THE PLOTTERS
When Blake came back with the baby, Isobel begged him for a full
account of how Ashton had been wounded. In relating the affair he
sought to minimize the danger that he had incurred, and he omitted all
mention of the bullet shot at him the previous evening. But his
account was frequently interrupted by exclamations from his wife and
Isobel.
At the end he dwelt strongly on the cowardly haste of the assassin's
flight; only to be met by a shrewdly anxious rejoinder from the girl:
"He ran away after he attacked Lafe the other time. He will come back
again!"
"Oh, Tom!" cried Genevieve--"if he does!"
"We will get him, that is all there is to it," replied her husband.
"What do you say to that, Ashton?"
"We will not have the chance," said Ashton. "I don't believe he has
nerve enough to try it the third time. But if he should--"
"No, no! I hope he keeps running forever!" fervently wished Isobel.
"Don't you realize how close a miss that was, Lafe?--and the other
time, too?"
"I like having one Miss close," he punned.
The girl blushed, but failed to show any sign of resentment.
Blake looked significantly at his wife. "Don't know but what I've
changed my mind about a _siesta_," he remarked. "Here's Tommy gone to
sleep just when I wanted to fight him. Do you think Miss Chuckie can
keep him and Ashton from running away if I go to bring in the level?"
"You say you had started to run the line of levels across to the
mountain?" she asked.
"Yes.... This little pleasantry has knocked us out of a day's work and
you out of your trip to the canyon."
"But why couldn't I rod for you?" she suggested. "I noticed Lafayette
the other day. It seems easier than golfing."
"It is."
"Then I shall do it. A good walk is exactly what I need."
"Genevieve!" hastily appealed Isobel. "Surely you'll not go off and
leave me--us!"
"Thomas is asleep, and Lafayette needs to be quiet," was the demure
reply. "Come, Tom. We'll run the levels over to the foot of the
mountain, at least."
With a reproachful glance at the smiling couple, the girl slipped over
to put Thomas Herbert between herself and Ashton. Blake found another
bag and can, which last he filled with water from the bucket.
Genevieve put on the cowboy hat that she had borrowed at the ranch,
and sprang up to join him.
He paused for a question: "How about leaving the rifle?"
Isobel put her hand to a fold in her skirt and drew out her
long-barreled automatic pistol. "I can do as well or better with
this," she answered.
"What a wicked looking thing!" exclaimed Genevieve. "Surely, dear, you
do not shoot it?"
"Shoot it!" put in Ashton. "Hasn't she told you about saving me from a
rattler?"
"She did?"
"Yes," he replied, and he told about the rattlesnake in the
bunkhouse.
"But I ought to have shot quicker," Isobel explained, when he
finished. "I missed the head, though I aimed at it."
"The way we've left Thomas about on the ground!" exclaimed Genevieve.
"Are there any of the horrid things around here? Is that why you carry
the pistol?"
"No, no, don't be afraid. We've killed them out here, long ago,
because of the cattle. I carry my pistol on the chance of killing
wolves. They're dreadfully harmful to the calves and colts, you
know."
"Good for you," praised Blake, as he picked up the rifle. "Well, we're
off."
He started away, hand in hand with his wife. They were soon at the top
of the dike slope and almost dancing along over the dry turf. It was
months since they had been alone together in the open, and they were
still deeper in love than at the time of their marriage--if that were
possible.
They soon reached the place where the shooting had occurred. Here they
picked up the lunch bag, Ashton's canteen and his hat, now punctured
with another bullet hole; and at once started to carry the line of
levels out across the valley. A few words of instruction made an
efficient rodwoman of Genevieve, so that they soon reached the foot of
the ridge up which her husband had led Ashton the previous day. Here
he established a bench-mark, and turned along the base of the
escarpment to the mouth of Dry Fork Gully, where he checked the line
of levels that had been run up the bed of the creek.
"Good work--less than three tenths difference, and all that I am
concerned about is an error in feet," he commented. "It's getting
along towards noon. We'll go up the gulch, and eat our lunch in the
shade. This place is almost as much of a sight as the canyon."
Genevieve more than agreed with her husband's opinion when he led her
up into the stupendous gorge and the walls of rock began to tower on
each side ever steeper and loftier.
"Oh, I do not see how anything can be so grand, so awesome as this!"
she cried, gazing up the precipices. "It makes me positively giddy to
look at such heights!"
"Better stop off for a while," advised Blake. "We are almost to where
the bottom tilts skyward. You can stargaze while we are eating lunch.
It's rougher along here. We can get on faster this way."
