"Father has a series of electrical signal stations all along the upper
canyon. He said at the dinner-table that the rise to-night promises to
be greater than any we have ever seen."
Ballard came alive upon the professional side of him with a sudden
quickening of the workaday faculties. With the utmost confidence in that
part of the great retaining-wall for which he was personally
responsible--the superstructure--he had still been hoping that the huge
reservoir lake would fill normally; that the dam would not be called
upon to take its enormous stresses like an engine starting under a full
load. It was for this reason that he had been glad to time the closing
of the spillway in August, when the flow of the river was at its
minimum. But fate, the persistent ill-fortune which had dogged the
Arcadian enterprise from the beginning, seemed to be gathering its
forces for a final blow.
"Cloud-bursts?" he questioned. "Are they frequent in the head basin of
the Boiling Water?"
"Not frequent, but very terrible when they do occur. I have seen the
Elbow toss its spray to the top of this cliff--once, when I was quite
small; and on that day the lower part of our valley was, for a few
hours, a vast flood lake."
"Was that before or after the opening of your father's mine over
yonder?" queried Ballard.
"It was after. I suppose the mine was flooded, and I remember there was
no work done in it for a long time. When it was reopened, a few years
ago, father had that immense bulkhead and heavy, water-tight door put in
to guard against another possible flood."
Ballard made the sign of comprehension. Here was one of the mysteries
very naturally accounted for. The bulkhead and iron-bound door of the
zirconium mine were, indeed, fortifications; but the enemy to be
repulsed was nature--not man.
"And the electric signal service system in the upper canyon is a part of
the defence for the mine?" he predicated.
"Yes. It has served on two or three occasions to give timely warning so
that the miners could come up and seal the door in the bulkhead. But it
has been a long time since a cloud-burst flood has risen high enough in
the Elbow to threaten the mine."
Silence supervened; the silence of the flooding moonlight, the stark
hills and the gently lapping waters. Ballard's brain was busy with the
newly developed responsibilities. There was a little space for action,
but what could be done? In all probability the newly completed dam was
about to be subjected to the supreme test, violently and suddenly
applied. The alternative was to open the spillway gate, using the
cut-off tunnel as a sort of safety-valve when the coming flood water
should reach the Elbow.
But there were an objection and an obstacle. Now that he knew the
condition of the honeycombed tunnel, Ballard hesitated to make it the
raceway for the tremendously augmented torrent. And for the obstacle
there was a mechanical difficulty: with the weight of the deepening lake
upon it, the stop-gate could be raised only by the power-screws; and the
fires were out in the engine that must furnish the power.
The Kentuckian was afoot and alert when he said: "You know the
probabilities better than any of us: how much time have we before these
flood tides will come down?"
She had risen to stand with him, steadying herself by the hook of the
derrick-fall. "I don't know," she began; and at that instant a great
slice of the zirconium mine dump slid off and settled into the eddying
depths with a splash.
"It is nothing but a few more cubic yards of the waste," he said, when
she started and caught her breath with a little gasp.
"Not that--but the door!" she faltered, pointing across the chasm. "It
was shut when we came out here--I am positive!"
The heavy, iron-studded door in the bulkhead was open now, at all
events, as they could both plainly see; and presently she went on in a
frightened whisper: "Look! there is something moving--this side of the
door--among the loose timbers!"
The moving object defined itself clearly in the next half-minute; for
the two at the derrick-heel, and for another--young Blacklock, who was
crouching behind his rejected thorough-stone directly opposite the mine
entrance. It took shape as the figure of a man, slouch-hatted and
muffled in a long coat, creeping on hands and knees toward the farther
dam-head; creeping by inches and dragging what appeared to be a six-foot
length of iron pipe. The king's daughter spoke again, and this time her
whisper was full of sharp agony.
"_Breckenridge!_ it is my father--just as I have seen him before! That
thing he is dragging after him: isn't it a--merciful Heaven! he is going
to blow up the dam! Oh, for pity's sake can't you think of some way to
stop him?"
There are crises when the mind, acting like a piece of automatic
machinery, flies from suggestion to conclusion with such facile rapidity
that all the intermediate steps are slurred and effaced. Ballard marked
the inching advance, realised its object and saw that he would not have
time to intervene by crossing the dam, all in the same instant. Another
click of the mental mechanism and the alternative suggested itself, was
grasped, weighed, accepted and transmuted into action.
