# Scientific Sprague/Chapter 5
### V The Cloud-Bursters

IT was an article in the news columns of The Brewster Morning Tribune which first called attention—the attention of the Brewsterites and the inter-mountain world in general—to the plans and purposes of the Mesquite Valley Land and Irrigation Company.
Connabel, a hard-working reporter on The Tribune, had been sent over to Angels, the old head-quarters of the Red Butte Western on the other side of the Timanyonis, to get the story of a shooting affray which had localized itself in Pete Grim's place, the one remaining Angelic saloon. Finding the bar-room battle of little worth as a news story, and having time to kill between trains, Connabel had strolled off up the gulch beyond the old copper mines and had stumbled upon the construction camp of the Mesquite Company.
Being short of "copy" on the fight story, the reporter had written up the irrigation project, taking the general outlines from a foreman on the job whose tongue he loosened with a handful of Brewster cigars. A big earth dam was in process of construction across the mouth of the rather precipitous valley of Mesquite Creek; and the mesa below, which, to Connabel's unrural eye, seemed to be a very Sahara of infertile desolation, was to be made to blossom like the rose.
Kendall, managing editor of The Tribune, had run the story, partly because real news happened to be scarce at the moment, and partly out of sheer astonishment that an enterprise of the magnitude of the Mesquite project had not already flooded the country wkh the brass-band publicity literature which is supposed to attract investors.
That a land and irrigation company should actually wait until its dam was three-fourths completed before it began to advertise was a thing sufficiently curious to call for editorial comment. Why Editor Kendall did not comment on the news item as a matter of singular interest is a query which had its answer on the loggia porch of the Hotel Topaz in the evening of the day on which Connabel's write-up appeared.
It was Kendall's regular habit to close his desk at seven o'clock and to spend a leisurely hour over his dinner at the Topaz before settling down to his night's work. On the evening in question he had chanced to sit at table with Maxwell, the general superintendent of the railroad, and with Maxwell's friend and college classmate, Sprague. After dinner the three had gone out to the loggia porch to smoke, and it was the big chemistry expert who spoke of the Mesquite news story which had appeared that morning in The Tribune.
"Yes," said the editor; "Connabel got on to that yesterday. I sent him over to Angels to write up a shooting scrape, and he had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with. We've all known, in a general way, that an Eastern company was doing something over there, but I had no idea that they'd got their dam pretty nearly done and were about ready to open up for business."
"It's wild-cat, pure and unadulterated!" cut in the railroad man snappily. "What they are going to do to a lot of woolly investors will be good and plenty. That Mesquite Mesa land is just about as fertile as this street pavement here."
Kendall was a dried-up little wisp of a man, with tired eyes and a face the color of old oak-tanned leather.
"That is what you would think—that they are out for the easy money," he agreed. "But there is something a little queer about it. They haven't advertised."
"Not here," supplemented Maxwell. "It would be a trifle too rank. Everybody in the Timanyoni knows what that land is over in the edge of the Red Desert."
"They haven't advertised anywhere, so far as I can ascertain," put in the editor, quietly. "What is more, Jennings, who is the engineer in charge of the dam-building and who seems to be the only man in authority on the ground, came in this afternoon and raised sand with me for printing the news story. He said they were not exploiting the scheme here at all; that their money and their investors were all in the East, and they were asking no odds of the Brewster newspapers."
"Bitter sort of devil, that fellow Jennings," was Maxwell's comment; but it was the big chemist who followed the main thread of the argument.
"What reason did he give for making such an extraordinary break as that, Mr. Kendall?"
"Oh, he had his reason pat enough," rejoined the editor, with his tired smile. "He said he realized that we have irrigated land of our own over here in the Park upon which we are anxious to get settlers, and that public sentiment here would naturally be against the Mesquite project. He asked, as a matter of fairness, that we simply let the desert project alone. He claimed that it had been financed without taking a dollar out of the Timanyoni, so we could not urge that there were local investors to be protected."
"Umph! that argument cuts both ways; it's an admission that the Eastern investors might need protection," scoffed the railroad superintendent. Then he added: "They certainly will if they expect to get any of the money back that they have been spending in Mesquite Valley. Why, Kendall, Mesquite Creek is bone-dry half the year!"
"And the other half?" inquired Sprague.
"It's a cloud-burst proposition, like a good many of the foot-hill arroyos," Maxwell explained. "Once, in a summer storm, I saw a wall of water ten feet high come down that stream-bed, tumbling twenty-ton bowlders in the thick of it as if they had been brook pebbles. Then, for a month, maybe, it would be merely a streak of dry sand."
"Perhaps they are counting upon storing the cloud-burst water," commented Kendall dryly. Then as he rose to go back to his work: "As you say, Maxwell, it has all the ear-marks of the wild-cat. But so long as it doesn't stick its claws out at us, I suppose we haven't much excuse for butting in. Good-night, gentlemen. Drop in on me when you're up my way. Always glad to see you."
The two who remained on the hotel porch after the editor went away smoked in comradely silence for a time. The night was enchantingly fine, with a first-quarter moon swinging low in a vault of velvety blackness, and a gentle breeze, fragrant with the breath of the mountain forests, creeping down upon the city from the backgrounding high-lands. Across the plaza, and somewhere in the yards behind the long two-storied railroad head-quarters building and station, a night crew was making up trains, and the clank and crash of coupling cars mingled with the rapid-fire exhausts of the switching engine.
The big-bodied chemistry expert was the first to break the companionable silence, asking a question which had reference to the epidemic of disaster and demoralization which had recently swept over Maxwell's railroad.
"Well, how are things coming by this time, Dick? Are the men responding fairly well to that little circular-letter, man-to-man appeal we concocted?"
"They are, for a fact," was the hearty assurance. "I have never seen anything like it in railroading in all my knocking about. They've been coming in squads to 'fess up and take the pledge, and to assure me that it's the water-wagon for theirs from now on. By George, Calvin, it's the most mellowing experience I've ever had! It proves what you have always said, and what I have always wanted to believe: that the good in the mass definitely outweighs the bad, and that it will come to the front if you only know how to appeal to it."
"That's right," averred the chemist. "It is the strong hope of the country that there is justice and fairness and sane common-sense at the American bottom of us, if you can only get at it. I think you can call the booze-fight and demoralization round-up a trouble past and begin to look around you for the signs and symptoms of the next biff you're going to get."
The stockily built little man who stood as the railroad company's chief field-officer on the far-western fighting line moved uneasily in his chair.
"I have been hoping there wasn't going to be any 'next time,’" he said, chewing thoughtfully upon his cigar.
"I should hope with you, Dick, if we had been able, in any of the former scrimmages, to secure good, indubitable court evidence against the men who are backing these buccaneering raids on your securities. The one thing that big money really fears to-day is the law—the law as the Federal courts are likely to construe and administer it. But to obtain your day in court you've got to have evidence; and thus far we haven't been able to sweat out anything that would implicate the man or men higher up. Therefore, you may continue to sleep on your arms, keeping a sharp eye out for surprises."
"I guess that is pretty good advice," was the ready admission; "but it is rather difficult to put into practice, Calvin. There are five hundred miles of this railroad, and my job of operating them is big enough to keep me busy without doing any detective stunts on the side."
"I know," Sprague nodded reflectively, "and for that reason I've been half-way keeping an eye out for you myself."
"You have? Don't tell me you've been finding more grief!"
Sprague threw away his outburned stub and found and lighted a fresh cigar.
"I don't want to pose as an alarmist," he offered at length, "but I'd like to dig a little deeper into this Mesquite irrigation scheme. How much or little do you know about it?"
"Next to nothing. About two months ago Jennings, the construction engineer, made application for the through handling, from Copah, of a train-load of machinery, tools, and camp outfit. He asked to have the stuff delivered at the end of the old copper-mine spur above Angels. We put the spur in shape for him and delivered the freight."
"Well, what else?"
"That is about all we have had to do with chem in a business way. Two weeks ago, when we had that wreck at Lobo, they were asking Benson for an extension of the copper-mine spur to a point nearer their job, chiefly, I think, so they could run a hand-car back and forth between the camp and the saloon at Angels. Benson didn't recommend it, and the matter was dropped."
"Without protest?"
"Oh, yes; Jennings didn't make much of a roar. In fact, I've always felt that he avoided me when he could. He is in town a good bit, but I rarely see him. Somebody told me he tried once to get into the Town and Country Club, and didn't make it. I don't know who would blackball him, or why; but evidently some one did."
The ash grew a full half-inch longer on Sprague's fresh cigar before he said:
"Doesn't it occur to you that there is something a bit mysterious about this dry-land irrigation scheme, Dick?"
"I had never thought of it as being mysterious. It is a palpable swindle, of course; but swindles are like the poor—they're always with us."
