Conniston instantly saw the need of haste, the urgent necessity of
acting speedily upon the advice tendered by Tommy Garton in his note.
"Arrest you!" Argyl had cried, indignantly. "Arrest you for being a
man and doing your duty!"
"No, Argyl," he told her, a bit anxiously. "Their reasons for causing
my arrest now are simply that that man Swinnerton, not knowing when he
is beaten, wants me out of the way for a few days. He is ready to
spring another bit of his villainy, I suppose. But I do not think that
Wallace is going to serve his warrant in a hurry."
They laid their plans swiftly, Mr. Crawford agreeing silently as
Conniston outlined the thing to be done. When the horses were ready
Conniston walked cautiously to Tommy Garten's window and peered in.
And he was grinning contentedly when he returned to Mr. Crawford and
his daughter.
"Tommy is the serenest law-breaker you ever saw," he told them, as he
swung to his horse after having helped Argyl to a place at her
father's side in the buckboard. "It's a cure for the blues to see him
sitting there on his cot covering his tame sheriff with a young
cannon. There'll be a fine, I suppose, for interfering with an officer
in the pursuit of his duty."
"I think," Mr. Crawford said, quietly, as he sent his horses racing
into the night, "that Oliver Swinnerton won't be looking for any more
trouble from now on."
Where the road forked, one branch running straight on to
Crawfordsville, the other turning off toward Deep Creek, Mr. Crawford
took Conniston's horse, and Conniston got into the buckboard. Mr.
Crawford was to ride alone to Crawfordsville, see Colton Gray, of the
P. C. & W., tell him that the Crawford Reclamation Company had made
good its part of the contract, invite him out to Dam Number One to see
what was done, and to insist that the P. C. & W. keep to its part of
the contract, beginning work immediately upon the railroad into the
Valley. Conniston and Argyl were to drive on to the dam, and to open
the gates controlling the current to be poured into the big flume.
The darkness had not yet gone, but was lifting, turning a dull gray,
when Argyl and Conniston came to the dam. And now the engineer told
her of two things which until now he had mentioned to no one save the
men whom he had been obliged to call in to do the work for him. From
Dam Number One for thirty miles, reaching to Valley City, there were
small groups of his men stationed a mile apart. Each group had piled
high the dry limbs of trees, scrub brush, and green foliage brought
from the mountains. Each group was instructed to watch for the water
which was to be turned at last into the ditch and to set fire to its
pile of brushwood when the precious stuff came abreast of them. And
so, by day or night, there was to be thirty miles of signal fires to
proclaim with flame and smoke that the Great Work was no longer a
man's dream, but an accomplished, vital thing.
The second thing he explained as Argyl walked with him to the dam
across Deep Creek. He showed her the accomplished work, showed her the
deep, wide flume, and as they stood upon the dam itself pointed out an
intricate set of levers controlling the great gates.
"Argyl," he told her, speaking quietly, but knowing that there was a
tremor in his voice which he could not drive from it--"Argyl, do you
know how much to-day means to me? Do you know that it is the most
gloriously wonderful day I have ever known? Do you know that I have
fought hard for this day, and that the hardest fighting I had before
me was the fight against Greek Conniston the snob? Do you know that at
least I have tried to make a man of myself, even as I have tried to
build ditches and dams? You do know it, Argyl? You do know that as
hard as I have worked for reclamation I have worked for regeneration!
And I have not failed altogether."
His tone was suddenly firm, suddenly stern. He was a man weighing
himself and his work, and he was speaking with a voice which rang with
simple frankness and deep sincerity.
"There is the work to say that I have not failed utterly. There it is,
ditch and dam, to say that I have done a part of the thing I have set
my hand to. I am not boasting of it, for what many men could have done
I should have been able to do. But I am proud of it. And, Argyl, while
I am not a man yet as I would be, not a man full grown as your father
is, while I can never hope to be the man your father is, yet I have
done what I could to be less of a fop, less of a drone in the world.
Do you understand me, Argyl?"
"Yes, Greek." She answered him softly, her face turned up to his, her
eyes frankly filled with love and pride for what he had done, what he
was. "I understand."
"Then, Argyl Crawford, just so sure as I have done a little thing or a
big thing in working the reclamation of this desert, just so certainly
have you done a big thing or a little thing in making less barren the
waste places in my own soul. Don't you see what you have done, Argyl?
It is not I who have done anything; it is you who have done
everything. If I am in any way responsible for success to our work,
then are you responsible for every bit of it. That dam, that ditch,
everything, all of it belongs to you! The success belongs to you!"
"Greek"--she smiled at him through a sudden gathering of tears--"you
mustn't say such things--"
"And so," he went on, quietly, "since the whole work has been your
work, I want the completion of the work to be yours. Look here,
Argyl."
