“THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN”
The big “consolidation,” its single pair of pony trucks feeling out the
way for the eight gripping drive-wheels, was storming up the crooked
canyon of the Tourmaline, pushing two flat-car loads of steel rails
ahead of it and waking the echoes with its clamor.
The track, rough and uneven because it had not yet been “surfaced,”
made the big engine rock and surge from side to side, and Dick and
Larry, perched on the fireman’s seat and carefully nursing two mahogany
boxes, had to brace themselves to keep their places. Two days earlier
a pair of surveying instruments had been damaged by the premature
explosion of a blast in a rock cutting, and the boys were returning
from a hurry trip to the valley supply camp with replacements.
As the steel train rounded one of the canyon curves, the elbow where
the branch gulch from the north came in, a scene of strenuous activity
came into view. On the opposite side of the river, workmen, clustering
like bees in swarming time, were building a trestle designed to carry a
railroad track past a hundred-foot stretch where the canyon wall rose
almost perpendicularly from the water’s edge. The legs of the trestle
bents were planted fairly in the stream and the difficulties in the
builders’ way were prodigious. Yet the little army was toiling as if
the very minutes were precious――as, indeed, they were. For, in the race
to reach the gold field at the head of the Tourmaline the Nevada Short
Line was now well in the lead.
“They’re getting in their old scaffolding, all right,” Larry commented,
twisting himself to look out of the 815’s cab window, “and it will do
to run over until they can take time to blast out a notch in the cliff.
When they get their track past that place they’ll be in shape to give
us a lot of trouble.”
“It sure looks that way,” Dick agreed. “If we could only get our rock
cutting in the ‘Narrows’ done before they catch up and go to drilling
and blasting across the creek from us it wouldn’t be so bad. But if we
don’t.... Believe me, I’m calling the situation pretty complicated,
aren’t you?”
“Complicated” was a rather mild word to use in describing the
strugglesome industrial battle going on in the narrow gorge of the
Tourmaline. Like most mountain canyons, this one offered scanty
encouragement to the building of even one railroad line, let alone two.
In many parts it was merely a deep, rock-bound chasm, with usually a
narrow shelving bank on one side of the stream――but rarely on both.
Having been first in the field, the Nevada Short Line engineers had
chosen the easiest route, crossing from one bank of the stream to the
other as the ground was most favorable for their purpose. But the
competing railroad, coming in later, had ignored the Short Line’s
earlier survey, overlapping and even duplicating it in some places,
with no regard whatever for the rights of the pioneer company. Under
such conditions the struggle for the right-of-way had now developed
into a fighting race between the two construction forces, each trying
to forge ahead of the other and to seize and hold every foot of the
favorable ground.
In this race the Short Line was, for the moment, the winner, having
already laid its track some three miles beyond the point where the
Overland Central was entering the canyon through the northern gulch
and building its trestle. But the race was by no means won. In the
ruggedest part of the canyon the Short Line was halted by a rocky
buttress through which it was necessary to cut a shelf for the track.
And rock blasting is slow work.
Two and a half miles above the scene of hurried trestle-building, and
a scant half-mile below their own “end of track,” the two boys on the
storming 815 saw another gang of Overland Central graders at work on
the opposite side of the gorge. They were on a steep slope covered
with great boulders and standing “monuments” of eroded rock in curious
formations. Neither Dick nor Larry could make out what the men were
doing, but they seemed to be actively busy doing something.
“They’re coming right along with the graders without waiting for their
trestle to be finished,” Dick pointed out. Then: “Say, Larry――I didn’t
realize that their grade was so much higher up than ours. If their
track is as high as those fellows are working they must be making
altitude a lot faster than we are.”
“They need to make it,” Larry explained. “They are planning to go into
Little Ophir on a grade much higher than ours; or at least, they’ve
made one survey that way. Mr. Goldrick told me so when I was out
working with him yesterday.”
“Which the same spells a heap more trouble for us,” said Dick gloomily.
“Having the height on us that way, every blast they fire will bombard
our track and our working gangs. Looks to me as if we’ve simply _got_
to keep ahead of them; that’s all there is to it!”
Reaching the temporary “front” camp at Pine Gulch, in a little
park-like widening of the canyon, they left the surveying instruments
in the office tent and walked on up the gorge to report for duty to
Goldrick, the assistant engineer in charge of the rock cutting in the
Narrows.
