted camp. “Nobody here,” the
engineer reported, when they came back to the car; and then Sprague
asked Starbuck to relight the head-lamps.
With the acetylenes flinging their broad white beam across the
earthwork, another change was made apparent. In the centre of the dam a
square pit, plank-lined like the shaft of a mine, had been either sunk
or left in the building. Over this pit stood a three-legged hoist, with
the block-and-tackle still hanging from its apex.
“What is that thing out there?” queried the colonel, shading his eyes
with his hand.
“Jennings would probably tell you that it is a new kind of spillway, by
which, in case of need, the reservoir lake can be emptied,” suggested
Sprague. “But we haven’t time to investigate it just now. Our job at
the present moment is to take the law into our hands and empty this
lake, and to do it, if we can, without bringing on the catastrophe it
was designed to accomplish.”
“Heavens!” ejaculated Colonel Baldwin. “That’s a criminal offence,
isn’t it?--and in the face of Judge Watson’s injunction, at that!”
“It is criminal,” was the calm reply; “unless we shall find sufficient
justification for it as we go along. There is one chance in a dozen
that we may find it first. Tarbell, take this little flash-light of
mine and skip out there and look into that pit.”
Tarbell paused scarcely a moment at the mouth of the mid-dam shaft.
“It’s filled up to within a few feet of the top with dirt,” he said,
when he returned.
“That is what I expected. We might find another warrant for what we
are about to do, but we haven’t time to search for it. Jennings may
come back at any minute, and if he suspects anything wrong, he’ll bring
that bunch of dance-hall cowmen with him. If you’d like to hide the car
and stand aside to see what he will do when he comes----”
“By Jove! I’m with you, injunction or no injunction!” cried Smith, and
he began to take the picks and shovels out of the car.
“Go to it,” said the colonel; and Sprague turned to Williams.
“Mr. Williams, you’re an engineer. Our problem is to drain this lake in
the shortest possible time in which it can be done without raising a
dangerous flood-level in the Timanyoni River. We’re under your orders.”
Williams took the job as a dog snaps at a fly, barking out his
directions with the curt precision of a man who knew his business.
Planks were brought from the dismantled shacks to be thrust down on
the inward face of the dam as a protection, and these were weighted in
place with a make shift buttressing built out of the bags of sand which
had been used as temporary coffer-dams in the construction work. When
all was ready, a small ditch was opened across the protected end of the
dam and the water began to pour through.
Immediately the wisdom of Williams’s precaution became evident.
Instantly the rushing stream began to eat into the loosely built dam,
threatening to turn the ditch into a gully and the gully into a chasm,
and quick work was necessary with more planks and sand-bags to check
the rapid widening of the spillway. Even at that, the ditch grew
swiftly deeper and more cavernous as the torrent emptied itself through
it, and the roar of the artificial cataract filled the air with a note
of sustained thunder.
“Jennings’ll be deaf if he doesn’t hear this plumb down at the
railroad!” shouted Tarbell. But there was no time to consider the
consequences Jennings-wise. Every man of the six, including the
colonel, was constrained to work like mad to prevent the catastrophe
they were trying to avert.
It was when the flood was pouring through the gap in a solid six-foot
stream that shot itself far out to fall in a thunderous deluge upon the
barren Mesquite mesa, and the planking and sand-bagging was sufficing
to hold it measurably within bounds, that Sprague took steps looking
toward a defensive battle should the need arise. Under his direction
the auto was drawn out to one side and the lamps were extinguished.
Then a hasty breastwork was made of the remaining bags of sand, and
Tarbell and Starbuck were sent out as skirmishers to keep watch on the
Angels road while the others renewed their efforts to hold the pouring
torrent within safe limits.
A toiling half-hour, during which the spillway flood had slowly grown
in volume until it threatened to become a destroying crevasse, slipped
away, and at the end of it the two scouts came hurrying in.
“They’re coming!” yelled Starbuck; and once again the big man from the
East took the command.
“Down behind the sand-bags!” he shouted. “If Jennings gets near enough
to strike a match on this hill-side, we’ll all go to glory!”