"It interests me," said the big man, half-musingly. "A company, formed nobody knows where or how, drops down in the edge of the Red Desert and begins—absolutely without any of the clatter and clamor of advertising that usually go with such enterprises—to build what, from all reports, must be a pretty costly dam. If they have acquired a title to the Mesquite Mesa, no one seems to have heard of it; and if they are hoping to sell the land when the dam is completed, that, too, has been kept dark. Now comes this little newspaper puff this morning, and Mr. Jennings promptly turns up to ask Kendall to drop it."
"It is rather queer, when you come to put the odds and ends of it together," admitted the railroad man.
"Decidedly queer, I should say." So far the Government man went on the line which he himself had opened. Then he switched abruptly. "By the way, where is your brother-in-law, Starbuck? I haven't seen him for three or four days."
"Billy has been in Red Butte, figuring on a little mining deal in which we are both interested. But I am looking for him back to-night."
"Good. If you should happen to see him when the train comes in, ask him to come over here and smoke a pipe with me. Tell him I'm losing my carefully acquired cowboy accent and I'd like to freshen it up a bit."
The superintendent promised; and, since he always had work to do, went across to his office in the second story of the combined head-quarters and station building.
Some hour or so later the evening train came in from the west, and at the outpouring of passengers from it one, a man whose air of prosperous independence was less in the grave, young-old face and the loosely fitting khaki service clothes than in the way in which he carried his shoulders, was met by a boy from the superintendent's office, and the word passed sent him diagonally across the grass-covered plaza to swing himself lightly over the railing of the hotel porch.
"Dick made motions as if you wanted to smoke a peace pipe with me, " he said, dropping carelessly into the chair which had been Maxwell's.
"Yes," Sprague assented; and then he went on to explain why. At the end of the explanation Starbuck nodded.
"I reckon we can do it all right; go up on the early morning train to the canyon head, and take a chance on picking up a couple of bronc's at Wimberley's ranch. But we could hoof it over from Angels in less than a quarter of the time it'll take us to ride up the river from Wimberley's."
"For reasons of my own, Billy, I don't want to 'hoof it,' as you say, from Angels. To mention one of them, I might ask you to remember that I tip the scale at a little over the half of the third hundred, just now, and I'm pretty heavy on my feet." And therewith the matter rested.
At an early hour the following morning, an hour when the sun was just swinging clear over the far-distant blue horizon line of the Crosswater Hills which marks the eastern limit of the great desert, two men dropped from the halted eastbound train at the Timanyoni Canyon water-tank and made their way around the nearest of the hogbacks to the ranch house of one William Wimberley.
As Starbuck had predicted, two horses were obtainable, though the ranchman looked long and dubiously at the big figure of the Government chemist before he was willing to risk even the heaviest of the horses in his small remuda.
"I reckon you'll have ter set sort o' light in the saddle, Mister," he said at the mounting; and then, apparently as an after-thought: "By gollies, I wouldn't have you fall over ag'inst me f'r a farm in God's country, stranger! Ef you was to live round here, we'd call you Samson, and take up a c'lection fer the pore, sufferin' Philistines. We shore would."
Sprague laughed good-naturedly as he followed Starbuck's lead toward the river. He was well used to being joked about his size, and there were times when he rather encouraged the joke. Big men are popularly supposed to be more or less helpless, physically, and Sprague was enough of a humorist to enjoy the upsetting, now and then, of the popular tradition. In his college days he had held the record for the heavy lift and the broad jump; there was no man of his class who could stand up to him with the gloves or on the wrestling-mat; and in the foot-ball field he was at once the strongest "back" and the fastest man on the team—a combination rare enough to be miraculous.
"You say you want to follow the river?" said Starbuck, when they had struck in between the precipitous hills among which the green flood of the Timanyoni made its way toward the canyon portal.
"Yes, if it is at all practicable. I'd like to get some idea of the lay of the land between this and the camp on the Mesquite."
"I'm anticipatin' that you'll get the idea, good and plenty," agreed the superintendent's brother-in-law dryly; and during the three-hour jaunt that followed, the prediction was amply confirmed. There was no trail, and for the greater part of the way the river flowed between rocky hogbacks, with only the narrowest of bowlder-strewn margins on either hand.
Time and again they were forced to dismount and to lead the horses around or over the natural obstructions; and once they were obliged to leave the river valley entirely, climbing and descending again by a circuitous route among the rugged hills.
It was late in the forenoon when they came finally into the region of upper basins, and, turning to the eastward, threaded a dry arroyo which brought them out upon the level-bottomed valley known as the Mesquite Mesa. It was not a mesa in the proper meaning of the term; it was rather a vast flat wash brought down from the hills by the sluicing of many floods. Here and there its sun-baked surface was cut and gashed by dry gullies all pointing toward the river, and each bearing silent witness to the manner in which the mesa had been formed.
At a point well within this shut-in moraine, Sprague dismounted, tossed his bridle reins to Starbuck, and went to examine the soil in the various gullies. Each dry ditch afforded a perfect cross-section of the different strata, from the thin layer of sandy top-soil to the underlying beds of coarse sandstone pebbles and gravel. Sprague kicked the edges from a dozen of the little ditches, secured a few handfuls of the soil, and came back shaking his head.
"I don't wonder that these people don't want to advertise their land, Billy," he commented, climbing, with a nimbleness astonishing in so large a man, to the back of his mount. "As they say down in Tennessee, you couldn't raise a fuss on it. Let's amble along and see what they are doing at the head works."
At the head of the wash the valley of Mesquite Creek came in abruptly from the right. On a bench above the mouth of the valley they found the construction camp of the irrigation company, a scattered collection of shack sheds and tents, a corral for the working stock, and the usual filth and litter characterizing the temporary home of the "wop."
Across the valley mouth a huge earthwork was rising. It was the simplest form of construction known to the dam-building engineer: a mere heaping of earth and gravel moved by two-horse scrapers from the slopes of the contiguous hills on either hand. There was no masonry, no concrete, not even the thin core wall which modern engineering practice prescribes for the strengthening member in an earth embankment designed to retain any considerable body of water.
Moreover, there was no spillway. The creek, carrying at this season of the year its minimum flow, had been stopped off without an outlet; and the embankment upon which the force was heaping the scrapings from the hillsides was already retaining a good-sized lake formed by the checked waters of the stream.
Starbuck and Sprague had drawn rein at the outskirts of the construction camp, and they were not molested until Sprague took a flat black box from his pocket, opened it into a camera, and was preparing to take a snap-shot of the dam. At that, a man who had been lounging in the door of the camp commissary, a dark-faced, black-bearded giant in brown duck and service leggings, crossed the camp street and threw up a hand in warning.
"Hey, there; hold on—that don't go!" he shouted gruffly, striding up to stand squarely in the way of the camera. "You can't take any pictures on this job."
"Sorry," said Sprague, giving the intruder his most amiable smile, "but you were just a half-second too late," and he closed the camera into its box-like shape and dropped it into his pocket.
The black-bearded man advanced threateningly.
"This is company property, and you are trespassers," he rasped. "Give me that camera!"
Starbuck's right hand went softly under his coat and stayed there, and his steady gray eyes took on the sleepy look that, in his range-riding days, had been a sufficient warning to those who knew him. Sprague lounged easily in his saddle and ignored the hand extended for the camera.
"You are Mr. Jennings, I take it," he said, as one who would temporize and gain time. "Fine dam you are building there."
"Give me that camera!"
Sprague met the angry eyes of the engineer and smiled back into them.
"I'll take it under consideration," he said, half-jocularly. "You'll give me a little time to think about it, won't you?"
Jennings's hand dropped to the butt of the heavy revolver sagging at his hip.
"Not a damned minute!" he barked. "Hand it over!"
Starbuck was closing up slowly on the opposite side of his companion's horse, a movement which he brought about by a steady knee pressure on the bronco's off shoulder. Jennings's fingers were closing around the grip of his pistol when the astounding thing happened. Without so much as a muscle-twitching of warning Sprague's left hand shot out, the fingers grappled an ample breast-hold on the engineer's coat and shirt-bosom, and Jennings was snapped from his feet and flung, back down, across the horn of Sprague's saddle much as if his big body had been a bag of meal. Starbuck reached over, jerked the engineer's weapon from its holster, broke it to eject the cartridges, and flung it away.
"Now you can get down," said Sprague quietly; and when he loosed the terrible clutch, Jennings slid from the saddle-horn and fell, cursing like a maniac.
"Stand still!" ordered Starbuck, when the engineer bounded to his feet and started to run toward the commissary, and the weapon that made the bidding mandatory materialized suddenly from an inner pocket of the ex-cowman's khaki riding-coat.
But the trouble, it seemed, was just fairly getting under way. Up from the embankment where the scrapers were dumping came two or three foremen armed with pick-handles. The commissary was turning out its quota of rough-looking clerks and time-keepers, and a mob of the foreign laborers—the shift off duty—came pouring out of the bunk houses and shacks.