“Well, you got back all right, did you?” said Goldrick, as they came
up. “How are things looking down along?”
They told him of the O. C. trestle-building, and of the slope-side gang
they had seen just below the Pine Gulch camp. While they were talking a
distant thunder-burst of heavy blasts jarred upon the air.
“That must be that gang we saw a few minutes ago,” said Dick, adding:
“It’s sort of curious. They weren’t drilling when we came by, and we
didn’t see any air compressor or machinery of any kind.”
“All right; let ’em waste their dynamite if they want to,” said the
young engineer. “We’re going to beat ’em, hands down.” Then to the
matter in hand: “If you two cubs want to do a bit of surveying, you may
take an instrument and run a trial level for Bannagher in that rock
cutting. He’s lost his bench marks in the shooting.”
Delighted to get a chance at real instrument work, the two boys hurried
back to camp, got a transit, and were presently hard at it, running
lines for the hard-rock foreman. Absolute accuracy wasn’t necessary, of
course; if it had been, Goldrick would have run the lines himself. Just
the same, the two understudies, working with the instrument, were as
painstaking as they knew how to be, and that was why Dick, taking his
turn at the eye-piece of the telescope, burst out suddenly:
“Say, Larry――gee whiz! what’s the matter with the river?”
Larry, who was holding the target staff, grinned.
“I don’t know; I’ll ask it if you want me to,” he joked. “What do you
think you see?”
“I don’t think――I _know_,” Dick came back. “That rock I was sighting at
a minute ago was out of water. Now it’s gone under.”
“Bugs!” scoffed Larry. “You’re seeing things. There’s something the
matter with your eyes.”
“There isn’t a thing the matter with my eyes,” Dick insisted. “You look
at that rapid; it isn’t shooting half as high as it did. I tell you the
river’s rising!”
A very little additional observation proved the fact definitely and
beyond doubt; the river _was_ rising. Hurrying up to the gash in the
cliff where the men were working, the boys assailed Bannagher, asking
him where Mr. Goldrick had gone.
“’Twas over the hill he wint,” said the big Irishman. “What is ut yez’d
be wanting――with the eyes av yez buggin’ out as if yez’d seen th’
Banshee?”
“The river’s rising like fun!” Dick exclaimed, excitedly.
“Av coorse ut is――with th’ mountain snow meltin’ under th’ June sun.
What wud yez ixpect? Haven’t yez seen ut joompin’ up an’ down ivery day
we’ve been here?”
The two cubs glanced at each other sheepishly. One of the first things
they had remarked in the canyon was the daily fluctuation in the stream
level caused by the more or less rapid melting of the snow on the high
peaks.
“’Tis forgetting yer lesson yez were,” laughed Bannagher. Then:
“We’d be nading more dannymite. Would yez two be taking the key av
th’ powther house, and a couple av the min, and th’ push-car, and be
sinding a box av ut up to us?”
They undertook the errand willingly. The line-running was done, and the
trip with the push-car enabled them to take the transit back to camp
without having to carry it. In a few minutes they were on their way,
all four riding the small platform car as it slid down the grade on the
brake.
The car had made only a couple of turns in the crooking canyon,
however, before the strange behavior of the Tourmaline again drew their
attention. With every hundred yards the change in the river became more
apparent. Great boulders that had stood waist-high in the bed of the
stream were slowly submerging, and the rapids were disappearing one by
one, leaving only oily swirls to mark the places where they had been.
“I can’t believe it’s only the snow melting!” Dick shouted, raising his
voice to make himself heard above the shrilling of the little car’s
wheels. “We’ve never seen it come up like this before!”
The words were hardly out of his mouth before the car shot around the
final curve and raced into the small basin where the Pine Gulch camp
was pitched. With a shock of astoundment they saw that the basin was
rapidly becoming a lake, with the water already lapping at the tie-ends
of the single short side-track. In the camp the men of the night
shift had turned out as if at a fire alarm and were hastily carrying
everything portable to higher ground.
Jackson, the night boss, explained the astonishing thing when the
push-car party of four ran up to add four pairs of hands to the work of
salvaging the company property. “It’s that blithering O. C. outfit!” he
gritted. “They’ve gone and shot half a mountain into the river a little
ways below here, and it’s made a dam. We’re goin’ to be swamped out!”