Sprague had predicted that if Jennings suspected trouble he would not
return to the dam alone. The prediction was verified when a squad
of mounted men came in view at the turn in the road leading around
the hill shoulder. The moon, declining to its setting behind the
Timanyonis, flung ghostly shadows across the valley, and the watchers
behind the sand-bag breastwork saw only the dark blot of blacker shadow
sweeping up the road.
“Give ’em a volley over their heads!” Sprague ordered, and the three
sawed-off Winchesters barked spitefully.
“That means war,” said the colonel, when the charging cavalcade stopped
abruptly and a dropping fusillade of revolver-shots spatted into the
sand breastwork and whined overhead. “We’re strictly in for it, now.”
“If those fool cowpunch’s only knew what they’re fightin’ for, they’d
turn their artillery the other way,” growled Starbuck. “I reckon
they’re the ‘Lazy X’ outfit, and Cummings, their owner, is one of the
High Line directors.”
“It’s a pity we can’t get word to them some way,” said Smith. “We’re
not out to kill anybody if we can help it.”
“No, but they’re out to kill us,” grunted Williams, as a second shower
of bullets thudded into the breastwork and tore up the gravel on either
hand. Then: “What are they doing now?”
The defenders of the breastwork were not left long in doubt as to
what was doing. The horsemen in front were deploying in a thin line
which rapidly bent itself into a semi-circle across the hill slope. To
let any one of these skilled marksmen gain the rear meant death for
somebody, and again Sprague gave the word of command.
“Better kill horses than men,” he said. “We’ve got to stop that
manœuvre,” and again the Winchesters spoke, this time to deadlier
purpose. At the third volley two of the horses were down, and the
scattering line was drawing together again and galloping out of range.
In the lull which succeeded, Williams dropped his weapon and crawled
quickly away to the edge of the spillway torrent. When he came back
there was a new note of alarm in his voice.
“That spillway of ours is eating away the dam at the rate of a foot a
minute!” he announced. “If we can’t get to work on it again, the whole
business will go out with a rush!”
It was a cruel dilemma, and it was quickly made worse by a new movement
on the part of the attackers. Jennings’s party was closing in again,
and flashes of red fire were appearing here and there on the hill-side
to herald a dropping hail of pistol bullets. Under cover of the
irregular firing, a man was worming his way down toward the edge of the
ravine through which the wasting torrent was rushing out upon the mesa.
It was Sprague who first saw the crawling man and divined his purpose.
“That’s Jennings!” he exclaimed, “and if he reaches the edge of that
gully, we’re all dead men! Stop him, Starbuck! don’t kill him if you
can help it, but stop him!”
Starbuck levelled his short rifle over the top of the breastwork and
took careful aim. The light was bad and he could scarcely see the
sights. At the trigger-pulling, those who were watching saw a little
cloud of dust and gravel spring up directly in front of the crawling
man; saw this, and heard above the roaring of the torrent his yell of
pain as he doubled up and clapped his hands to his face.
“Good shot, Billy!” gritted the white-haired colonel. “You’ve blinded
him! Now if we could only choke those crazy range-riders off....
Tarbell, can’t you--where’s Tarbell gone?”
Tarbell’s place at the end of the breastwork was empty, and Smith, who
was next in the line, accounted for him.
“Archer dropped out a minute or two ago. I think he’s trying to make a
dodge-around to get at those cow-punchers.”
The firing had ceased for the moment, and the man who had tried to
creep down to the ravine was stumbling back up the hill. Williams
nervously thrust in his plea again.
“I tell you, we’ve got to get to work on this thing behind us and do it
quick!” he urged. “There is still water enough in the lake to tear the
heart out of Timanyoni Canyon if it all goes at once!”
Sprague set the temerarious example by springing to his feet, and the
others followed him. There was no answering volley from the hill-side.
On the contrary, the black blot of things animate on the slope was
melting away, and a minute later Tarbell came running back.
“The boys have got their hunch!” he cried. “A couple of them are taking
Jennings back to Angels, and the rest of ’em’ll be here in a minute to
help us. They didn’t know what was up.”