Sprague had unlimbered and focussed his camera again and was calmly taking snap-shot after snap-shot: of the dam, of the impounded lake, of the up-coming mob, and of the black-bearded man held hands-up in the middle of the camp street. When he shut the box on the last of the exposures he turned to Starbuck with a whimsical smile wrinkling at the corners of his eyes.
"They don't seem to be very enthusiastic about keeping us here, Billy," he said, with gentle irony. "Shall we go?"
Starbuck shook the reins over the neck of his mount and the two horses wheeled as one and sprang away down the rough cart-road leading to the end of the copper-mine spur above Angels. At the retreat, some one on the commissary porch began to pump a repeating rifle in the general direction of the pair, but no harm was done.
Starbuck was the first to break the galloping silence when an intervening hill shoulder had cut off the backward view of the camp at the dam, and what he said was purely complimentary.
"You sure have got your nerve with you, and the punch to back it up," he chuckled. "I reckon I'm goin to wake up in the middle of the night laughin' at the way you snatched that rustler out of his tracks and slammed him across the saddle. I'd give a heap to be able to do a thing like that; I sure would."
"Call it a knack," rejoined Sprague modestly. "You pick up a good many of those little tricks when you're training on the squad. Perhaps you've never thought of it, but the human body is easier to handle, weight for weight, than any inanimate object could possibly be. That is one of the first things you learn in tackling on the foot-ball field."
They were jogging along slowly by this time and had passed the copper-mine switch on the road leading to the station at Angels. Starbuck was not over-curious, but the experiences of the forenoon were a little puzzling. Why had his companion wished to take the long, hard ride up the valley of the Timanyoni? And why, again, had he taken the chance of a fight for the sake of securing a few snap-shot pictures of the irrigation company's construction camp and dam? A third query hinged itself upon the decidedly inhospitable, not to say hostile, attitude of Jennings, the irrigation company's field-officer. Why should he object so strenuously to the common sight-seer's habit of kodaking anything and everything in sight?
Starbuck was turning these things over in his mind when they reached Angels. As they rode into town Sprague glanced at his watch.
"I have been wondering if we couldn't get this man Dickery at the town corral to take charge of these horses of ours until Wimberley can come and get them?" he said. "That would make it possible for us to catch the eleven-thirty train for Brewster."
Starbuck said it was quite feasible, and by the time they had disposed of the horses the train was whistling for the station. When they boarded the train, Sprague proposed that they postpone the midday meal in the diner in order to ride out on the rear platform of the observation-car.
"We'll get to town in time for a late luncheon at the hotel," was the way he put it; "and on as fine a day as this I like to ride out of doors and take in the scenery."
Starbuck acquiesced, and smiled as one well used to the scenery. Truly, the trip through the Timanyoni Canyon was one which usually brought the tourists crowding to the rear platform of the train, but until the morning of this purely sight-seeing jaunt he had been thinking that Maxwell's big friend was altogether superior to the scenic attractions.
Now, however, Sprague seemed greatly interested in the canyon passage. Again and again he called his companion's attention to the engineering difficulties which had been overcome in building the narrow pathway for the rails through the great gorge. Particularly, he dwelt upon the stupendous cost of making the pathway, and upon the temerarious courage of the engineers in adopting a grade so near, in dozens of places, to the level of the foaming torrent at the track-side.
"Yes," Starbuck agreed; "it sure did cost a heap of money. Dick says the thirty-six miles are bonded at one hundred thousand dollars a mile, and even that didn't cover the cost of construction on some of the miles."
"But why did they put the grade so close to the river level?" persisted the expert, when the foam from a mid-stream bowlder breathed a misty breath on them as the train slid past. "Isn't there constant trouble from high water?"
"No, the Timanyone's a tolerably dependable creek," was Starbuck's answer. "Summer and winter it holds its own, with nothing like the variation you find in the Mississippi Valley rivers. An eight-foot rise is the biggest they've ever recorded at the High Line dam, so J. Montague Smith tells me."
"They are fixed to take care of that much of a rise at the High Line dam, are they?" queried Sprague.
"Oh, yes; I reckon they could take a bigger one than that, if they had to. That dam is built for keeps. Williams, who was the constructing engineer, says that the dam and plant will stand when the water of the river is pouring through the second-story windows of the power-house."
"And that, you would say, would never happen?" put in the expert thoughtfully, adding, "If it should happen, your brother-in-law would have to build him a new railroad through this canyon, wouldn't he?"
"He sure would. That eight-foot rise I spoke of gave them a heap of trouble up here—washouts to burn!"
"What caused that rise—rains?"
"Rains and cloud-bursts, in the season of the melting snows. It was just as Smith was turning heaven and earth upside down to get the dam completed, and for a little spell they sure was anticipate trouble a-plenty; thought they were going to be plumb paralyzed."
"I want to meet that man Smith," said the expert, going off at a tangent, as his habit was. "Stillings, your friend the lawyer who has his offices next door to my laboratory, says he's a wonder."
"Smith is all right," was Starbuck's verdict. "He's a first-class fighting man, and he doesn't care much who knows it. He got big rich out of that High Line fight, married old Colonel Baldwin's little peach of a daughter, and is layin' off to live happy ever afterward."
From that on, the rear-platform talk had to do chiefly with Mr. J. Montague Smith and his plucky struggle with the hydro-electric trust which had tried, unsuccessfully as the event proved, to steal the High Line dam and water privilege. In due time the train shot out of the gorge, and after a dodging course among the Park hills, came to the skirting of the High Line reservoir lake lying like a silver mirror in its setting of forested buttes and spurs.
At the lower end of the lake, where the white concrete dam stretched its massive rampart across the river gorge, the train halted for a moment in obedience to an interposing block-signal. It was during the momentary stop that a handsome young fellow with the healthy tan of the hill country browning his frank, boyish face, came out of the near-by power-house, ran up the embankment and swung himself over the railing of the observation platform.
"Hello, John!" said Starbuck; and then he introduced the new-comer to his companion.
"Glad to know you, Mr. Sprague," said the young man, whose hearty hand-grip was an instant recommendation to the good graces of the big expert. "I've been hearing of you off and on all summer. It's a saying with us out here that any friend of Dick Maxwell's owns Brewster—or as much of it as he cares to make use of."
"I have certainly been finding it that way, Mr. Smith," Sprague rejoined, in grateful recognition of the Brewster hospitality. And then: "We were just talking about you and your dam as we came along, Starbuck and I. You have a pretty good head of water on, haven't you?"
"An unusually good head for this time of the year. The heavy storms we have been having in the eastern foot-hills account for it. Our power plant is working at normal load, and our ranchmen are all using water liberally in their late irrigating, and yet you see the quantity that is going over the splash-boards."
"Yes, I see," observed Sprague thoughtfully. And when the train began to move onward: "With this big reservoir behind you, I suppose a sudden flood couldn't hurt you, Mr. Smith?"
The young man with the healthy tan on his clean-cut face promptly showed his good business sense.
"We think we have a comfortably safe installation, but we are not specially anxious to try it out merely for the satisfaction of seeing how much it would stand," was the conservative reply.
Sprague looked up curiously from his solid planting in the biggest of the platform folding-chairs.
"And yet, three days ago, Mr. Smith, you said, in the presence of witnesses, that a ten-foot rise wouldn't endanger your dam or your power plant," he put in shrewdly.
Mr. J. Montague Smith, secretary and treasurer of the Timanyoni High Line Company, was plainly taken unawares.
"How the dev—" he began; and then he tried again. "Pardon me, Mr. Sprague; you hit me when I wasn't looking for it. I believe I did say something like that; in fact, I've said similar things a good many times."
"But not in exact feet and inches, I hope," said Sprague, with a show of mild concern. "These exactnesses are what murder us, Mr. Smith. Now, I presume if somebody should come to you to-day and threaten to turn another ten feet of river on you, you'd object, wouldn't you?"
"We certainly should—object most strenuously!"
"Yet, if that person were so minded, he might quote you as having said that ten additional feet wouldn't hurt you."
The young treasurer laughed a trifle uneasily.
"I can't believe that anybody would make a bit of well-meant boasting like that an excuse for—but it's altogether absurd, you know. Your case is unsupposable. Nobody pushes the button for the rains or the cloud-burst storms. When you introduce me to the fellow who really has the making of the weather in the Timanyoni head-waters, I'll be very careful what I say to him."
"Just so," said the expert quietly; and then a long-continued blast of the locomotive whistle announced the approach to Brewster.
Sprague took leave of his latest acquaintance at the station entrance, where a trim, high-powered motor-car, driven by an exceedingly pretty young woman in leather cap, gauntlets, and driving-coat, was waiting for Smith.
"I am a soil expert, as you may have heard, Mr. Smith," he said at parting, "and I am interested at the moment in alluvial washes—the detritus brought down from the high lands by the rivers. One of these days I may call upon you for a little information and help. "
"Command me," said the young financier, with another of the hearty hand-grips; and then he climbed in beside the pretty young woman and was driven away.
Sprague was unusually silent during the tardy luncheon shared with Starbuck in the Topaz café; and Starbuck, who never had much to say unless he was pointedly invited, was correspondingly speechless. Afterward, with a word of caution to his table companion not to mention the morning's adventure to any one, Sprague went to his laboratory, to test the specimens of soil gathered on the Mesquite mesa, Starbuck supposed.
But the supposition was wrong. What Mr. Calvin Sprague busied himself with during the afternoon was the careful developing of the film taken from his pocket camera, and the printing of several sets of pictures therefrom. These prints he placed in his pocket note-book, and the book and its enclosures went with him when, after the evening meal, at which he had somehow missed both Maxwell and Starbuck, he climbed the three flights of stairs in the Tribune Building and presented himself at the door of Editor Kendall's den.
Kendall was glad to see him, or at least he said he was, and, waving him to a chair at the desk end, produced a box of rather dubious-looking, curiously twisted cigars, at which the visitor shook his head despondently.
"You'd say I was the picture of health, wouldn't you, Kendall, and you wouldn't believe me if I were to tell you that I am smoking a great deal too much?" he said, with a quizzical smile that was on the verge of turning into a grin.
The editor was not fooled; as a matter of fact, it was an exceedingly difficult matter to fool the tired-eyed tyrant of The Tribune editorial rooms.
"Cut it out," he said, with his mirthless laugh. "You wouldn't expect to find fifty-cent Rienas in a newspaper shop—any more than I'd expect you to climb up here with a news story for me. Smoke your own cigars, and be damned to you." And in sheer defiance he lighted one of his own dubious monstrosities, while Sprague was chuckling and passing his pocket-case of fat black Maduros.
"You say, any more than you'd expect a news story. Perhaps I have a news story for you. Cast your eye over these," and he threw out the bunch of lately made photographs.
The editor went over the collection carefully, and at the end of the inspection said, "Well, what's the answer?"
"The construction camp of the Mesquite Land and Irrigation Company at about half-past ten this forenoon. The held-up man is Mr. Engineer Jennings, posed by Billy Starbuck, who was kindly holding a gun on him for me. The people running are Jennings's workmen, coming to help him obliterate us. The water is the irrigation lake; the heap of dirt is the dam."
"Still, I don't quite grasp the news value," said Kendall doubtfully. "Why should Jennings wish to obliterate you?"
"Because I was taking pictures on his job. He was unreasonable enough to demand my camera, and to make the sham bad man's break of handling his gun without pulling it on me."
The editor studied the pictures long and thoughtfully.
"You've got something up your sleeve, Mr. Sprague; what is it?" he asked, after the considering pause.
Sprague drew his chair closer; and for five minutes the city editor, who had come in for a word with his superior, forbore to break in upon the low-toned earnest conference which was going on at the managing-editor's desk. At the end of it, however, he heard Kendall say, "I'll get Monty Smith on the wire, and if he coincides with you, we'll take a hand in this. I more than half believe you're right, but you'll admit that it sounds rather incredible. The Tribune's motto is 'All the news that is news.' but we don't want to be classed among the 'yellows.’"
"You run no risk in the present instance," was Sprague's confident assurance. "Of course, there is no direct evidence; if there were, the case would be promptly taken to the courts. As a matter of fact, I'm hoping that Mr. Smith will take it to the courts as it stands. But in any event, an appeal to the public will do no harm."
"All right; we'll see what Smith says," said Kendall; and then the patient city editor had his inning.
Leaving the Tribune Building, the chemistry expert went to the nearest telephone and called for the house number of Mr. Robert Stillings, the attorney who served locally for the railroad company and was also counsel for the High Line people. Happily, it was the young lawyer himself who answered the 'phone.
"This is Sprague," said the down-town caller. "How busy are you this evening?"
The answer was apparently satisfactory, since the big man went on: "All right; I wish you would arrange to meet me in the lobby of the Topaz. Catch the next car if it won't hurry you too much. You'll do it? Thank you. Good-by."
Fifteen minutes later the Government man, writing a letter at one of the desks in the hotel lobby, looked up to greet his summoned visitor, a keen-eyed, self-contained young man whose reputation as a fearless fighter in just causes was already spreading from the little inter-mountain city of his adoption and becoming State-wide.
"I'm here," said Stillings briefly; and Sprague rose and drew him aside into one of the alcoves.
For some little time after they had drawn their chairs together, Sprague held the floor, talking earnestly and exhibiting a set of the snap-shot pictures. Stillings listened attentively, examining the pictures by the aid of a small pocket magnifier. But when Sprague finished he was shaking his head doubtfully, unconsciously following the example set by The Tribune editor.
"We have nothing definite to go on, Mr. Sprague, as you yourself admit. These people are well within their legal rights. As you probably know, there is no statutory provision in this State requiring the builders of a dam to conform to any particular plan of construction; and, as a matter of fact, there are dozens of dams just like this one—mere earth embankments without masonry of any kind."
"Do you mean to say that the safety of the entire Timanyoni Valley can be endangered by a structure like this, and that the property owners who are imperilled have no legal recourse?" demanded the expert.
"Recourse, yes; plenty of it after the fact. If the dam should give way and cause damage, the irrigation company would be liable."
"Humph!" snorted the big-bodied one, half-contemptuously. "Law is one of the few things that I have never dabbled in. What you say amounts to this: if I find a man training a cannon on my house, I have no right to stop him; I can only try to collect damages after the gun has gone off and ripped a hole through my property. I could make a better law than that myself!"
Stillings was staring thoughtfully through the opposite window at the lights in the railroad building across the plaza.
"There are times, Mr. Sprague, when we all feel that way; crises which seem to call for something in the way of extra-judicial proceedings," he admitted. And then: "Have you told Maxwell about this?"
"Not specifically. Dick has troubles of his own just now; he has had enough of them this summer to turn his hair gray, as you know. I have been hoping that this latest move of the enemy could be blocked without dragging him into it."
Stillings turned quickly. "That is the frankest thing you've said this evening. Is it another move of the enemy—the New Yorkers?"
Sprague spread his hands and his big shoulders went up in a shrug.
"You have just as much incriminating evidence as I have. How does it strike you?"
The attorney shook his head in doubtful incredulity, again unconsciously following Editor Kendall's lead.
"It doesn't seem possible!" he protested. "Think of the tremendous consequences involved—outside of the crippling of the railroad. The Short Line wouldn't be the only sufferer in case of a dam-break in the Mesquite. The entire valley would be flood-swept, and our High Line dam—" he stopped abruptly and half-rose to his feet. "Good Lord, Sprague! the breaking of the High Line dam would mean death and destruction without end!"
Sprague had found a cigar in an overlooked pocket and was calmly lighting it. Though he did not tell Stillings so, the argument had finally gotten around into the field toward which he had been pushing it from the first.
"Three days ago, your High Line treasurer, Mr. J. Montague Smith, declared in the presence of witnesses—it was right here in this hotel lobby, and I happened to overhear it—that a ten-foot rise in the river, which, as you know, would sub- merge and sweep away miles of the railroad track in the canyon, would by no means endanger his dam. There you are, Mr. Stillings. Now fish or cut bait."
"Great Scott! what could Smith have been thinking of!" ejaculated the lawyer.
"It was merely a bit of loyal brag, as he admitted to Starbuck and me on the train this afternoon; and it had been craftily provoked by one of the men who heard it. But he said it, and what is more, he said it to—Jennings!"
This time the attorney's start carried him out of his chair and stood him upon his feet
"I shall have to see Smith at once," he said hurriedly. "Still, I can't believe that these New York stock pirates would authorize any such murderous thing as this!"
"Authorize murder or violence? Of course not; big business never does that. What it does is to put a man into the field, telling him in general terms the end that is to be accomplished. The head pushers would turn blue under their finger-nails if you'd charge them with murder."
"But that is what this would amount to—cold-blooded murder!"
"Hold on a minute," objected Sprague. "Let's apply a little scientific reasoning. Suppose this thing has been accurately figured out, engineering-wise. Suppose that, by careful computation, it has been found that a certain quantity of water, turned loose at the mouth of Mesquite Valley, would produce a flood of a certain height in the full length of Timanyoni Canyon—say ten or twelve feet—sufficient to obliterate thirty-five or forty miles of the railroad track. Below its path of the greatest destruction it comes out into your High Line reservoir lake, with some miles farther to go, and a greatly enlarged area over which to diffuse itself."
Stillings was nodding intelligence. "I am beginning to see," he said. "Ten feet in the canyon wouldn't necessarily mean ten feet at Smith's dam."
"No; but at the same time Smith is on record as having said that ten feet wouldn't endanger his dam or the power plant. So there you are again."
Stillings walked the length of the alcove twice with his head down and his hands in his pockets before he stopped in front of the expert to say: "You've half-convinced me, Mr. Sprague. If we could get the barest shred of evidence that these people are building a dam which isn't intended to hold——"
"There spoke the lawyer again," laughed Sprague. "If you had the evidence, what would you do?"
"Institute legal proceedings at once."
"And how long would it take you to get action?"
"Oh, that would depend upon the nature of the evidence I had to offer, of course."
Sprague laughed again, derisively this time.
"Yes, I thought so; and while you were getting out your writs and monkeying around—do you know what that piece of canyon track cost, Mr. Stillings? I was told to-day that three million dollars wouldn't replace it—to say nothing of what it would mean to the railroad company to have its through line put out of business indefinitely. No; if we mean to——"
The interruption was the intrusion into the alcove of a huge-framed, hard-faced man who was fumbling in his pocket for a paper.
"Hello, Harding," said Stillings; and then, jokingly: "What brings the respected sheriff of Timanyoni County charging in upon us at this time of night?"
"It's a warrant," said the sheriff, half in apology. And then to Sprague: "I hate like the mischief to trouble you, Mr. Sprague, but duty's duty."
Sprague smiled up at the big man. "Tell us about it, Mr. Harding. You needn't bother to read the warrant."
"It's that scrap you had with Jennings up at the Mesquite this morning. He's swore out a warrant against you for assault and battery."
"And are you going to lock me up over night? I fancy that is what he would like to have you do."
"Not me," said the sheriff good-naturedly. "I got Judge MacFarland out o' bed and made him come down to his office. I'm goin' to ask you to walk around there with me, just to let me out of it whole. I've fixed it with the judge so you won't have to give bail."
"I'll go with you," Stillings offered; and a few minutes later, in the magistrate's office, the Government man had bound himself on his own recognizance to appear in court the next morning to answer the charge against him.
On the sidewalk in front of the justice shop, Stillings reverted to the more pressing matter.
"I'm going to see Smith before I sleep, if I have to drive out to the Baldwin ranch to find him," he declared. "In the meantime, Mr. Sprague, if you can devise any scheme by which we can get a legal hold on these fellows—anything that will serve as an excuse for our asking that an injunction be issued——"
"That would come before Judge Watson, wouldn't it?" Sprague broke in.
"Yes."
"See Kendall, of The Tribune, about that. From what he told me a couple of hours ago, I should say that your petition for an injunction would be only a crude loss of time. We'll try to think of a better way, or at least a more effective way. Good-night; and don't omit to throw the gaff into Smith, good and hard."
On the morning following Sprague's visit to The Tribune editorial rooms, the newspaper-reading public of Brewster had a small sensation served, in Starbuck's phrase, "hot from the skillet." A good portion of the front page of The Tribune was given to a news story of the work which was under way in the Mesquite Valley, and pictures were printed of the camp, the dam, and the growing lake.
On the editorial page there was a caustic arraignment of the Mesquite Company, which was called upon to show cause why it should not be condemned as a public nuisance of a kind which had already brought much reproach upon the West as a field for legitimate investment, and the suggestion was made that a committee of responsible citizens be sent to investigate the Mesquite project, to the end that the charges made might be either substantiated or set aside.
Specifically, these charges were that there was no arable land within reach of the Mesquite dam, and that the dam itself was unsafe. Throughout his editorial Kendall had judiciously refrained from making any mention of a possible disaster to the railroad; but he hinted broadly at the danger to which the High Line dam—the source of the city's power and lights—would be subjected in the event of a flood catastrophe on the distant project.
Maxwell, who was living at the hotel in the absence of his family, had read the paper before he came down to join Sprague at the breakfast-table, and, like every other newspaper reader in Brewster that morning, he was full of the latest sensation.
"By George, Calvin," he began, "somebody has been stirring up the mud for those people we were talking about night before last. Have you seen The Tribune?"
Sprague nodded assent.
"What do you make of it?" asked the railroad man
I should say that somebody—possibly the High Line management—is beginning to sit up and take notice, wouldn't you?"
"Y-yes; but see here—any such thing as Kendall hints at would knock the Nevada Short Line out long before it would get to the High Line dam!"
"Naturally," said Sprague coolly.
"Great Jehu! was that what you meant when you were making me dig this Mesquite project over for you the other day?"
"I didn't want to drag you into it, and don't yet," said Sprague quietly. "You've had grief enough for one summer. But the detective half of me tells me that there is little doubt that this thing is another attempt on the part of the big-money crowd to side-swipe your railroad off the map. It can be done, and you have no preventive recourse; Stillings says you haven't."
"But, Calvin—something's got to be done! Are we going to sit still and——"
"One kind of a something is doing itself, right now," interrupted Sprague. "It's your play, this time, to keep out of it, if you can. You'd say that the High Line people, J. Montague Smith and his crowd, inspired that blast in The Tribune this morning, wouldn't you?"
"It looks that way, yes."
"Well, let them stir up the mud and make the fight. You sit tight in the boat and say nothing. What kind of an agent or operator have you at Angels?"
"Disbrow?—he's a good man; so good that I'm going to promote him to a better station next week."
"Let that promotion wait a while. Give this good man instructions to watch every move that Jennings makes, and to report at once anything out of the ordinary that may happen. Do you get that?"
"I'll do it. Anything else?"
"No, not at present. Later on, say after the evening edition of The Times-Record comes out, I may want to get you on a quick wire. But the chief thing just now is to post the Angels man, and to have him keep in touch with you."
After Maxwell had gone the chemistry expert finished his breakfast with epicurean leisure, smoked a reflective cigar in comfortable solitude in the hotel lobby, and, when the court hour arrived, went around to the office of the justice of the peace to answer to the charge of assault. As was to be expected, Jennings was not present; was not even represented by an attorney. Sprague pleaded guilty and paid his nominal fine, which MacFarland took with a quiet smile.
"I don't know what you did to that black-faced bully, Mr. Sprague, but I hope you got your money's worth," he said. "Every time he turns up here in Brewster he proves himself an undesirable citizen, right from the word go."
"Tough, is he?" queried Sprague.
"As tough as they make them. I wonder he didn't try to get square with you with a gun. That would be more like him."
"Perhaps he will, later on," suggested the fined one, with a good-natured smile; after which he went across to his laboratory and was invisible for the remainder of the morning.
Just before noon Stillings dropped into the laboratory office. He found the chemist working among his retorts and test-tubes.
"I fell in to give you a pointer," was the attorney's excuse for the intrusion. "Jennings is in town. He came over on the ten-o'clock local and went straight to The Times-Record office."
Sprague grinned. "You were looking out for him, were you? Somebody got waked up at last?"
"Yes; the High Line people are on, all right," was the reply. "Smith called an emergency meeting of his directors early this morning. Two of them are Red Desert cattle barons, and they know the Mesquite situation like a book. What none of them can understand is the 'why'; why the Mesquite outfit should take ninety-nine chances in a hundred of sending a flood down the Timanyoni when there is no money to be made by it."
"What action did the directors' meeting take?"
"Instructed me to feel Judge Watson on the question of holding things up with an injunction. I did it, and it turned out as you intimated it would; nothing doing. Smith asked me to borrow Maxwell's special officer, Arch Tarbell, suggesting that we ought to keep in touch with Jennings. Archer was going over to Angels on the afternoon train, but Jennings has saved him the trouble by coming to town."
"Well, what next?" Sprague inquired.
"That is just what I'd like to ask you," was the lawyer's frank admission. "We're all looking to you to set the pace. You're the one man with the holy gift of initiative, Mr. Sprague. You haven't admitted it in so many words, but I know as well as I know anything that you are the man who started this newspaper talk."
"Pshaw!" said the expert, in genial raillery; "I'm only a Government chemist, Mr. Stillings."
"That's all right, too; but that isn't why the railroad men call you 'Scientific Sprague.' Four times this summer you've dug Maxwell and his railroad out of a hole when the rest of us didn't know there was any hole. What I'm most afraid of now is that Jennings will put up some sort of a scheme to get you out of the way. He knows well enough by this time that you are the key to his situation."
"I'm a tenderfoot," said the big man, with naive irony. "What would you suggest?"
"That you go to Sheriff Harding and get him to swear you in as a special deputy. Then you can be prepared to defend yourself."
Sprague's mellow laugh rumbled deep in his big body.
"I guess I can take care of myself, if it comes to that, without 'packing hardware,' as Starbuck would put it," he averred. "There won't be more than three or four of them to tackle me at once, will there? But about your campaign—I have been hoping that the High Line people, backed by public sentiment, would be able to head this thing off. I am still hoping it. It will be altogether better if the railroad doesn't have to take a hand on its own account. The New Yorkers would be sure to make capital out of it, holding the Ford-Maxwell management up to public execration as a corporation which deliberately strangles development propositions in its own territory."
