A RACE FOR LIFE.
Fast as they raced on, Jack and the cow-puncher seemed to gain on the
flying Petticoats with aggravating slowness.
"Consarn that mare, she's plumb locoed, I reckon!" growled Bud, as they
rocketed along, flogging their ponies to renewed efforts with their
heavy quirts.
"She runs like a quarter horse!" gasped Jack, his mouth full of alkali
dust; for he had no neck handkerchief to pull up over his mouth,
vaquero style.
But with their splendid mounts they were bound to gain on the suddenly
crazed Petticoats, and gradually they drew so close that all three
riders were blanketed by the same cloud of dust.
Behind them came a second great cloud, in which rode a score or more of
riders from Maguez who had hastily mounted and galloped out to see the
fun as soon as they heard there was a runaway.
"The canal!" shouted Jack suddenly.
A wandering breeze for a second swept aside the dust cloud before
them, and showed the fresh, raw wound gaping in the level surface of
the desert. It was fully thirty feet wide, and as the canal was a new
ditch, its sides were almost as steep as a wall.
Bud Wilson said nothing, but set his lips grimly. With an imperceptible
movement of his wrist, he gathered his trailing loop into the air and
began to whirl it above his head, first slowly and then faster and
faster. The rawhide loop opened out till it was ten feet or more in
circumference.
"Now!" he yelled, and at the same instant the released loop went
swirling through the air.
"Yip-yip!" yelled Jack.
Bud had won proudly many a prize for roping, and was the most expert
man with the lariat in his part of the West. Had he wished, he could
have roped the flying Petticoats by the heels. But to have done so
would have been to have brought the crazed pony down with a crash, and
probably have seriously injured, if not killed, her rider.
Swish!
The great loop settled as accurately as if hands had guided it about
the maddened pony's neck. Bud took a twist of his end round the saddle
horn and checked the calico.
"Got her!" screamed Jack. "Yi-hi!"
But there came a sudden shout of dismay from Bud.
The calico's foot had caught in a gopher hole, and over he went,
turning almost a complete somersault.
Jack gave a shout of horror as he saw the catastrophe. He feared Bud
had been killed, but the lithe bronco buster was up in a second,
stumbling toward his fallen horse.
But the rope did not prove equal to the sudden strain put upon it by
the collapse of the calico. The instant the pony had fallen, of course
its full weight had come on the rawhide, instead of there being, as Bud
had planned, a gradual strangling down of the runaway. It had been,
in effect, a tug of war between the flying Petticoats and the suddenly
checked calico.
Crack!
The rope twanged taut as a stretched fiddle string and parted with a
snap just as Bud reached back into the hip of his leathern chaperaros
for his Colt.
He had determined to shoot the runaway and risk disabling Ralph, rather
than have the pony take the twenty-foot plunge over the brim of the
canal. But at the moment his finger pressed the trigger there came a
shout from Jack, who was now only a few paces behind Petticoats. The
boy's hastily thrown lariat had missed altogether.
Before their horrified eyes, the runaway buck-skin and her rider the
next instant plunged in one confused heap over the bank of the canal
and vanished from sight.
Jack was within a breath of following them over the brink, but in the
nick of time he wheeled the carefully trained Firewater round on his
haunches and averted a second calamity.
Controlling his half-maddened steed, the boy pressed to the edge of
the canal. The bank was new and smooth, and as steep as the roof of
a house. Ralph and his pony had rolled over and over down this place
in one inextricable heap. But by the time Jack reached the edge of the
steep bank, Ralph had kicked free of the big, clumsy Mexican stirrups
and was struggling in the water.
The flood was rushing along in a yellow, turbid swirl. There had been a
freshet in the mountains a few days before, and to relieve the pressure
on the land company's dam up there, the spillways had been opened to
their capacity. The canal was carrying the great overflow. It tore
along between the high, steep banks like a mill race.
"The flood gates!" came a frenzied shout from Bud. He pointed westward.
In a flash Jack realized that the flood gates below must be open, and
at the instant of this realization came another thought.
If he did not act and act quickly, Ralph would be carried through the
gates to probably certain death.
"Ralph! Ralph!" he shouted, as he gazed down at the brave struggle his
chum was making to reach the bank; but the current swept the Eastern
boy away from it every time. His pony had gained the bank, and was
pawing pitifully at the steep, sandy slope.
It did not need more than a glance to see that Ralph's strength was
giving out. He turned up a white, despairing face to Jack, by whose
side there now stood Bud Wilson.
"Quick, Jack! Chuck him the rope!" shouted Bud in a tense voice.
Inwardly angry at himself for not having thought of this before,
Jack sent his rawhide snaking down the bank. Ralph, his face white
and strained above the tearing yellow current, reached out in a
desperate effort to clutch the rawhide. Even as his fingers gripped it,
however, the current proved too much for him. He was swept away on its
white-flecked surface like a bit of drift.
"Ride, boy, ride! We've got to beat him to the sluice and close the
gates! It's his only chance!"
It was Bud's voice once more.
Somehow, Jack found himself in the saddle, with Firewater racing
under him as that brave little bay had never raced before. Close
alongside came Bud, rowelling his bleeding-kneed calico cruelly to
keep alongside. Far behind came shouts and yells from the crowd. The
buckskin, the cause of all the trouble, managed to clamber to the edge
of the stream, where the water was slightly shallower, and was dragged
out by ropes. While the race for life swept onward, she stood dripping
and shivering on the summit of the bank.