It was a gymnast's trick, neatly done. The looped-up derrick-fall was a
double wire cable, running through a heavy iron sheave which carried the
hook and grappling chains. Released from its rope lashings at the
mast-heel, it would swing out and across the canyon like a monster
pendulum. Ballard forgot his bandaged arm when he laid hold of the
sheave-hook and slashed at the yarn seizings with his pocket-knife; was
still oblivious to it when the released pendulum surged free and swept
him out over the chasm.
XXIII
DEEP UNTO DEEP
Mechanically as such things are done, Ballard remembered afterward that
he was keenly alive to all that was passing. He heard Elsa's
half-stifled cry of horror, Blacklock's shout of encouragement from some
point higher up on the mesa, and mingled with these the quick _pad-pad_
of footfalls as of men running. In mid-air he had a glimpse of the
running men; two of them racing down the canyon on the side toward which
his swinging bridge was projecting him. Then the derrick-fall swept him
on, reached the extreme of its arc, and at the reversing pause he
dropped, all fingers to clutch and tensely strung muscles to hold,
fairly upon the crouching man in the muffling rain-coat.
For Blacklock, charging in upon the battle-field by way of the dam, the
happenings of the next half-minute resolved themselves into a fierce
hand-to-hand struggle between the two men for the possession of the
piece of iron pipe. At the pendulum-swinging instant, the collegian had
seen the sputtering flare of a match in the dynamiter's hands; and in
the dash across the dam he had a whiff of burning gunpowder.
When the two rose up out of the dust of the grapple, Ballard was the
victor. He had wrested the ignited pipe-bomb from his antagonist, and
turning quickly he hurled it in a mighty javelin-cast far up the Elbow.
There was a splash, a smothered explosion, and a geyser-like column of
water shot up from the plunging-point, spouting high to fall in sheets
of silver spray upon the two upcoming runners who were alertly springing
from foothold to foothold across the dissolving mine dump.
So much young Blacklock noted at the moment of uprushing. In the next
breath he had wrapped the mackintoshed bomb-firer in a wrestler's hug
from behind, and the knife raised to be driven into Ballard's back
clattered upon the stones of the path. There was a gasping oath in a
strange tongue, a fierce struggle on the part of the garroted one to
turn and face his new assailant, and then the collegian, with his chin
burrowing between the shoulder-blades of his man, heard swift footsteps
approaching and a deep-toned, musical voice booming out a sharp command:
"Manuel! you grand scoundrel!--drop that thah gun, suh!"
Something else, also metallic, and weightier than the knife, clicked
upon the stones; whereupon Blacklock loosed his strangler's grip and
stepped back. Ballard stooped to pick up the knife and the pistol.
Wingfield, who had been the colonel's second in the race along the
hazardous mine path, drew aside; and master and man were left facing
each other.
The Mexican straightened up and folded his arms. He was breathing hard
from the effect of Blacklock's gripping hug, but his dark face was as
impassive as an Indian's. The white-haired King of Arcadia turned to
Ballard, and the mellow voice broke a little.
"Mistuh-uh Ballard, you, suh, are a Kentuckian, of a race that knows to
the fullest extent the meaning of henchman loyalty. You shall say what
is to be done with this po' villain of mine. By his own confession, made
to me this afte'noon, he is a cutthroat and an assassin. Undeh a
mistaken idea of loyalty to me"--the deep voice grew more tremulous at
this--"undeh a mistaken idea of loyalty to me, suh, he has been fighting
in his own peculiah fashion what he conceived to be my battle with the
Arcadia Company. Without compunction, without remo'se, he has taken
nearly a score of human lives since the day when he killed the man
Braithwaite and flung his body into the riveh. Am I making it cleah to
you, Mistuh Ballard?"
How he managed to convey his sense of entire comprehension, Ballard
scarcely knew. One thought was submerging all others under a mounting
wave of triumphant joy: Colonel Adam, the father of the princess of
heart's delight, was neither a devil in human guise nor a homicidal
madman. Elsa's trouble was a phantom appeased; it had vanished like the
dew on a summer morning.
"I thank you, suh," was the courtly acknowledgment; and then the deep
voice continued, with an added note of emotion. "I am not pleading for
the murderer, but for my po' liegeman who knew no law of God or man
higheh than what he mistakenly took to be his masteh's desiah. How long
all this would have continued, if I hadn't suhprised him in the ve'y act
of trying to kill you as you were lowering that thah stop-gate to-day,
we shall neveh know. But the entiah matteh lies heavy on my conscience,
suh. I ought to have suspected the true sou'ce of all the mysterious
tragedies long ago; I should have suspected it if I hadn't been
chin-deep myself, suh, in a similah pool of animosity against Mr. Pelham
and his fellow-robbehs. What will you do with this po' scoundrel of
mine, Mistuh Ballard?"