He picked her up in his arms as though she were a feather, and carried
her on up the gulch to the foot of the Titanic chute. Here, resting on
a flat rock in the cool semi-twilight of the gorge bottom, they ate
their lunch and talked with as much zest as if they were still new
acquaintances.
"Those awful cliffs!" she murmured, lowering her gaze from the
colossal walls above her. "I cannot bear to look at them any longer.
They overpower me!"
"Wait till you look down into the canyon," replied her husband. "In
some ways it is more tremendous than the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado--the width is so much narrower in proportion to the depth."
"What makes these frightful chasms?--earthquakes?"
"Water," he replied.
"Water? Not all these hundreds and thousands of feet cut down through
the solid rock!"
"Every foot," he insisted. "Think of water flowing along in the
same bed and always washing sand and gravel and even bowlders
downstream--grind, grind, grind, through the centuries and hundreds of
centuries."
"But there is no water here, Tom."
"Not now, and no chance of any this time of year, else I wouldn't
have brought you in here. A sudden heavy June rain up above there
would pour down a torrent that would drown us before we could run
three hundred yards. Imagine a flood roaring down that bumpy
shoot-the-chutes."
"I can't! It's too terrifying. Is that the way it will be if you get
the water and dig the tunnel?"
"No. At this end, the tunnel may terminate any place from down here to
a thousand feet up, but in any event far below the top. I hope it
proves to be well up. The greater the drop to the level of the mesa,
the more turbines could be put in to generate electricity."
"That sounds so inspiring! But, Dear--" Genevieve looked at her
husband with a shade of anxiety--"even if this project is feasible, do
you feel you should carry it through?"
"You mean on account of Miss Chuckie and her father," he replied. "I
have considered their side of the matter, and even at the first I saw
how--Listen, Sweetheart. No one knows better than you that I'm an
engineer to the very marrow of my bones. My work in life is to
construct,--to harness the forces of nature and compel them to serve
mankind; and to save waste--waste material, waste energy--and put it
to use."
"Don't I know, Tom!"
"Well, then," he went on, "in the bottom of Deep Canyon is a
river--waste waters down there beyond the reach of this rich but
waterless land, down in the gloom, doing no good to anything or
anybody, frittering away their energy on barren rocks. Why, it's as
bad as the way Ashton, with all the good qualities we now see he has
in him--the way he dissipated his strength and his brains and his
father's money."
"Ah, Dear! wasn't it a splendid thing when he was thrown out of his
rut of wastefulness?"
"Otherwise known as the primrose path, or the great white way," added
Blake. "It certainly was a throw out. I'm as pleased as I am
astonished that he seems to have landed squarely on his feet."
"What a marvelous change it has made in him!" exclaimed Genevieve.
"Sometimes I hardly can believe it really is Lafayette. He is so
serious and manly."
"Good thing he has changed," replied Blake. "If Miss Chuckie hadn't
told us he had made a clean breast of that bridge, I should begin to
feel worried about--Do you know, Sweetheart, it's the strangest thing
in the world the way I feel towards that girl. It's not because she is
so lovely. Of course I enjoy her beauty, but that's not it. If Tommy
were a girl and grown up--that's how I feel."
"She is a very dear, sweet girl."
"So are several of your friends--our friends," said Blake. "This is
different. The very first day we met her, there was something about
her voice and face--seemed as though I already knew her."
"She knew you, through what she had read of you. She warned me, in
that frank, charming way of hers, that you were a hero to her and I
must not mind if she worshiped you openly."
Blake laughed pleasedly. "Isn't she the greatest! And the way she
chums with me! Wonder if that is what makes Ashton so sore at me? The
idiot! Can't he see the difference?"
"Lovers always are blind," said Genevieve.
"I'm not," he rejoined, his eyes, as he gazed down into hers, as blue
and tender as Isobel's.
The young wife blushed deliciously and rewarded him with a kiss.
"But about Chuckie?" she returned to the previous question. "You were
going to tell me--"
"I am going to tell you something you will think is very fanciful--and
it is! Do you know why I am so taken with that girl? It's because
she reminds me of my sisters--what they might have grown to be!...
God!--" he bent over with his face in his shaking hands--"God! If only
they had gone any other way than--the way they did!"
"My poor dear boy!" soothed his wife, her hand on his downbent head.
"Let us trust that they are in a happier world, a world where sorrow
and pain--"
"If only I could believe that!" he groaned.
Genevieve waited a few moments and with quiet tactfulness sought to
divert him from his grief: "If Chuckie reminds you of them, Dear--"
"She might be either--only Mary, the older one, had dark brown eyes.
But Belle's were blue like Chuckie's."
"What a pure blue her eyes are--the sweet true girl! Why can't you
regard her as your sister, and--and give over further thought of this
irrigation project?"
Blake looked up, completely diverted. "You little schemer! So that's
what you've been working around to?"
"But why not?" she insisted.
"I'll tell you. It is because I am so fond of Chuckie that I am
determined to get water on Dry Mesa, if it is possible."
"But--"
"To make use of those waste waters," he explained; "to turn this dusty
semi-desert into a garden; and to benefit Chuckie by doubling the
value of her father's property."
"How could that be, when the farmers would divide up his range?"
"He owns five sections, Chuckie told me. What are they worth now? But
with water on them, even without a single tree planted, they would
sell as orchard land for more than all his herd; and he would still
have his cattle. He could sell them to the settlers for more than what
he now gets shipping them over the range."
"I begin to see, Tom. I might have known it."
"I'm telling you, of course. We're to keep it from them as a happy
surprise, because it may not come off. There's still the question
whether the water in the canyon--"
"But if it is! How delightful it will be to help Mr. Knowles and
Chuckie, besides, as you say, turning this desert into a garden!"
"That valley is a natural reservoir site to hold flood waters,"
continued the engineer. "All that's needed is a dam built across the
narrow place above the waterhole, with the dike for foundation. I
would build it of rock from the tunnel, run down on a gravity tram."
"You've worked it all out?"
"Not all, only the general scheme. If the tunnel comes through high
enough up here, we shall be able to manufacture cheap electricity to
sell. Just think of our settlers plowing by electricity, and their
wives cooking on electric stoves."
"You humorous boy!"
"No, I mean it. There's another thing--I wouldn't whisper it even to
you if you weren't my partner as well as my wife. I have reason to
believe the creek bed above the dike is a rich placer. I've planned to
take Knowles and Ashton in on that discovery--Gowan, too, if Knowles
asks it."
"A placer?"
"Yes, placer mine--gold washed down in the creek bed. But it's a small
thing compared with another discovery I've made. Up there--" Blake
pointed up the steep ledges that he had climbed--"I found a bonanza."
"Bonanza? What is that, pray?"
"A mint, a John D. bank account, a--Guess?"
"A gold mine! Oh, Tom, how romantic!"
"Yes; it's free-milling quartz. We can mill it ourselves, and not have
to pay tribute to the Smelting Trust. That's romance--or at least
sounds like it. You will pay for all the development work, in return
for one-third share. I shall take a third, as the discoverer, and
Chuckie gets the remaining third as grub-staker."
"As what?"
"She is staking us with grub--food and supplies. If she had not sent
for me to come and look over the situation, I should not have been
here to stumble on this mine. So she gets a share."
"I'm glad, glad, Tom! Isn't it nice to be able to do fine things for
others? I'm so glad for Chuckie's sake, because, if Lafayette keeps on
as he is doing now, he may win his father's forgiveness."
"What has that to do with Chuckie?"
"You and I know what she is, Dear; yet if she had no money, his father
might insist on regarding her as a mere farm girl. He is as--as
snobbish as I was when we were flung ashore by the storm, there in
Mozambique."
"I fail to see that it matters any to Chuckie what Ashton senior
thinks."
"Of course you don't see. You're as blind as when I--" the lady
blushed--"as when I had to fling myself at you to make you see. The
dear girl is as deeply in love with Lafayette as he is with her."
"No? She doesn't show it. How can you tell?"
"You know that Mr. Gowan is desperately in love with her."
"That stands to reason. He couldn't help but be. Can't say I like
the fellow. He may be all right, though. Must have some good
qualities--Chuckie seems to be very fond of him."
"As fond as if he were a brother. No; Lafayette is to be the happy
man--unless he backslides. We must help him."
Blake nodded. "That's another thing that hangs on this project. If it
proves to be feasible, I can give Ashton a chance to make good as an
engineer. I used to think he must have bought his C.E. Now I see he
has the makings."
"He can be brilliant when he chooses. If only he were not so--so
scatter-brained."
"What he needed was a jolt heavy enough to shake him together. It
seems as though his father gave it to him."
"That shock, and being picked up by Chuckie," agreed Genevieve.
"We'll help her keep him braced until the cement sets," said her
husband. "It's even worse to let brains go to waste than water."
"Far worse! What is the good of all your engineering--of all the
machinery, yes, and all the culture of civilization, if not to uplift
men and women? May the next generation work for the uplifting of all
mankind, both materially and spiritually!"
"We might make a try at it ourselves," said Blake. "As for the future,
I know it will not be your fault if our member of the next generation
fails to do his share of uplift work."
The young mother placed her hand on her bosom, and sprang up. "We
should be going back, Dear. Thomas will be wakening."