From his flying pony Jack caught occasional glimpses of Ralph in the
stream below. The boy was a good swimmer, and now that he was being
carried along with the current, instead of fighting it, he was able to
keep his head above water most of the time.
"Stick it out, Ralph, old boy!" yelled Jack, as he dashed past the
half-drowned lad whom the rapid current was carrying almost as swiftly
as the over-run ponies could gallop.
"We'll be in time!" exclaimed Jack, through his clinched teeth. Right
ahead of him he saw some grim, gallows-like looking timbers reared up
against the sky line, which he knew must mark the sluice.
Hardly had the thought flashed through his mind, when Firewater seemed
to glide from beneath him. An instant later Jack found himself rolling
over and over on the level plain.
The same accident as had befallen Bud had happened to him. A gopher
hole--one of those pests of desert riders--had tripped Firewater and
sent his rider sprawling headlong.
"Hurt?"
Bud Wilson, on the calico, drew up alongside Jack, who had struggled to
his feet and was looking about in a dazed sort of way.
"No, I'll be all right in a second. But Firewater!"
The bay had risen to his feet, but stood, sweating and trembling, with
his head down almost between his knees. He could not have expressed
"dead beat" better if he had said it in so many words.
"Blown up!" exclaimed Bud disgustedly.
"What shall we do?" choked out Jack.
"Here, quick! Up behind me!"
Bud reached down a hand, kicked a foot out of his left stirrup, and in
a second Jack was swung up behind him and they were off.
"I hope to goodness we strike no more gopher holes," thought the boy,
as they raced along, scarcely more slowly than when the plucky little
calico had only a single burden to carry. Never had the brave little
beast been used more unmercifully. Bud Wilson plied his heavy quirt
on the pony's flanks as if he meant to lay the flesh open. To every
lash of the rawhide the calico responded bravely, leaping forward
convulsively.
"We'll beat him to it!" cried Jack triumphantly, as both riders fairly
fell off the spent calico's back at the sluice gates.
"Yep, maybe; but we've got to get 'em closed first!" was Bud's laconic
response.
Paying no further attention to the calico--which was too spent, anyhow,
to attempt to get away--the two, the man and the boy, ran at top speed
across the narrow wooden runway which led to the big wheels by which
the gateways of the sluice were raised and lowered.
"If Ralph can only hold out!" gasped Jack, who, far up the stream had
espied a small black object coming rapidly toward him, which he knew
must be the head of his chum. Ralph was swimming easily, taking care
not to wind himself, and looking out for any opportunity which might
present itself to reach the bank. No sooner did he attempt to cross the
current, however, than the water broke over him as if he had been a
broached-to canoe. He confined his efforts, therefore, to keeping his
head above water. Of the deadly peril that lay ahead of him he had, of
course, no knowledge.
"Hurry, Bud!" cried Jack, in an agony of fear that they would be too
late.
"All right now, take it easy, Jack. No use hurrying over this job,"
replied Bud easily, though his drawn face and the sweat on his forehead
showed the agitation under which he was laboring.
"Consarn this thing! How's it work!" he muttered angrily, fiddling with
the machinery, which was complicated and fitted with elaborate gears
and levers to enable the terrific pressure of the water to be handled
more easily.
Beneath their feet the stream--a mad torrent above--developed into a
screaming, furious flood at the sluiceway. It shot through the narrow
confines at tremendous velocity, shaking and tearing at the masonry
buttresses as if it would rip them away.
To Jack's excited imagination, it seemed as if the swollen canal was
instinct with life and malevolence, and determined to have human life
or property in revenge for its confinement.
Suddenly the boy's eyes fell on something he had not noticed before.
Beyond the floodgate the engineers of the irrigation canal, finding
that the confinement of the water at the sluiceway tended to make the
current too savage for mere sandy walls to hold it, had constructed
a tunnel. This expedient had been resorted to only after numerous
experimental cement retaining walls had been swept away.
Just beyond the buttresses on the other side of the sluice, the
entrance of the tunnel yawned blackly. Like a great mouth it swallowed
the raging flood as it swept through the sluice.
"Bud! Bud! Look!" cried Jack, pointing.
"Great jumping side-winders! I forgot the tunnel!" groaned Bud, his
usually emotionless face working in his agitation. He had been handling
the sluice desperately, but without result.
"We _must_ close the gates within a second, or it will be too late!"
shouted Jack, above the roar of the water. Ralph's despairing face was
very close now.
"My poor kid, we can't!" wailed Bud.
"Why not?"
"The double-doggoned, dash beblinkered fool as looks after 'em has
padlocked 'em, and we can't git 'em closed without a key!"
There was not a second to think.
Even as the discovery that it would be impossible to close the gates
was made, Ralph's white face flashed into view almost beneath them.
Bud made a quick snatch at Jack's lariat, which the boy still retained,
and snaked it down over the racing water.
"Missed!" he groaned, as Ralph's upturned face was hurried by.
At the same instant there came a splash that the cow puncher heard even
above the roar of the water as it tore through its confines.
Bud glanced quickly round.
Where Jack Merrill had stood a moment before were a pair of shoes, the
boy's coat and his shirt.
But Jack had gone--he had jumped to Ralph's rescue. As Bud, with a
sharp exclamation of dismay, switched sharply round, he was just in
time to see the forms of the two boys swallowed in the darkness of the
irrigation tunnel.