As one man the half-dozen flung themselves upon the task of keeping the
roaring crevasse under control; and a little later eight of the cowmen
came racing down to swell the working force. But even for the augmented
numbers, it proved to be a fiercely fought battle, with the issue
hanging perilously in the balance for a long time.
Hour by hour they toiled, making plank bulk-heads out of the shack
lumber, piling sand-bags against the crumbling embankment, and fighting
inch by inch with the gnawing flood as the night wore away.
And it was thus that the graying dawn found them; soaked, muddied,
gasping, and haggard with fatigue, but with the victory fairly won. The
flood was still pouring through the gap which had by now widened to the
cutting away of a full half of the dam; but the great body of water
had already passed out and there was no longer any danger.
When the sun was just beginning to redden on the higher peaks of the
western mountains, a shout from the hill-side road broke upon the
morning stillness. A moment later Maxwell and Stillings came running to
the brink of hazard.
Sprague stumbled up out of the crevasse chasm and pointed down to the
washed-out heart of the dam. There, piled in the bottom of what had
once been the plank-lined pit with the hoisting-tackle over it, and
laid bare now by the scouring flood, was a great pile of dynamite
stacked solidly in its shipping-boxes. And, half-buried in the sand and
detritus of the outflow, lay the iron pipe through which the firing
fuse had been carried to the gully edge Jennings had tried to reach.
“There is the warrant for what we’ve been doing, gentlemen,” said the
big expert wearily. “Take a good look at it, all of you, so that if the
courts have anything to say about this night’s work----”
Maxwell cut in quickly.
“There’s nobody left to make the fight. Jennings went east from Angels
on the first train that got through. He was badly blinded, so Disbrow
says; got a fall from his horse, was the story he told. We’ll fix this
lay-out so it will stand just as it is until everybody who wants to has
seen it!”
“You couldn’t stay away, could you?” said the white-haired colonel,
grinning up from his seat on the last of the sand-bags. “I told the
boys here you’d be turning up as soon as your railroad track was open.”
“We’ve had a mighty anxious night,” Stillings put in. “The river is up
five feet, and we couldn’t tell what was happening over here. Great
Jonah! but you men must have had your hands full!”
“We did,” said Smith; “but it’s all over now.”
“All but the shouting,” said Maxwell. “But post your guards and let’s
get back to town. My car is at Angels, and we came up special. When we
left Brewster the plaza was black with people waiting for news.”
It was on the way down the flood-swollen canyon that the chemistry
expert explained to the private-car company at the breakfast-table how
he had been able to diagnose the case of the cloud-bursters.
“It was merely a bit of what you might call constructive reasoning,”
he said modestly. “I knew by personal investigation in the line of
my proper work--soil-testing--that there was no arable land within
reach of the Mesquite project. The other steps followed, as a matter
of course. Starbuck, here, is wondering why I risked his life and mine
to get a few photographs for _The Tribune_, but if any of you
will examine the snap-shots carefully under a magnifier, you will see
that they prove the existence of the central pit in the dam, and that
one of them shows the pipe-line through which the fuse was to run.
For the possible legal purpose I was anxious to have this evidence in
indisputable form. That’s all, I believe.”
“Not quite all,” Maxwell broke in. “How did you know that Jennings
would be hanging over the wire at Angels while you people were making
your flying trip across the mountain in the auto?”
Sprague laughed good-naturedly.
“Call it a guess,” he said. “It was evident that Jennings wasn’t
anxious to kill a lot of innocent people. His inquiries about the
strength of the High Line dam proved that. It ran in my mind that he
wouldn’t touch off his earthquake until he could be reasonably sure
that the flood wouldn’t catch a train in transit in the canyon. That
would have been a little too horrible, even for him. Now you’ve got it
all, I guess.”
“But you haven’t got yours yet,” laughed Stillings. “When this thing
gets out in Brewster the whole town will mob you and want to make you
the next mayor, or send you to Congress, or something of that sort.”