The prophecy proved true in almost no time at all. With a good-sized
river pouring into the narrow, dammed-up gorge, the water rose
with incredible rapidity. The two boys, with their helpers, hurled
themselves upon the engineers’ office tent, pulled it down and dragged
it and its contents up among the hillside pines, and while they were at
it they saw the two tracks, the main line and the siding, disappear in
the flood.
Martin, the driver of the big 815, was trying to save his engine. But
to get it out on the main track so that it could be run up the canyon,
he had first to back down to the switch, and at that point the water
was by this time deep enough to put the fire out――which it did, killing
the engine and leaving Martin to jump and wade up to his hips in
getting away from it.
When the water stopped rising, which did not happen until the
locomotive, sizzling and sputtering, showed nothing but its stack
and the roof of its cab, there was time to look around and measure
the extent of the disaster. It was discouragingly complete. Thanks
to the hurried salvaging, most of the store-room supplies and other
movables had been carried up out of the flood’s reach; but the shacks
were swamped, all the rails and heavy material were at the bottom
of the lake, and the park-line opening in the canyon was afloat with
cross-ties, boards and timbers of all descriptions.
“Great murder!” Dick gasped, when the breath-taking interval had come,
“wouldn’t that make you weep? I believe they did it on purpose――those
O. C. people. That’s what they were so busy about when we came past a
couple of hours ago. They were placing their dynamite, right then!”
But Larry was a bit more charitable.
“I don’t suppose they cared very much what might happen to us, but I
can’t believe that they deliberately planned any such thing as this,”
he objected. “What say if we climb up somewhere from where we can see
the dam? There isn’t anything more to do here now.”
Making their way around the head of the side gulch from which the camp
had been given its name they climbed to the summit of the great cliff
below the park-like widening. This cliff was a rocky promontory called,
from the likeness of its jagged front to the profile of a human face,
“The Old Man of the Mountain.” From the high viewpoint they could look
down upon the dam which was flooding the camp. As nearly as they could
determine, it seemed that the whole of the opposing cliff face had been
blown out bodily to fall into the stream bed.
Naturally, the huge, loose-rock dam was not nearly watertight. As they
looked down upon it a dozen cataracting jets were spurting through it
under the immense pressure of the backed-up river. But in a little time
the flow wash of the river would fill up many of these outlets, and
then the flood would rise higher.
“Good gracious! they’ve sure got us where the ax got the chicken, this
time!” Dick groaned. “Our wires are gone, and we can’t even get word to
Red Butte for more help――or to tell Mr. Ackerman what’s been done to
us.”
“Mr. Ackerman is in Red Butte?” Larry asked.
“I suppose he is there yet. Mr. Goldrick told me he went down
yesterday.”
Larry had planted himself on a flat rock with his elbows on his knees,
and the “brown-study” frown came to wrinkle between his level, wide-set
eyes.
“I was just thinking, Dick,” he said. “Doesn’t it strike you that these
O. C. people have put a pretty big rod in pickle for themselves?”
Dick shook his head.
“I don’t see it――yet.”
“Think a minute. We’ve just naturally got to get rid of this dam; we
can’t hit another lick until we do. If you were in Mr. Ackerman’s
place, what would you do?”
Dick took his turn at the brown-studying, dived deep and came up with
his decision.
“I guess I’d sink about half a car-load of dynamite down behind that
pile of rock and touch it off. I’ll bet that would move it out in a
hurry.”
“It would,” said Larry quietly. “And after that――what would happen when
that lake’s turned loose?”
“Gee!” Dick breathed, pushed on thus from cause to effect and
after-effect――“their trestle down yonder; it would go out just like so
much matchwood! And it would serve them mighty good and right, too!”
“Yes,” said Larry, still speaking quietly; “I suppose we might send
them word to get their men off of it. You wouldn’t want to drown the
men too, would you?”
“No-o,” Dick admitted, dragging the word as if it came rather
reluctantly. “But they’re making it war, Larry, and they ought to be
willing to take the consequences.”
For a time neither of them spoke again. Within their range of vision,
looking up-stream, the dammed-up lake extended endlessly, as it seemed,
winding away through the mountains like a sheet of molten silver.