"Nothing, at present," said Ballard, gravely, "or nothing more than to
ask him a question or two." He turned upon the Mexican, who was still
standing statue-like with his back to the low cliff of the path ledge.
"Did you kill Macpherson?--as well as Braithwaite and Sanderson?"
"I kill-a dem all," was the cool reply. "You say--he all say--'I make-a
da dam.' I'll say: '_Caramba!_ You _no_ make-a da dam w'at da Colonel no
want for you to make.' Dass all."
"So it was you who hit Bromley on the head and knocked him into the
canyon?"
The statuesque foreman showed his teeth. "Dat was one bad _mees_take.
I'll been try for knock _you_ on da haid, dat time, for sure, Senor
Ballar'."
"And you were wearing that rain-coat when you did it?"
The Mexican nodded. "I'll wear heem h-always w'en da sun gone down--same
like-a da Colonel."
"Also, you were wearing it that other night, when you heaved a stone
down on my office roof?"
Another nod.
"But on the night when you scared Hoskins and made him double up his
train on Dead Man's Curve, you didn't wear it; you wore a shooting-coat
and a cap like the one Braithwaite used to wear."
The posing statue laughed hardily. "Dat was one--w'at you call
heem?--one beeg joke. I'll been like to make dat 'Oskins break hees
h'own neck, _si_: hees talk too much 'bout da man w'at drown' heself."
"And the Carson business: you were mixed up in that, too?"
"Dat was one _mees_take, al-so; one ver' beeg _mees_take. I'll hire dat
dam'-fool Carson to shoot da ditch. I t'ink you and da beeg h-Irishman
take-a da trail and Carson keel you. Carson, he'll take-a da money, and
make for leetle scheme to steal cattle. Som' day I keel heem for dat."
"Not in this world," cut in Ballard, briefly. "You're out of the game,
from this on." And then, determined to be at the bottom of the final
mystery: "You played the spy on Mr. Wingfield, Bromley, Blacklock and me
one afternoon when we were talking about these deviltries. Afterward,
you went up to Castle 'Cadia. That evening Mr. Wingfield nearly lost his
life. Did you have a hand in that?"
Again the Mexican laughed. "Senor Wingfiel' he is know too moch. Som'
day he is make me ver' sorry for myself. So I'll hide be'ind dat
fornace, and give heem one leetle push, so"--with the appropriate
gesture.
"That is all," said Ballard, curtly. And then to the colonel: "I think
we'd better be moving over to the other side. The ladies will be
anxious. Jerry, take that fellow on ahead of you, and see that he
doesn't get away. I'm sorry for you, Colonel Craigmiles; and that is no
empty form of words. As you have said, I am a Kentuckian, and I do know
what loyalty--even mistaken loyalty--is worth. My own grudge is nothing;
I haven't any. But there are other lives to answer for. Am I right?"
"You are quite right, suh; quite right," was the sober rejoinder; and
then Blacklock said "_Vamos!_" to his prisoner, airing his one word of
Spanish, and in single file the five men crossed on the dam to the mesa
side of the rising lake where Bigelow, with Elsa and Miss Cantrell and a
lately awakened Mrs. Van Bryck, were waiting. At the reassembling,
Ballard cut the colonel's daughter out of the storm of eager
questionings swiftly, masterfully.
"You were wrong--we were all wrong," he whispered joyously. "The man
whom you saw, the man who has done it all in your father's absolute and
utter ignorance of what was going on, is Manuel. He has confessed; first
to his master, and just now to all of us. Your father is as sane as he
is blameless. There is no obstacle now for either of us. I shall resign
to-morrow morning, and----"
It was the colonel's call that interrupted.
"One moment, Mistuh Ballard, if you please, suh. Are there any of youh
ditch camps at present in the riveh valley below heah?"
Ballard shook his head. "Not now; they are all on the high land." Then,
remembering Bromley's report of the empty ranch headquarters and
corrals: "You think there is danger?"
"I don't think, suh: I _know_. Look thah," waving an arm toward the
dissolving mine dump on the opposing slope; "when the wateh reaches that
tunnel and finds its way behind the bulkhead, Mistuh Ballard, youh dam's
gone--doomed as surely as that sinful world that wouldn't listen to
Preachuh Noah!"