“Not this year,” said the big man, with another mellow laugh. “And I’ll
tell you why. Just before this train reaches town it’s going to stop
and let us law-breakers get off, scatter and drop into town as best
we can without calling attention to ourselves. And to-morrow morning
you’ll read in _The Tribune_ how the Mesquite dam, weakened by the
recent storms and cloud-bursts, went out by littles during the night,
watched over and kept from going as a disastrous whole by a brave
little bunch of”--he looked around the table and winked solemnly--“by
a brave little bunch of cowboys from the ‘Lazy X.’” Then, with sudden
soberness: “Promise me that you won’t give it away, gentlemen all. It’s
the only fee I shall exact for my small part in the affair.”
And the promise was given while the locomotive whistle was sounding for
the Brewster yard-limits, and Maxwell was pulling the air-cord for the
out-of-town stop.
VI
The High Kibosh
SINCE it is a Western boast that the West does nothing by halves, the
Brewster Town and Country Club owns two houses; a handsome pink-lava
home on one of the quieter business streets of the city, and a
rambling, overgrown bungalow at the golf-links on the north shore
of the High Line reservoir lake, rechristened, in honor of Colonel
Baldwin’s pretty daughter, “Lake Corona.”
On Saturday afternoons, which are bank holidays in the progressive
little inter-mountain city, the links at Lake Corona are well
patronized; and on a certain Saturday in early September, in the year
written down in the annals of the inter-mountain region as “the year
of the great railroad war,” one of the players was the big-muscled
athlete who figured for the Brewsterites as an expert soil-tester in
the Government service, and whose nickname in the Timanyoni country was
“Scientific Sprague.”
Sprague’s opponent on the links on this particular Saturday afternoon
was Stillings, the railroad lawyer; and at the conclusion of the game,
which had been a rather easy walk-over for the big athlete, Stillings
offered the winner a seat in his runabout for the return to Brewster.
“Sorry, but I can’t go with you this time, Robert,” said the
heavy-weight, when he had tipped his caddie and struggled into his
coat. “Maxwell is coming out to dinner and I promised to wait for him.
He thinks he is up for another match game with the big-leaguers.”
Stillings paused with his hand on the dash of the runabout. “That so?”
he queried. “More piracy?”
“Nothing actually in sight, as yet. But Dick has been getting fresh
tips from the New York head-quarters. The big-money people who want
your railroad have been keeping pretty quiet since the Mesquite fizzle;
possibly they were afraid you folks might have the evidence on them.
But now the air seems to be full of lightning again, and nobody, not
even President Ford himself, appears to know just where it is going to
strike.”
The lawyer reached over and retarded the spark on the racing engines of
the little car.
“It’s a queer fight,” he commented. “I never heard of anything
just like it before. Of course, we all know what it means: the
Transcontinental needs our five-hundred-odd miles of Nevada Short Line
to put in with its Jack’s Canyon branch for a short cut to the southern
coast. Ordinarily, those things are fought out on the floor of the
Stock Exchange, and the people who are operating the railroad never
know what hits them until they’re safely dead. If the big fellows want
the Short Line so bad, why the dickens don’t they go in and buy it up
decently?”
The large man who had played such a successful game of golf winked one
eye solemnly.
“You wouldn’t expect a Government chemist to find you the answer to any
such conundrum as that, would you?” he asked, in cheerful irony.
“I’ll bet you know, just the same,” asserted Stillings confidently.
“I do happen to know, Robert,” was the even-toned reply. “A financial
transaction entered into in the early summer by the Ford management--a
transaction having nothing whatever to do with the fight--makes a break
in prices absolutely necessary before the control can be acquired.
What the Ford people did was to build a solid wall of protection
around themselves without knowing it or intending to. They deposited
something like sixty per cent of the Short Line stock with a syndicate
of New York and Boston banks as collateral for a loan to be used in
double-tracking.”
“Still, I don’t see,” objected the lawyer.
“Don’t you? That sixty per cent of the stock--which is the
control--can’t be touched by any fireworks business on the Exchange.