Presently they saw a line of men topping the high spur to the westward
and descending, like a string of ants, into the flooded camp basin.
Bannagher and his hard-rock men had been driven from their work in the
Narrows by the rising waters.
“I suppose we may as well climb down,” Dick suggested at last. “Bob
Goldrick may want to send us out with the news, now that we haven’t any
wires left.”
In returning to the lower level they descended the back of the “Old
Man,” zigzagging down until they reached the water’s edge in a finger
of the flood which reached well back into the pine-forested side gulch.
In dropping down the final declivity Larry was a few steps ahead, and
when Dick caught up with him he was standing before a curious, timbered
opening in the mountain side almost at the new water level.
“What is it――a mine?” Dick asked, pausing with a hand on Larry’s
shoulder.
“No; just a prospect hole that somebody has dug some time, I guess,”
was the reply. “These hills are full of ’em, so Bannagher says. After
gold was discovered at the canyon head everybody came here to dig holes
in the ground.”
Dick peered into the dark cavity.
“I wonder how far in it goes?” he queried.
There was no particular reason why they shouldn’t take a few minutes
in which to find out how far in it went, so they ducked in under the
rotting timbers.
The tunnel dipped down sharply from the entrance, as if its excavator
had been following an erratic mineral lead of some sort, and it
presently passed from red clay into rock. Then, suddenly, the man-made
part of it stopped short, and in the dim light filtering down from
the entrance they found themselves in what appeared to be a cavern
of tremendous extent; at least, in the semi-darkness they could not
distinguish its boundaries.
“Great Jehu!” Dick exclaimed, and his voice came back to him in a
hollow echo, “the――the Old Man of the Mountain’s got a hole in his
insides!”
“And some hole, at that,” Larry agreed, and he struck a match.
The tiny flame did next to nothing in the way of dispelling the
darkness in the great chamber, but it did serve to show them how the
unknown prospector’s final round of blasts had broken through into the
cavern.
“And I’ll bet he was just about as much astonished as we were just
now,” was Dick’s comment. Then he said, “’Sh!――listen!”
What they heard was the steady drip-drip-drip of water. And now they
noticed that there was a dank smell in the place, like that of a wet
cellar.
“Say, Larry,” Dick went on, “I’d like to know a little more about this
place. Let’s go back to what there is left of our camp and see if we
can’t find a candle.”
The retreat to the upper air was quickly made. On the hillside to which
the camp salvage had been carried they found the men sitting or lying
around under the trees waiting for some one to come and tell them what
to do. Bannagher had sent one member of his shift over the mountain
to try to find Goldrick; and two more had gone out in the opposite
direction to carry the news of the disaster to the camps below.
Larry and Dick found a candle in their own camp dunnage, and Larry,
searching in the heap of tools and equipment that had been carried up
from the store shack, secured a coil of light rope. As if moved by a
common impulse, neither of them said anything to anybody about their
recent discovery. In a few minutes they were back in the great central
cavern under the “Old Man,” Dick carrying the lighted candle and Larry
the coil of rope.
A survey of the place made possible by the better light was almost
awe-inspiring. The great domed chamber in the heart of the mountain was
fully a hundred feet in diameter, with a height of at least fifty feet
in the center. It was irregularly circular in shape, and there were
half a dozen passages leading out of it in different directions.
But that was not all. Through a multitude of seams and cracks in
one side of the chamber, drops and little rivulets of water were
oozing to form shallow spreading pools on the floor; pools which were
already beginning to drain into the largest of the out-going passages.
Instantly the same conclusion struck both of the boys.
“It’s the backed-up river forcing its way through cracks in the rock!”
said Dick in an awed whisper.
“You’ve said it,” Larry agreed. “It has just begun coming in; you
can see by the way the pools are spreading.” Then: “Say, Dick! it’s
down-hill all the way from that prospect hole in the gulch to this
place――pretty steeply down-hill, at that. Do you know what that means?”
Dick shivered.
“Don’t I know? It means that we’re away below the level of that
flood-pond, right now!”
Larry nodded.
“We are; thirty-five or forty feet, at the very least.”
“For pity’s sake!” Dick gasped. “If that lake should take a running
jump and break through on us――――”
“Wait,” Larry broke in; “I’ve got an idea――and it’s a whaling big
one! Gee!――if it will only work out ... but first we’ve got to find
out where this leakage water is traveling to. Are you game to take a
chance, Dick?”