"But, Colonel--you can't know positively!"
"I do, suh. And Mistuh Pelham knows quite as well as I do. You may have
noticed that we have no pumping machinery oveh yondeh, Mistuh Ballard:
_That is because the mine drains out into youh pot-hole below the dam!_"
"Heavens and earth!" ejaculated Ballard, aghast at the possibilities
laid bare in this single explanatory sentence. "And you say that Mr.
Pelham knows this?"
"He has known it all along. I deemed it my neighbo'ly duty to inform him
when we opened the lower level in the mine. But he won't be the loseh;
no, suh; not Mistuh Howard Pelham. It'll be those po' sheep that he
brought up here to-day to prepare them for the shearing--if the riveh
gives him time to make the turn."
"The danger is immediate, then?" said Bigelow.
The white-haired King of Arcadia was standing on the brink of the mesa
cliff, a stark figure in the white moonlight, with his hand at his ear.
"Hark, gentlemen!" he commanded; and then: "Youh ears are all youngeh
than mine. What do you heah?"
It was Ballard who replied: "The wind is rising on the range; I can hear
it singing in the pines."
"No, suh; that isn't the wind--it's wateh; torrents and oceans of it.
There have been great and phenomenal storms up in the basin all day;
storms and cloud-bursts. See thah!"
A rippling wave a foot high came sweeping down the glassy surface of the
reservoir lake, crowding and rioting until it doubled its depth in
rushing into the foothill canyon. Passing the mine, it swept away other
tons of the dump; and an instant later the water at the feet of the
onlookers lifted like the heave of a great ground-swell--lifted, but did
not subside.
Ballard's square jaw was out-thrust. "We did not build for any such
brutal tests as this," he muttered. "Another surge like that----"
"It is coming!" cried Elsa. "The power dam in the upper canyon is gone!"
and the sharer of the single Cantrell Christian name shrieked and took
shelter under Bigelow's arm.
Far up the moon-silvered expanse of the lake a black line was advancing
at railway speed. It was like the ominous flattening of the sea before a
hurricane; but the chief terror of it lay in the peaceful surroundings.
No cloud flecked the sky; no breath of air was stirring; the calm of the
matchless summer night was unbroken, save by the surf-like murmur of the
great wave as it rose high and still higher in the narrowing raceway.
Instinctively Ballard put his arm about Elsa and drew her back from the
cliff's edge. There could be no chance of danger for the group looking
on from the top of the high mesa; yet the commanding roar of the menace
was irresistible.
When the wave entered the wedge-shaped upper end of the Elbow it was a
foam-crested wall ten feet high, advancing with the black-arched front
of a tidal billow, mighty, terrifying, the cold breath of it blowing
like a chill wind from the underworld upon the group of watchers. In its
onrush the remains of the mine dump melted and vanished, and the heavy
bulkhead timbering at the mouth of the workings was torn away, to be
hurled, with other tons of floating debris, against the back-wall of the
dam.
Knowing all the conditions, Ballard thought the masonry would never
withstand the hammer-blow impact of the wreck-laden billow. Yet it
stood, apparently undamaged, even after the splintered mass of wreckage,
tossed high on the crest of the wave, had leaped the coping course to
plunge thundering into the ravine below. The great wall was like some
massive fortification reared to endure such shocks; and Elsa, facing the
terrific spectacle beside her lover, like a reincarnation of one of the
battle-maidens, gave him his rightful meed of praise.
"You builded well--you and the others!" she cried. "It will not break!"
But even as she spoke, the forces that sap and destroy were at work.
There was a hoarse groaning from the underground caverns of the
zirconium mine--sounds as of a volcano in travail. The wave retreated
for a little space, and the white line of the coping showed bare and
unbroken in the moonlight. Silence, the deafening silence which follows
the thunderclap, succeeded to the clamour of the waters, and this in
turn gave place to a curious gurgling roar as of some gigantic vessel
emptying itself through an orifice in its bottom.
The white-haired king was nearest to the brink of peril. At the gurgling
roar he turned with arms outspread and swept the onlooking group,
augmented now by the men from Garou's cook camp, back and away from the
dam-head. Out of the torrent-worn pit in the lower ravine a great jet of
water was spurting intermittently, like the blood from a severed artery.