The big-money people have played the market up and down with the
forty per cent which is not pooled, and nothing has happened. The
loaning banks have merely sat tight in the boat, knowing that they
held the joint control of a good paying property, and that no amount
of sky-rocketing on the Street could make any difference, any real
difference, in the value of their collateral so long as the property
itself was earning dividends.”
“That is good as far as it goes,” said Stillings, with a frown of
perplexity. “But it doesn’t explain why the big-money crowd, or
somebody, has been turning heaven and earth upside down all summer to
wreck, not the stock, but the property itself. You know that is what
has been done. No stone has been left unturned, from demoralizing
Maxwell’s force to dynamiting tunnels and planning forty-mile
washouts. If big business wants the road, why is it trying to wreck it
physically?”
The big man who was fond of insisting that he was first, last, and all
the time a Government chemist grinned amiably.
“It doesn’t agree with your mentality to get beaten at golf, does it,
Robert?” he said jokingly. “It is plain enough, when you get hold
of the right end of it. Big money’s play is to throw a real scare,
not into the stockholders, but into these loaning bankers, don’t you
see? If the road’s earnings fall off and it has bad luck enough to
make these creditor-bankers really nervous about the value of their
collateral, the trick will be turned. The Ford people will immediately
be asked to make good or pay up; and there you are.”
“Why, sure!” said the attorney, in a tone which sufficiently
emphasized his complete understanding. Then he climbed slowly into the
driving-seat of the runabout. “I don’t see why some of the rest of us
haven’t caught on long ago,” he went on. “I suppose any of us might
have had the simple facts if we had taken the trouble to dig for them.”
Then, abruptly: “You’re looking for more trouble, Sprague?”
“Maxwell is; and so is Ford, apparently,” was the evasive reply.
“Never mind Maxwell or Ford; you’re the man,” snapped the lawyer.
“No, I’m not,” was the decisive denial. “It’s true, I have been
willing to help out and take a hand in standing off a few of the
attempted smashings; but that was only because Dick Maxwell is my
friend, and it suited my humor to ride my little reasoning hobby in his
behalf. I’m not a sleuth, Stillings; I’m a Government chemist, and I am
out here for the ostensible purpose of making a technical report on the
soils of this charming valley of yours. You forget that every now and
then.”
“Pardon me, old man; I did forget it,” was the hearty apology. “Just
the same, you mustn’t throw us down while the fight is still on.
Maxwell put it about right the other day when he said that the Nevada
Short Line would have been dead and buried two months ago if it hadn’t
been for you.”
“Nevertheless, I can’t help out this time, Stillings. That is why I am
staying here this evening--to meet Maxwell and tell him that he’ll have
to fight for his own hand if the New Yorkers come after him again.”
“Good goodness, Sprague! what’s happened?”
“A thing which nobody could have foreseen, and for which nobody is to
blame. At the same time, it lets me out. I’ve got to quit you.”
The attorney adjusted the spark and throttle and cut the wheels of the
little car preparatory to the start.
“I can’t very well argue with you--not having any grounds,” he said.
“But I hope you won’t decide finally until after you’ve had another
talk with Maxwell. Think it over between now and dinner-time, and
weigh the consequences to Dick, Sprague. If there’s another earthquake
on the way, and you throw him down, he’s a ruined man. I know what
you will say: that he is well fixed and doesn’t have to be a railroad
superintendent. That’s all right, but his job means more to him than
it might to a poor man; it’s his ambition. If there is anything I can
do----”
The big chemistry expert shook his head. “There isn’t anything that
anybody can do, Robert,” he said soberly; and at that, Stillings eased
the clutch in and drove away.
Two hours later Maxwell was sitting out the after-dinner interval with
his friend and classmate on the broad lake-fronting veranda of the
bungalow club-house. It was a fine night, and the Saturday evening
crowd was larger than usual. There was a dotting of canoes on the
reservoir lake, and the verandas were filling slowly as the great
dining-room emptied itself. For a time the two men had let the talk
drift into college reminiscences; but it took a more strictly personal
turn when the superintendent said: