NO QUARTER
The peril threatening the unfinished dam now alone engaged Steele
Weir's mind. Personal considerations did not enter into his
calculations, least of all thought of personal danger; for when he
placed himself in an undertaking whatever rested under his hand, as in
this case the irrigation company's property, became for him a trust to
attend, to direct, to guard. Even more than if it had been his own
property did he feel the obligation, for the interests concerned were
not his. But the matter went deeper than a prospective money loss; it
struck down to principles and rights--the principles of order and
industry as against viciousness and havoc; the rights of law-abiding
men who create as against the wantonness of lawless men who would
destroy.
Were it his own workmen who, inflamed by drink and incited by a spirit
of recklessness, were coming to wreck the camp in a moment of mad
intoxication, he would have made allowances for the cause. Before
resorting to extreme measures in defending his charge, he first would
have sought to bring them to their senses. Drunken men are men
unbalanced, irrational.
But here was another case: an attack by a secret, sober, malevolent
band, who in cold blood approached to demolish the company works. Not
liquor moved them on their mission, but money--money paid by his arch
enemies. The men were simply hired tools, brazenly indifferent no
doubt to crimes, desperate in character certainly, for a handful of
coins ready to wipe out a million dollars' worth of property and
effort. Such deserved no consideration or quarter.
Weir proposed to give none. With enemies of this kind he had but one
policy, strike first and strike with deadly force. One does not seek
to dissuade a rattlesnake; one promptly stamps it under heel. One
cannot compromise with ravenous wolves; one shoots them down. One does
not wait to see how far a treacherous foe will go; one forestalls and
crushes him before he begins. Moreover, if wise, one does it in such
fashion that the enemy will not arise from the blow.
With the information given him by the guard posted at the spring Weir
immediately grasped the true nature of the plot. The "whiskey party"
was but a means of withdrawing the workmen from the scene, of
weakening the camp, while a picked company of ruffians wrecked the
property. It was an assault intended to wipe out the works and end
construction, coincident with his arrest. Both the company and he were
to pay the penalty for resisting the powers that rule San Mateo. And
if the tale were spread that the destruction had been wrought by his
workmen while drunk, who would doubt it?
Like shadows the band of Mexican desperadoes would come, dynamite the
dam, fire the buildings, stampede the horses, and like shadows vanish
again. In the unexpectedness of the raid, in the confusion, in the dim
light, no one would with certainty be able to say who the assailants
were. A scheme ferocious in its conception and diabolical in its
cunning! But there was one flaw--the element of chance. Chance had
given Weir warning.
A strong man warned is a strong man armed.
As the engineer stood in the office, swiftly measuring the imminent
menace of which he had just been told, calculating the meager
instruments of defense at hand, his mind sweeping up all the salient
aspects, features, advantages and disadvantages of the situation, he
seized on the one weak spot in the attacking party's plan. At that
spot he would strike.
So giving Johnson and Madden the order to take charge of the little
handful of guards, he had plunged out into the night.
The men from the bunk-house were already running toward the office,
before the door of which the rancher gathered them together to make
sure of their arms and ammunition. All told, when Martinez and Pollock
presently came from the store with guns, the little party numbered
eleven.
"Is this all there are of us?" Dr. Hosmer asked.
"We are worth all that crowd that's coming," Johnson exclaimed, taking
a spare gun Martinez had brought him.
"Did Weir send the rest of the engineers down to that house? I
understood so."
"That's where they are, I reckon."
Dr. Hosmer considered for a minute.
"I can be there in five minutes in my car. The road is on the north
side of the stream, as is this camp: the gang that's heading here to
blow things up is coming up from the south, so it will not block the
way. Men could be here in twenty minutes from down yonder by
running."
"A good suggestion, doctor," Pollock said. "It may take you a bit
longer to find and tell them what's occurring, but even so they may
return in time. Fifty, or even twenty, might give us enough
assistance to beat off the attack."
"There comes the moon," said the man who had been at the spring. "They
must be near now."
Far in the east the moon was stealing above the horizon. Under its
light the mesa took form out of the darkness--the level sagebrush
plain criss-crossed by willow-lined ditches and checkered by small
Mexican fields, the winding shimmering Burntwood River with its border
of cottonwoods, the narrow road, the distant town of San Mateo, a
vague blot of shadow picked out by tiny specks of light.
The mountains too now reared in view, silent, silvered, majestic,
towering about the camp on the lower base. One could see, as the moon
swam higher, the low long buildings of the camp clustered on the
hillside above the canyon, in the bottom of which was the dashing
stream and the bone-white core of the dam.
"Look down yonder on the other side!" Martinez exclaimed suddenly,
pointing a long thin forefinger at the mouth of the canyon where a
group of black dots were moving up the river.
"That's them," said the man who had given the warning.
"And they're armed," said another. "You can see the moon shine on
their gun-barrels."
On the opposite side of the stream, some two hundred yards below the
dam and three or four hundred feet lower in elevation than the camp,
advancing up the canyon in a string, the men looked like a line of
insects.
"I'm off for help," the doctor said, springing into his car. "Janet,
you and Mary go higher up among the rocks and hide if these buildings
are attacked." Away he went, buzzing down the hillside to the long
stretch of road.
Weir now came into sight, walking quickly towards the group. That he
saw the Mexicans down in the canyon was evident from his swift
appraising glances thither.
"Johnson, move your men down halfway to the dam and have them scatter
there behind bowlders. I shall go still lower down," he said. "You
will hold your fire until I signal with my hat from the dam."
"You're going to the dam?"
"Yes."
"We ought to go with you."
"I don't need you. You'll be more effective hidden above. You'll have
plenty of light as the moon is shining squarely in the gorge. And
await my signal."
"All right; you're the general."
"But take no extreme risks, Weir. The company doesn't ask you to
sacrifice yourself," Pollock stated.
"The sacrifice will be down among those fellows," Steele replied, with
set jaw. "Don't worry about me. Now, start, men."
He stood for a little watching the rate of progress of the line of
Mexicans ascending the stream, which was not rapid owing to the broken
rocks lining the bank. Then he swung about to the two girls.
"Every one here now is under my orders," he said. "You two will take
your car and go at once. This is no place for you."
"But----" Janet began.
"I'm taking no chances that you shall fall into the hands of those
scoundrels," he declared, sternly. "They may succeed in reaching this
spot. You must not be here; you must go."
Taking each by an arm he piloted them to the car.
"Sorry, but it has to be," he added. "This is work for men, and men
alone."
Janet and Mary climbed up into the seat.
"You--you will take care of yourself," Janet said, tremulously.
"I expect to. Still, this isn't going to be a croquet party; anything
may happen. Good-by."
With that he swung about and breaking into a run made for a small
building half-buried in the hillside and apart from the camp. There he
stooped and picked up under each arm what looked like a cylinder of
some size and went down towards the dam. For a time they could see
him, but all at once he slipped behind an outcrop of rock and they saw
him no more.
Janet turned to eye her companion. Once more her face was pale.
"Well?" she inquired of Mary.
"I reckon we'd better do as he says. He'd be awful mad if we didn't.
Did you see his eyes when he talked to us?"
"But if he--he and others are wounded?"
Uneasily Mary gazed at the older girl and then down at the canyon. On
the hillside the men led by her father were no longer in sight,
somewhere concealed among the stones that dotted the earth. But down
by the stream and now scarcely fifty yards from the white stretch of
concrete barring the river bed through a tunnel in which the water
foamed and escaped, the Mexicans were clearly visible, their hats
bobbing about, their guns flinging upward an occasional gleam.
"It doesn't seem as if anything was going to happen," Mary went on in
awed tones. "Things are so quiet and peaceful."
Still Janet delayed starting the car, divided in feelings between a
wish to respect Steele Weir's insistent command and a growing fear for
his safety. She could see nothing of him. Into the shadow of a rock he
had disappeared and thither she gazed with straining eyes, hoping to
see again his straight strong figure.
"Why, look down there at the dam," Mary said, whose eyes had been
wandering from, point to point of the scene. "Isn't that him?"
Janet's heart gave a quicker beat, then seemed to sink in her breast
as staring downward she recognized the engineer. He had come out all
at once from the shade cast by a wooden framework. He had with him the
burdens he had lifted from the ground before the little detached stone
house at the edge of the camp, and these, the cylinders, he placed on
the surface of the concrete core at the spot where he stood. Then he
knelt down, struck a match, lighted a cigar--as if any man in his
senses would stop to smoke in such a situation!--and busied himself at
some task over the cylinders.
Only for an instant had he stood erect on the flat top of the dam.
Apparently he had been unseen by the attackers, engaged in picking
their footing: and now in his crouching position, retired from the
upper edge of the dam's front as he was, it was very likely that he
was wholly out of view of the band.
At last Weir moved his cylinders forward towards this edge. Afterwards
he straightened up and standing hands on hips, smoking his cigar, the
tiny crimson glow of which rose and fell, he watched the party nearing
the foot of the white gleaming wall, fifty feet below him.
For Janet the sight was too much. His indifference to risk froze her;
he appeared to be courting death; and she strove to open her lips to
send down to him an imploring cry to draw back, but succeeded in
uttering only a tremulous wail.
"They'll shoot him," Mary was saying, "oh, they'll kill him!"
A surge of terror swept Janet. Next thing she knew she was out of the
car and running down the hillside among the stones and the stalks of
sagebrush, frantic to reach him, to pull him out of view of the men
beneath. Only a single one of them had to cast a glance upward and to
raise his gun and fire, then he would die. He should not die! She
should fling herself as a protection before him rather than that he
should be slain!
On a sudden a hand reached up from a rock and seized her arm, stopping
her with a jerk. Then she was roughly pulled down beside it. The man
was Madden, the sheriff.
"What in hell are you doing?" he demanded harshly. "Have you gone
crazy?"
His grip was not relinquished.
"But see him! Aren't you men going to help him? Are you going to let
him be killed?"
Madden forced her to her knees, so that she was sheltered by the
outcrop of stone.
"Any man who can smoke a cigar like that at such a time as this knows
just what he's doing," was the answer. "Keep quiet and watch."
"Oh, I don't want to see," she said. But she continued to look with
fascinated eyes at the lone, calm figure on the dam.
Presently Madden pushed his gun forward over the rock.
"They've caught sight of him," he stated.