He touched a long, slender lever reaching from the flume to the bank
where they stood.
"When the sun comes up it is going to bring a new day for all of us,"
he continued, slowly. "A new day which, for me, you have made
possible. And just as the sun comes up will you put your hand to this
lever and press it down?"
She looked up at him quickly. "Oh," she cried, her hand clutching at
his arm, her voice quivering, "you mean--"
He laughed happily. "I mean that when you press that lever it will
throw open the water-gates. I mean that it will be your hand which
turns the first mad current down into the flume. I mean that it will
be you, Argyl, who actually sends the first water to reclaim
Rattlesnake Valley. Are you glad, Argyl?"
If Argyl was glad, she did not say so. For a moment she stood with her
face in her two hands, sobbing. And then, laughing softly, the tears
upon her cheeks catching fire from the first rays of the rising sun,
she lifted her face to Greek Conniston's, and, drawing his face down,
kissed him.
The new day had leaped out at them, whipping the last shreds of misty
darkness from the face of the earth. Down yonder, below them upon the
slope of the hills, they saw the Lark and his hundred men preparing
for breakfast. Only in the bed of Deep Creek alone, below the dam
where a trickle of water ran thread-like, was there any shadow. And
suddenly something moving within the breaking darkness there caught
Conniston's eye.
It was a man running, running swiftly downstream, running as though
pursued by no less terrible a thing than death, stumbling, rising,
running again. Something in the man's carriage struck Conniston as
familiar, while he could not make out who it was. Then the light grew
stronger, rosier, and he cried out in surprise.
"Hapgood!" he exclaimed. "Roger Hapgood!"
And almost before the words had left his lips he cried out in a new
tone, a tone of horror, and, seizing Argyl's hand in his, ran with
her, crying for her to hurry, urging her to run with him, away from
the dam. For his eyes had seen another thing in the creek-bed, a
something just at the base of the dam at its lowest side. It was a
little sputtering flame, such a flame as is made by a burning bit of
fuse.
Hapgood, still running, had climbed up the steep right bank, had run
almost into the men's camp, had turned suddenly and dashed back down
the bank, to run across the creek and climb the farther side.
Conniston and Argyl as they fled from the threatened dam could see him
as he clambered upward, could see the loose stones and dirt set
sliding, rattling from under his hurrying feet and clawing hands.
Then came the thundering roar of the explosion. The great dam, the
citadel of all hopes of success, tottered like a stone wall smitten
with a thousand battering-rams, tottered and shook to its foundations.
And then, as a dozen explosions merged into one, the whole thing
leaped skyward, as though hurled aloft from some Titan's sling, and,
leaping, burst asunder, flying in a thousand directions, raining rock
and mortar far and wide along the slopes of the mountains. And
Conniston, dragging Argyl after him, cried out brokenly. Upon the dam
he had toiled for weeks, and now there was no one stone left of it!
And the first day of October was but five days off.
"Look!" Argyl was clinging to him wildly, her arm trembling as it
pointed. "Look! Oh, God!"
She did not point toward the dam. Her quivering finger found out a
moving figure far below it in the creek-bed. It was Hapgood. The
explosion which had demolished the work of weary weeks had shaken the
ground under his flying feet so that the loose soil no longer held
him. He had cried out aloud, had fought and clawed, had even bit with
blackened teeth into the steep bank. And it mocked him and slipped
away from him and hurled him, bruised and cut, to the bottom of the
cañon.
Even as Conniston looked the freed waters which had chafed in the
great dam leaped forward, a monster river of churning white water and
whirling debris, and like a live thing, wrathful, vengeful, was
charging downward through the steep ravine. Hapgood had heard. They
had seen his white face turned for an instant over his shoulder. And
then his shriek rose high above the thunder of waters as he ran from
the merciless thing which his own hands had unchained.
They saw his one hope; saw that he, too, had seen it. With the water
hurling itself almost upon him, he gained the bank ten feet farther
downstream, where the sides were more gently sloping. They saw him
climb to a little shelf of rock a yard above the bottom of the creek.
They saw his hands thrust out above his head, grasping at the root of
a stunted tree. One more second--
But the fates did not grant the one single second. The churning,
frothing, angry maelstrom had caught at his legs, whipping them from
under him. They heard his shriek again, throbbing with terror, vibrant
with a fear which was worse than despair. They saw his face, white and
horrible, as he glanced again for a moment at the thing behind him.
And then the swirling water leaped up at him, snarling like some
mighty beast, and clutched at his throat, at his hands, and flung him
like a thing of no weight far down into its own tumultuous bosom. For
a moment they saw his arms, then they saw his hands clutching at the
foam-flecked face of the water--and then even the hands disappeared.