"That's a fact," the attorney agreed.
"Working along that line, we can afford to wait, for a little while at least, to see how the cat is going to jump. Jennings is over here to get into the newspaper fight himself. In Maxwell's demoralization tussle of two weeks ago, it was demonstrated that The Times-Record had been subsidized by the enemy. Now we shall see Higginson and his editor jump in and take up the clubs in defence of the Mesquite Company."
"I guess that is pretty good advice—to wait," said Stillings. "But we have an active crowd in the High Line, and its blood is up. Our people will want to be doing something while they wait."
"Let them talk," said Sprague quickly. "Tell them to resolve themselves into committees of one to throw the big scare into the Brewster public which depends upon the safety of the High Line dam for its own safety. Then pick out a few good, dependable men like Smith, his old fighting father-in-law the colonel, and Williams the engineer, who will hold themselves in readiness to start at a moment's notice, night or day, for the firing line—any firing line that may happen to show up."
"That is more like it," rejoined the attorney, "I'm sworn to uphold the majesty of the law, but——"
"But, as you remarked last night, there are extra-judicial crises now and then which have to be met in any old way that offers. Let it rest at that, and see me at the hotel this evening, if you can make it convenient."
With the appearance on the streets of the evening edition of The Times-Record, the Brewster public learned that there were two sides to the Mesquite question. In terms of unmeasured scorn Editor Healy attacked the narrow prejudice which would seek to place stumbling-blocks in the way of a great enterprise designed to benefit, not only the region locally concerned, but the entire West.
In the course of a long and vituperative editorial, the High Line company, the Brewster public-service corporations, and the railroad, each came in for its share of accusation, and their joint lack of public spirit was roundly condemned. It was pointed out that the High Line plant, by the admission of its own officials, would be in no danger even in the unsupposable case of the breaking of the Mesquite dam. Also, it was urged that the penny-wise policy of the railroad in adopting the low grade in Timanyoni Canyon was a matter of its own risk. Was the development of the nation to be halted, it was asked, because a niggardly railroad company was unwilling to spend a little money in raising its grade beyond a possible danger line?
But the sting of the editorial for Maxwell was in its tail. Healy concluded by darkly hinting that certain of the railroad officials were interested financially in sundry Timanyoni Park lands owned by the High Line Company, and that they were willing to kill the prospects of the new district for the sake of their own pockets.
Maxwell was furiously hot about this blast in the evening paper, as his demeanor at the dinner-table, where he spoke his mind freely to Sprague, sufficiently proved.
"Why, the miserable liars!" he raged. "There isn't an official on the Short Line from President Ford down who owns a single share of stock in the High Line! We all did help out at first, but Ford made every man of us turn loose the minute the dam was completed and the project was securely on its feet. He insisted that we couldn't afford to work for two dividend accounts!"
"He was quite right," said Sprague calmly. "But that is neither here nor there. It was Jennings's turn at bat and he took it. Let it go, and tell me what you hear from that good and reliable man, Disbrow, at Angels."
"I had him on the wire myself, just a few minutes ago," was the superintendent's answer. "He says something has stirred things up over on the Mesquite. They're working night shifts—began last night."
"Rain?" queried the expert.
"How the devil do you manage to jump at things that way?" demanded Maxwell, half-irritably. "Yes; there have been cloud-bursts in the eastern foot-hills. The river rose two feet to-day."
"Ah? That may bring on more talk—before the stenographers are ready to take it down. Any more items from Angels?"
"Nothing special. The Mesquite people got half a carload of dynamite this morning. That shows you how careful Disbrow is; he is spotting everything—even the common routine things."
"Um; dynamite, eh? What use has Jennings for so much high explosive as that?"
"I don't know; uses it in excavating, I suppose. The more he uses, the bigger his rake-off from the powder company. Where there's a big graft, there are always a lot of little ones."
Sprague ate in silence for five full minutes before he said, quite without preliminary: "How long would it take a light special train to run from Brewster to Angels, with a clear track and regardless orders, Dick?"
"I made it once in my own car in two hours and fifty-five minutes, with two stops for water. Why?"
"Oh, I was just curious to know. Two fifty-five, eh? And how long would it take to get the special train ready?"
"Fifteen or twenty minutes, perhaps, on a rush order."
Sprague sat back and began to fold his napkin carefully in the original creases.
"As I have said before, I don't want to pose as an alarmist, Maxwell; but if I were you, I'd have that special train hooked up and ready to pull out—and I'd keep it that way, on tap, so to speak."
The railroad man rose to the occasion promptly.
"Beginning to-night?" he asked.
"Yes, beginning to-night."
"Has Jennings gone back?"
"He has. He went over on the evening train. Your man Tarbell kept cases on him while he was here. He spent most of the day with Higginson and Healy in The Times-Record office."
Maxwell refused his dessert and ordered a second cup of black coffee.
"This suspense is something fierce, Calvin," he said, when the waiter left them. "Have we got to sit still and do nothing?"
"That is your part in it," was the quiet reply. "If a party of prominent citizens should call upon you for a special train at some odd hour of the day or night, you want to be ready to supply it suddenly. Aside from that, you are to keep hands off."
For forty-eight hours beyond this evening dinner in the Topaz café—two days during which the railroad agent at Angels reported increased activities at the Mesquite dam—the newspaper wrangle over the merits and demerits of the irrigation project in the edge of the Red Desert went on with growing acrimony on both sides. But by the end of the second day it was apparent that The Tribune had public sentiment with it almost unanimously.
It was also on this second day that further bitterness was engendered by a street report that Judge Watson had enjoined the High Line Company from interfering in any way with the operations on the Mesquite. This was the last straw, and public indignation found expression that night in a monster mass meeting of protest, in which the speakers, with J. Montague Smith to set them the example, criticised the court sharply in free Western phrase.
After the meeting, adopting all sorts of resolutions condemnatory of everything in sight, adjourned—which was between nine and ten o'clock —there was a street rumor to the effect that Judge Watson would declare some of the speakers in contempt, and cinch them accordingly.
Maxwell and Starbuck brought this report to Sprague, who was smoking one of his big, black cigars on the porch of the hotel.
"Going to institute contempt proceedings, is he?" said the expert, with interest apparently only half-aroused.
"Wouldn't that jar you?" commented Starbuck. "I was telling Dick just now that Judge Watson has about outlived his usefulness in this little old shack town. This injunction of his is about the rawest thing that ever came over the range."
"Smith is red-hot," Maxwell put in; "hot enough to get out and scrap somebody. And his directors are all with him."
Still the big-bodied expert seemed only mildly interested.
"If anybody should happen to get mixed up legally with the Mesquite folks on this job of theirs, it would be pretty hard to get a jury in Brewster which would lean the way the judge does, wouldn't it?" he asked.
Maxwell's verdict was unqualified. "It would be practically impossible." He had found his pipe and was filling it when Sprague pointed to the spur track at the end of the railroad building opposite.
"Is that your special train over there, Dick?"
"Yes. You see I've obeyed orders. That train has been standing there for two days, with three shifts of men dividing up the watch in the engine cab."
"And the committee of prominent citizens hasn't yet materialized, eh? Never mind; you've done your part. What is the latest from Angels?"
"More cloud-bursts in the hills, and more activity up on the Mesquite. Disbrow says that Jennings has been offering all sorts of big pay to the scattered ranchmen to get them to come on the job with scraper-teams."
"That's bad," said the chemistry man briefly; adding, "I don't like that."
Starbuck got up to stand with his back to a porch pillar. From the new position he could look through the windows into the thronged hotel lobby.
"This town's stirred up some hotter than I've ever seen it before," he drawled. "Look at that mob inside—and every blame' man of it chewing the rag over this water proposition."
"I don't like that," Sprague repeated, thus proving that he had entirely missed Starbuck's comment on the excitement. Then he sat up suddenly. "There's a boy just coming down from your offices, Maxwell; it's the night watchman's boy, isn't it? Run across and head him, Starbuck; I believe that's a telegram he has in his hand."
Starbuck swung himself over the railing and caught the lad before he could disappear in the street throngs.
"You were plumb right," he said, when he came back to take his place on the porch. "He did have a message; it's for Dick. Here you are."
Maxwell tore the envelope across and held the telegram up to the ceiling light.
"Here's news," he announced. "It's from our man at Angels. He says: 'Jennings's force disbanded, and most of it gone east on Limited. Been shipping teams and outfit all afternoon. Too busy to wire sooner.’" The superintendent crumpled the telegram and smote fist into palm. "Bully for you, Sprague!" he exulted. "You pushed the right button just right! Jennings couldn't stand the pressure; he's given up the job and quit!"
There was no answering enthusiasm on the part of the big man who rose suddenly out of his chair and reached for the telegram. Quite the contrary, the hand which took the crumpled bit of paper was trembling a little.
"Dick," he began, in his deepest chest tone, "you hike over to the despatcher's office on the dead run and have Connolly clear for that special train. Don't lose a minute! Starbuck, it's up to you to find Smith, Tarbell, Williams, Colonel Baldwin, and two or three more good men whom you can trust—trust absolutely, mind you. Herd your crowd at the station in the quickest possible time; and you, Maxwell, make it your first business to tell the agent at Angels that there is a special train coming over the road. Don't tell him its destination; just say it will leave Brewster, going east, in a few minutes. Don't slip up on that—it may mean a dozen human lives! Get busy, both of you!"
After he was left alone, Sprague shouldered a path through the crowd in the lobby and had himself lifted to his rooms. When he came down a few minutes later he had changed his business clothes for the field rig which he wore on his soil-collecting expeditions. He had scarcely worked his way through the throng to the comparative freedom of the porch when Maxwell came hurrying across from the railroad building.
"Bad luck," said the superintendent, with brittle emphasis. "There's a freight-train off the steel half-way between Corona and Timanyoni, this side of the canyon, and the track is blocked."
"And we can't get by? There is nothing on the other side of the wreck that you could order down to meet us at the block?"
"Nothing nearer than Angels. There is an eastbound freight held there, loading the last of Jennings's outfit. To order the engine back from that would add at least an hour and a half to the two-hour-and-fifty-minute running schedule I gave you the other day."
Sprague swore out of a full heart, which, since he was the least profane of men, was an accurate measure of his growing disquietude.
"That's on me!" he grated. "I had it all figured out to the tenth decimal place, and I didn't put in the factor of chance! Dick, I want the biggest automobile in this town, and the one man among all your thousands who is least afraid to drive it."
Maxwell was able to answer without hesitation. "The car will be Colonel Baldwin's big 'six,' with Starbuck for your reckless chauffeur. But I doubt if you can get over the range in anything that goes on wheels." Then he added: "What is it, Calvin? What have you figured out?"
Sprague ignored the anxious query and spoke only to the fact.
"Can't get over the range? I tell you, we've got to get over the range! Good Lord! why in Heaven's name doesn't Starbuck hurry?"
Starbuck had hurried. He had looked to find most, if not all, of the men he had been told to summon, closeted in conference with Stillings, and his guess had gone true to the mark. Only Tarbell was missing, and him they picked up in front of The Tribune office as they were hurrying to the rendezvous in the colonel's big touring-car.
Maxwell saw the car as it came under the corner electrics. "There's a little luck, anyway!" he exclaimed. "That is the Colonel's car, now, and Billy is driving it."
"Tools and arms; half a dozen picks and shovels, and anything you can find that will shoot," commanded Sprague, vaulting the porch railing to the sidewalk as easily as Starbuck had vaulted it a little while before. "See to that part of the outfit yourself, Dick, while I'm looking after the human end of it."
One minute afterward the big man was standing beside the touring-car which had been drawn up at the town-side platform of the railroad building. Sprague shot the emergency at the five men in the car in bullet-like sentences.
"Gentlemen, we've got to get over to the Mesquite as quick as the Lord'll let us. The railroad is blocked, and it's an auto or nothing. Maxwell says we can't do it. I say we've got to do it. What do you say?"
"I reckon we can do it," drawled Starbuck, speaking for all. Then he turned to Smith, who was in the tonneau. "How about the tanks, Monty?"
"I filled them to-night, before we left the ranch," said the High Line treasurer. "Also, there is an extra gallon of oil aboard—we always carry it."
"How about it, colonel?" Sprague demanded of the erect, white-mustached old man in the back seat.
"Sure!" was the quick reply. "You haven't told us yet whether it's a fight or a frolic, but we're all with you, either way, Mr. Sprague. Hop in, and we'll be jogging along."
It was at this moment that Maxwell, followed by a couple of yard men, came up. The men were carrying the picks and shovels, which were hastily stowed in the car, and the superintendent handed over a small arsenal of weapons, three of them being sawed-off Winchesters.
"I had to raid the express office," he explained, "and I took what I could find." Then to Sprague, who had mounted to the seat beside Starbuck. "Don't you want me along?"
"No; you can do a great deal more good right here. Listen, now, and follow my directions to the letter. Go upstairs to the wire and get in touch with your man at Angels. It will be your job to keep him in doubt as to what is on the road between his station and the lower end of the canyon. Lie to him if you have to; tell him a part of the wrecked freight is on its way up the canyon, or something of that sort, and keep him believing it as long as you possibly can. Don't fall down on it! Everything depends now upon the length of time you can keep some such story as that going over the wires."
Starbuck had adjusted a pair of goggles to his eyes, and had his foot on the clutch-pedal. "All set?" he asked.
"Go!" said Sprague; and at the word the big car shot away from the platform, rounded the end of the plaza, and bore away through a cross street to the eastward, gathering headway until, when the city limits were passed, its cut-out exhausts were blending in a deafening roar.
Sprague was the only member of the party who had not at some time in the past had experience with Starbuck's driving. But before the first ten-mile lap on the mesa road had been covered he, too, had had his initiation. There was a little lamp on the dash which poured its tiny ray on the dial of the speedometer. Sprague saw the index pointer go up to thirty-five, jump to forty, crawl steadily onward until it had passed the forty-five and was mounting to the fifty. After that he saw no more, for the simple reason that he was obliged to close his unprotected eyes against the hurricane speed blast. The big man from Washington had asked for the fastest car in Brewster and for a man who was not afraid to drive it. He had got both.
At the same time, alarming as the pace might seem, Starbuck was not taking any needless chances. He knew his road, and knew also that there were many miles of it among the mountains that would have to be taken at slower speed. None the less, when the long mesa stretch was covered, and the big car was making zigzags up the precipitous slopes of Mount Cornell to reach the gap called Navajo Notch, the pace was still terrific, and the sober-faced driver was leaning over his wheel and pushing the motor like a true speed-maniac.
There was an hour of this risky zigzagging, and then the pass, lying cold and grim in the half moonlight at altitude ten thousand feet, was reached and threaded. Following the summit-gaining came the down-mountain rush on the eastern slope, and again Sprague closed his eyes, confessing inwardly that the steadiest nerve may have its limitations. With precipices shooting skyward on the right, and plunging sheer to unknown depths on the left, and with a man at the wheel who had apparently hypnotized himself until he had become a mere machine driving a machine——
When Sprague opened his eyes the great car was once more on an even keel and its wheels were spurning the hard red sand of the desert. In the far distance ahead a light was twinkling, the lamp in the station office at Angels. Sprague spoke to the iron-nerved driver at his side.
"Hold on, Billy; can you make the remainder of the run without the lamps?"
Starbuck brought the big machine to a stand, and leaned over and extinguished the lights. A little later, under Sprague's directions, he was making a silent circuit of the town, with the muffler in and the engine speeded at its quietest.
Since it was far past midnight, the better part of Angels was abed and asleep, with lights showing only at the railroad station and in Pete Grim's dance-hall, where, arguing from the row of hitched horses, a round-up of Red Desert cowboys made merry. Sprague stopped the car by a sign to Starbuck and turned to Tarbell.
"Get out, Archer, and make a quick run over to the station. I want to know what's going on in Disbrow's office."
Tarbell made the reconnoissance and was back in a few minutes.
"Disbrow is at his wire, with a man walkin' the floor behind him; and there's a piebald bronc' hitched out beyond the freight shed," was the brief report.
"Who is the floor-walker?" asked Sprague.
"I couldn't get a fair squint at him, but he looked mightily like the fellow I been keepin' cases on for the last two or three days."
"Gentlemen, we're in luck, for once," Sprague said impressively. "That's Jennings, without doubt; and he is waiting for a wire—the right kind of a wire—to come from Brewster. You remember what I told Maxwell, as we were leaving? That was one time when a guess was as good as a prophecy. Go on, Billy, and head straight for the Mesquite. And you gentlemen back there, get your weapons ready. If there happens to be a guard at the dam, we'll have to rush it."
Singularly enough, when the short run was accomplished they found that there was no guard. The shack camp was deserted, with all the disorder of a hasty evacuation strewn broadcast. But in the valley itself there was a startling change. The lake, which, three days earlier, had reached only half-way up the earth embankment, was now lapping within a foot of the dam top, the result of the continued storms and cloud-bursts reported by the Brewster weather station.
Starbuck eased the big car up to the dam head, and Williams and Tarbell made a quick quartering of the deserted camp. "Nobody here," the engineer reported, when they came back to the car; and then Sprague asked Starbuck to relight the head-lamps.