“Game is the word,” said the general manager’s son; and it was no
particular discredit to him if his voice shook a little.
“All right; come on.”
Larry had the candle now and he led the way to the passage down which
the gathered rivulets were just beginning to trickle to disappear in
some deeper depth.
Recalling the experiences of that nerve-sapping exploration afterward,
they were both glad to remember that there had been no talk of backing
out. There was ample chance for it, and plenty of good excuses, if
either of them had been so minded. The passage, in which they could
walk upright in the beginning, dwindled in places to squeeze holes
through which they had to crawl like a pair of burrowing ground-hogs.
Also, there were many branchings, and at the first of these Larry
began to uncoil his rope to leave it as a guide by means of which they
might find their way back through the maze; though as for this, as he
remarked, the trickling rill underfoot would serve if they shouldn’t
happen to lose it in some bottomless pit on the way.
At the same time it was the rill that gave them the most uneasiness.
Reason as they might about it, they could not rid themselves of the
fear that it was growing larger; and if it were, if it should grow big
enough, with the huge backed-up lake behind it, it might easily make
retreat impossible; worse, still, it might drown them suddenly right
where they were.
“Goodness!” Dick shuddered, after the passage of one of the tightest of
the squeeze holes, “isn’t there any end to this miserable mole burrow?”
It was just a little way beyond this that they found an end; a most
curious one. Away ahead they could see faint glimmerings of daylight,
and it was coming, not through a single outlet, but seemingly through
a dozen. A little farther advance showed them a singular phenomenon.
At its outer end the passage they were following was split into
numberless cracks and crevices, as if the final barrier of rock had
been shattered, but not entirely broken through and carried away, by
some mighty volcanic blast. And no one of the crevices was wide enough
to let them squeeze through to the open air.
“That settles it,” said Larry, not without keen disappointment. “We’ll
have to go back the way we came, and we’d better be doing it, too. This
seepage stream really is getting bigger, all the time.”
When they began to retrace their steps it was hard to keep panic
from getting the upper hand to turn the retreat into a rout. In the
tight places Dickie Maxwell had to shut his eyes and grit his teeth
to hold on to his nerve; and Larry, while he took it coolly and more
methodically as a thing that had to be done and done right, felt the
same naggings of panic in the critical pinches. For now it was plainly
apparent that the leakage stream from above was growing in volume from
minute to minute.
“Don’t let it get your nerve; we’ll make it all right,” he said to
Dick, as he braced himself to pull his lighter companion through one
of the mole burrows. But all Dick permitted himself to say was: “Gee!
Larry――if we ever get out of this trap alive!――”
They made it finally; or at least they reached the big cavern with
the water oozing through its western wall. With an open way of escape
through the old prospect tunnel now presenting itself they stopped to
catch a breath of relief. It was in this breathing spell that Dick said:
“I guess I know now what your big idea is, Larry.”
Larry nodded.
“You see why we had to go on and find out if this place had a real
drain-way to the canyon below the dam. We know it has, now. What I
don’t know about engineering would fill the biggest book you ever saw,
but anybody can see that a few boxes of dynamite buried up at the
head of that prospect tunnel and fired will let the water out of our
lake――and do it through these cave holes slowly enough so that it won’t
flood everything to death down below.”
Dick did not answer at once. There was a rock ledge at one side of the
big chamber and he sat down upon it. When he spoke it was to say:
“Those O. C. people don’t deserve to have us consider them in the
least, Larry. We ought to blow their old dam to bits and let them have
what’s coming to ’em when it goes out――at that place where they’re
building their trestle in the creek bed. It’d fix them good and
plenty, I guess.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Larry admitted. “As you say,
they’ve earned it and it’s coming to ’em. I never will believe that
they didn’t blow that cliff down on purpose to make trouble for us.”
Then, after a little pause: “I――guess――it’s up to us, Dick, to say
whether we get square with them or not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just this: we’re the only ones who know anything about this cave. If
we keep our mouths shut, Mr. Ackerman will dynamite the dam. There
isn’t anything else he can do, so far as he or anybody else will know.”
“Huh!” said Dick; “so you’ve thought of that notion of keeping still,
too, have you? Let’s fight it out right here. Do we, or don’t we?”