"That is the end!" groaned Ballard, turning away from the death grapple
between his work and the blind giant of the Boiling Water; and just then
Blacklock shouted, snatched, wrestled for an instant with a writhing
captive--and was left with a torn mackintosh in his hands for his only
trophy.
They all saw the Mexican when he slipped out of the rain-coat, eluded
Blacklock, and broke away, to dart across the chasm on the white pathway
of the dam's coping course. He was half-way over to the shore of escape
when his nerve failed. To the spouting fountain in the gulch below and
the sucking whirlpool in the Elbow above was added a second tidal wave
from the cloud-burst sources; a mere ripple compared with the first, but
yet great enough to make a maelstrom of the gurgling whirlpool, and to
send its crest of spray flying over the narrow causeway. When the
barrier was bared again the Mexican was seen clinging limpet-like to the
rocks, his courage gone and his death-warrant signed. For while he
clung, the great wall lost its perfect alignment, sagged, swayed outward
under the irresistible pressure from above, crumbled, and was gone in a
thunder-burst of sound that stunned the watchers and shook the solid
earth of the mesa where they stood.
* * * * *
"Are you quite sure it wasn't all a frightful dream?" asked the young
woman in a charming house gown and pointed Turkish slippers of the young
man with his left arm in a sling; the pair waiting the breakfast call in
the hammock-bridged corner of the great portico at Castle 'Cadia.
It was a Colorado mountain morning of the sort called "Italian" by
enthusiastic tourists. The air was soft and balmy; a rare blue haze lay
in the gulches; and the patches of yellowing aspens on the mountain
shoulders added the needed touch of colour to relieve the dun-browns and
grays of the balds and the heavy greens of the forested slopes. Save for
the summer-dried grass, lodged and levelled in great swaths by the
sudden freeing of the waters, the foreground of the scene was unchanged.
Through the bowl-shaped valley the Boiling Water, once more an
August-dwindled mountain stream, flowed murmurously as before; and a
mile away in the foothill gap of the Elbow, the huge steel-beamed
derrick lined itself against the farther distances.
"No, it wasn't a dream," said Ballard. "The thirty-mile, nerve-trying
drive home in the car, with the half-wrecked railroad bridge for a river
crossing, ought to have convinced you of the realities."
"Nothing convinces me any more," she confessed, with the air of one who
has seen chaos and cosmos succeed each other in dizzying alternations;
and when Ballard would have gone into the particulars of that with her,
the King of Arcadia came up from his morning walk around the homestead
knoll.
"Ah, you youngstehs!" he said, with the note of fatherly indulgence in
the mellow voice. "Out yondeh undeh the maples, I run across the Bigelow
boy and Madge Cantrell;--'Looking to see what damage the water had
done,' they said, as innocent as a pair of turtle-doves! Oveh in the
orcha'd I stumble upon Mistuh Wingfield and Dosia. I didn't make them
lie to me, and I'm not going to make you two. But I should greatly
appreciate a word with you, Mistuh Ballard."
Elsa got up to go in, but Ballard sat in the hammock and drew her down
beside him again. "With your permission, which I was going to ask
immediately after breakfast, Colonel Craigmiles, we two are one," he
said, with the frank, boyish smile that even his critics found hard to
resist. "Will you so regard us?"
The colonel's answering laugh had no hint of obstacles in it.
"It was merely a little matteh of business," he explained. "Will youh
shot-up arm sanction a day's travel, Mistuh Ballard?"
"Surely. This sling is wholly Miss Elsa's idea and invention. I don't
need it."
"Well, then; heah's the programme: Afteh breakfast, Otto will drive you
oveh to Alta Vista in the light car. From there you will take the train
to Denver. When you arrive, you will find the tree of the Arcadia
Company pretty well shaken by the news of the catastrophe to the dam. Am
I safe in assuming so much?"
"More than safe: every stockholder in the outfit will be ducking to
cover."
"Ve'y good. Quietly, then, and without much--ah--ostentation, as youh
own good sense would dictate, you will pick up, in youh name or mine, a
safe majority of the stock. Do I make myself cleah?"
"Perfectly, so far."
"Then you will come back to Arcadia, reorganise youh force--you and
Mistuh Bromley--and build you anotheh dam; this time in the location
below the Elbow, where it should have been built befo'. Am I still
cleah?"
"Why, clear enough, certainly. But I thought--I've been given to
understand that you were fighting the irrigation scheme on its merits;
that you didn't want your kingdom of Arcadia turned into a farming
community. I don't blame you, you know."