For a full minute there was nothing but the steady drip, drip of the
leaking flood to break the dead silence of the great cavern. At last
Larry said:
“I’ve got a mighty mean temper, Dick, and I can never tell when it’s
hammering me over into something that oughtn’t to be done.”
“A mean temper?――you?” Dick forced a laugh. “That’s a joke. Why, Larry
Donovan! you’re just about the most even-tempered fellow I’ve ever
known!”
“You say that because you don’t really know me, Dick――inside, I mean.
By nature, my temper is like a fulminate of mercury fuse-cap――set to go
off if you so much as drop it on the floor. All the Donovans are that
way. But when I was a little kid I got fighting mad one day――blind,
crazy mad――and nearly killed another little kid; hit him with a brick.
Young as I was, it made an awful dent in me; and away back at that
time I began to learn to sit on my temper, telling myself I’d have to
or else I’d be a murderer some day before I knew it.”
“Well?” said Dick; “you can sit on it all right now; I’ll bear witness
to that.”
“Yes; I can hold it down now――so far as boiling over suddenly is
concerned. But doing it makes me ugly and bitter inside; makes me chew
over a thing until I can’t tell right from wrong in it.... I mean when
things are fair and when they’re not. I guess you can see what I’m
trying to get at?”
“Yep, I guess I do,” Dick acknowledged. “You’ve chewed over all the
things the O. C. folks have been doing or trying to do to us, and it
has made you mad inside. So it has me.” Then he grew thoughtful again,
working his way back to the thing that was waiting to be decided. When
the back-tracking was accomplished he drove a small wedge into the one
little crack that offered itself.
“I’m just wondering what Mr. Ackerman would do if he knew all that we
know,” he threw out.
“You needn’t wonder about that,” Larry interposed quickly. “The chief
stands up so straight that he leans over backward――you know he does.
He’d give those O. C. people the benefit of the doubt, every time. No,
it’s up to us, Dick. If we keep still about this cave he’ll dynamite
the dam, because, so far as he will know, it will be the only thing
that can be done. If we tell him, he’ll dynamite this cave outlet,
instead――naturally.”
Dick brought his teeth together with a little snap and looked away.
“I’m for keeping still, Larry. Those scamps down yonder need a lesson
in fair play.”
Larry got up from his seat on the stone ledge and snuffed the candle
with his fingers.
“All right; I’m with you,” he said shortly. And then they made their
way out to daylight.
Discoveries a-plenty were awaiting them when they reached the outer
air. One was that they had spent a lot more time in the cave than they
thought they had and it was now late in the afternoon. Others were that
both Mr. Ackerman, and Goldrick, the assistant, were on the ground,
and that a telephone connection had been re-established with the camps
below the dam.
But the most exciting discovery was in the activities which were going
forward. A raft had been made out of the floating cross-ties and bridge
timbers, and upon it a gang of men were loading a round iron tank which
both of the boys recognized at once as a spare air-compressor receiver.
Into one of the tank tappings a long rubber air-hose was screwed, and
from the shore end of the hose a length of blasting fuse protruded.
They didn’t have to ask what was going to be done. The chief engineer
had accepted the only alternative that he knew of. The iron tank was an
immense bomb loaded with explosives, and it was to be sunk and fired at
the heel of the dam.
Before either Larry or Dick could say anything――if they had meant to
say anything――the raft was pushed off and two of the men jumped aboard
of it to paddle it out to where the current would catch it. The two
boys were standing immediately behind the chief when he gave Goldrick a
curt order.
“Call up Deverney over your emergency wire and tell him again to pass
the warning to the O. C. construction boss,” he snapped. “Have him
tell Grissby that he has about ten minutes in which to get his men off
that trestle and up to high ground.”
There was an unnerving little wait while the telephone call was going
in and the answer was returning. Dick was winking hard, and Larry was
biting his lip and staring away across the flooded canyon. Then the
reply came from Deverney, ’phoned from his post opposite the trestle,
and Goldrick repeated it to the chief.
“They won’t stop work. Grissby says for us to go ahead and shoot; that
he’s taking a chance that the flood will spend itself before it gets
that far down.”
“It is nothing but cold-blooded murder on Grissby’s part,” was Mr.
Ackerman’s brittle comment. “Tell Deverney to shout the warning across
to the men themselves. Then, if they don’t stampede they’ll have to
take what comes. They’ve given us this flood, and we’ve got to get rid
of it――and this is the only way.”
It was too much, the timber raft with its terrific bomb was swinging
out into the current; in another moment it would be too late to stop
it. As if they had both been hurled from the same catapult, the two
“cubs” flung themselves upon the big, square-shouldered chief of
construction, yelling with one voice: “There _is_ another way――we’ve
found it!”
[Illustration: The timber raft with its terrific bomb was swinging out
into the current]
“What’s that?” barked the chief; then, sharply: “Bannagher――fling
a line to that raft, quick! You fellows out there――grab that line
and haul the raft ashore!” Then, wheeling short upon the boys: “Now
then――out with it, you two; what have you found?”
Most haltingly and shamefacedly they told of the chance discovery of
the hollow stomach in the Old Man of the Mountain, and of the drainage
possibility it afforded, and a swift investigation followed. Instantly
the plan that Larry had suggested in the talk with Dick was put into
effect. The timber raft was towed up to the gulch bank near the old
prospect tunnel, and with team-work celerity the tank bomb was slid
into place in the tunnel mouth and many hands with picks and shovels
filled the hole and tamped it solidly.
When all was ready, everybody retreated to a safe distance on the
hillside and the fuse was lighted. After a breathless interval of what
seemed to Dick and Larry like a full half-hour――though it was really
less than five minutes――there came a low, grumbling roar like the
groan of a buried monster, the solid earth shook as if with a sudden
shivering ague chill, and with the thunder of a hundred cataracts
blended into one the flood lake began to pour into the depths of the
Old Man of the Mountain to find its way to the canyon below through the
crevice passages.
It was quite some time after dark before the park-like valley became
habitable again and the work of restoring the camp was gotten under
way. Mr. Ackerman’s office tent was one of the first to be set up, with
a flooring of planks over the soaked ground, and it was here that Dick
and Larry were, in railroad phrase, “called upon the carpet.”
“There’s just one thing missing now,” the chief said, eyeing them
sharply after they had told the story of the cave discovery in detail:
“I want to know why you didn’t tell us about this cave before we
launched the raft?”
As usual when both were called upon, Dick did the talking. And his
answer was manfully straightforward.
“At first, we didn’t mean to tell you at all. We――we had talked it
over, and we thought that the O. C. people had something coming to them
for what they had done to us.” Then he swallowed once or twice and wet
his lips and added: “I think maybe we wouldn’t have told, if we hadn’t
both been scared stiff for fear some of their trestle builders would be
drowned.”
For a moment or so the chief said nothing. Then a grim little smile, or
at least the shadow of one, began to draw at the corners of his eyes.
“When you two fellows go to college, if you do go, one of the first
things the faculty will tell you will be that they won’t undertake to
build you over morally,” he said. “A railroad construction camp is
a good bit the same way; nobody in it is going to take the trouble
to ride herd on you in the field of good morals, or to decide nice
questions of right and wrong for you. You’ve got to stand upon your own
feet and do those things for yourselves.
“You’ve been learning fast since you came on this job, and I’ve
been proud of both of you. You’ve shown aptness and courage and
resourcefulness; qualities that go a long way toward making a good
engineer; a good man in any walk in life. But there is one thing you
apparently haven’t learned; and that is that good business is never
vindictive――that in the long run, the man who strikes back merely to
‘get square’ with the other fellow is the man who loses out in the end.
Do you get that?”
“I’ve got it,” said Larry, quite meekly; and Dick nodded.
“All right, then; we’ll cross it off the book and call it a ‘has been.’
That’s all for to-night. You may go.”
But Dick hung upon his heel, and after another hard swallow or two:
“Just one thing more, Mr. Ackerman. Does my father have to know all the
ins and outs of this thing? Because, if he does――well, you see, Larry’s
got to make good, and――er――――” the plea tapered off into nothing and he
stopped in some embarrassment.
At this, the chief’s smile was less grim.
“I think, when the proper time comes, you will tell your father,
yourself,” he ventured. “And now you’d better turn in, both of you. The
Old Man of the Mountain has given you a pretty full day, and you’ve
earned your ten hours off. Good-night.”