With the acetylenes flinging their broad white beam across the earthwork, another change was made apparent. In the centre of the dam a square pit, plank-lined like the shaft of a mine, had been either sunk or left in the building. Over this pit stood a three-legged hoist, with the block-and-tackle still hanging from its apex.
"What is that thing out there?" queried the colonel, shading his eyes with his hand.
"Jennings would probably tell you that it is a new kind of spillway, by which, in case of need, the reservoir lake can be emptied," suggested Sprague. "But we haven't time to investigate it just now. Our job at the present moment is to take the law into our hands and empty this lake, and to do it, if we can, without bringing on the catastrophe it was designed to accomplish."
"Heavens!" ejaculated Colonel Baldwin. "That's a criminal offence, isn't it?—and in the face of Judge Watson's injunction, at that!"
"It is criminal," was the calm reply; "unless we shall find sufficient justification for it as we go along. There is one chance in a dozen that we may find it first. Tarbell, take this little flash-light of mine and skip out there and look into that pit."
Tarbell paused scarcely a moment at the mouth of the mid-dam shaft. "It's filled up to within a few feet of the top with dirt," he said, when he returned.
"That is what I expected. We might find another warrant for what we are about to do, but we haven't time to search for it. Jennings may come back at any minute, and if he suspects anything wrong, he'll bring that bunch of dance-hall cowmen with him. If you'd like to hide the car and stand aside to see what he will do when he comes——"
"By Jove! I'm with you, injunction or no injunction!" cried Smith, and he began to take the picks and shovels out of the car.
"Go to it," said the colonel; and Sprague turned to Williams.
"Mr. Williams, you're an engineer. Our problem is to drain this lake in the shortest possible time in which it can be done without raising a dangerous flood-level in the Timanyoni River. We're under your orders."
Williams took the job as a dog snaps at a fly, barking out his directions with the curt precision of a man who knew his business. Planks were brought from the dismantled shacks to be thrust down on the inward face of the dam as a protection, and these were weighted in place with a makeshift buttressing built out of the bags of sand which had been used as temporary coffer-dams in the construction work. When all was ready, a small ditch was opened across the protected end of the dam and the water began to pour through.
Immediately the wisdom of Williams's precaution became evident. Instantly the rushing stream began to eat into the loosely built dam, threatening to turn the ditch into a gully and the gully into a chasm, and quick work was necessary with more planks and sand-bags to check the rapid widening of the spillway. Even at that, the ditch grew swiftly deeper and more cavernous as the torrent emptied itself through it, and the roar of the artificial cataract filled the air with a note of sustained thunder.
"Jennings'll be deaf if he doesn't hear this plumb down at the railroad!" shouted Tarbell. But there was no time to consider the consequences Jennings-wise. Every man of the six, including the colonel, was constrained to work like mad to prevent the catastrophe they were trying to avert.
It was when the flood was pouring through the gap in a solid six-foot stream that shot itself far out to fall in a thunderous deluge upon the barren Mesquite mesa, and the planking and sand-bagging was sufficing to hold it measurably within bounds, that Sprague took steps looking toward a defensive battle should the need arise. Under his direction the auto was drawn out to one side and the lamps were extinguished. Then a hasty breastwork was made of the remaining bags of sand, and Tarbell and Starbuck were sent out as skirmishers to keep watch on the Angels road while the others renewed their efforts to hold the pouring torrent within safe limits.
A toiling half-hour, during which the spillway flood had slowly grown in volume until it threatened to become a destroying crevasse, slipped away, and at the end of it the two scouts came hurrying in.
"They're coming!" yelled Starbuck; and once again the big man from the East took the command.
"Down behind the sand-bags!" he shouted. "If Jennings gets near enough to strike a match on this hillside, we'll all go to glory!"
Sprague had predicted that if Jennings suspected trouble he would not return to the dam alone. The prediction was verified when a squad of mounted men came in view at the turn in the road leading around the hill shoulder. The moon, declining to its setting behind the Timanyonis, flung ghostly shadows across the valley, and the watchers behind the sand-bag breastwork saw only the dark blot of blacker shadow sweeping up the road.
"Give 'em a volley over their heads!" Sprague ordered, and the three sawed-off Winchesters barked spitefully.
"That means war," said the colonel, when the charging cavalcade stopped abruptly and a dropping fusillade of revolver-shots spatted into the sand breastwork and whined overhead. "We're strictly in for it, now."
"If those fool cow-punch's only knew what they're fightin' for, they'd turn their artillery the other way," growled Starbuck. "I reckon they're the 'Lazy X' outfit, and Cummings, their owner, is one of the High Line directors."
"It's a pity we can't get word to them some way," said Smith. "We're not out to kill anybody if we can help it."
"No, but they're out to kill us," grunted Williams, as a second shower of bullets thudded into the breastwork and tore up the gravel on either hand. Then: "What are they doing now?"
The defenders of the breastwork were not left long in doubt as to what was doing. The horsemen in front were deploying in a thin line which rapidly bent itself into a semi-circle across the hill slope. To let any one of these skilled marksmen gain the rear meant death for somebody, and again Sprague gave the word of command.
"Better kill horses than men, " he said. "We've got to stop that manœuvre," and again the Winchesters spoke, this time to deadlier purpose. At the third volley two of the horses were down, and the scattering line was drawing together again and galloping out of range.
In the lull which succeeded, Williams dropped his weapon and crawled quickly away to the edge of the spillway torrent. When he came back there was a new note of alarm in his voice.
"That spillway of ours is eating away the dam at the rate of a foot a minute!" he announced. "If we can't get to work on it again, the whole business will go out with a rush!"
It was a cruel dilemma, and it was quickly made worse by a new movement on the part of the attackers. Jennings's party was closing in again, and flashes of red fire were appearing here and there on the hillside to herald a dropping hail of pistol bullets. Under cover of the irregular firing, a man was worming his way down toward the edge of the ravine through which the wasting torrent was rushing out upon the mesa. It was Sprague who first saw the crawling man and divined his purpose.
"That's Jennings!" he exclaimed, "and if he reaches the edge of that gully, we're all dead men! Stop him, Starbuck! don't kill him if you can help it, but stop him!"
Starbuck levelled his short rifle over the top of the breastwork and took careful aim. The light was bad and he could scarcely see the sights. At the trigger-pulling, those who were watching saw a little cloud of dust and gravel spring up directly in front of the crawling man; saw this, and heard above the roaring of the torrent his yell of pain as he doubled up and clapped his hands to his face.
"Good shot, Billy!" gritted the white-haired colonel. "You've blinded him! Now if we could only choke those crazy range-riders off. . . . Tarbell, can't you—where's Tarbell gone?"
Tarbell's place at the end of the breastwork was empty, and Smith, who was next in the line, accounted for him.
"Archer dropped out a minute or two ago. I think he's trying to make a dodge-around to get at those cow-punchers."
The firing had ceased for the moment, and the man who had tried to creep down to the ravine was stumbling back up the hill. Williams nervously thrust in his plea again.
"I tell you, we've got to get to work on this thing behind us and do it quick!" he urged. "There is still water enough in the lake to tear the heart out of Timanyoni Canyon if it all goes at once!"
Sprague set the temerarious example by springing to his feet, and the others followed him. There was no answering volley from the hill-side. On the contrary, the black blot of things animate on the slope was melting away, and a minute later Tarbell came running back.
"The boys have got their hunch!" he cried. "A couple of them are taking Jennings back to Angels, and the rest of 'em 'll be here in a minute to help us. They didn't know what was up."
As one man the half-dozen flung themselves upon the task of keeping the roaring crevasse under control; and a little later eight of the cowmen came racing down to swell the working force. But even for the augmented numbers, it proved to be a fiercely fought battle, with the issue hanging perilously in the balance for a long time.
Hour by hour they toiled, making plank bulk-heads out of the shack lumber, piling sand-bags against the crumbling embankment, and fighting inch by inch with the gnawing flood as the night wore away.
And it was thus that the graying dawn found them; soaked, muddied, gasping, and haggard with fatigue, but with the victory fairly won. The flood was still pouring through the gap which had by now widened to the cutting away of a full half of the dam; but the great body of water had already passed out and there was no longer any danger.
When the sun was just beginning to redden on the higher peaks of the western mountains, a shout from the hill-side road broke upon the morning stillness. A moment later Maxwell and Stillings came running to the brink of hazard.
Sprague stumbled up out of the crevasse chasm and pointed down to the washed-out heart of the dam. There, piled in the bottom of what had once been the plank-lined pit with the hoisting-tackle over it, and laid bare now by the scouring flood, was a great pile of dynamite stacked solidly in its shipping-boxes. And, half-buried in the sand and detritus of the outflow, lay the iron pipe through which the firing fuse had been carried to the gully edge Jennings had tried to reach.
"There is the warrant for what we've been doing, gentlemen," said the big expert wearily. "Take a good look at it, all of you, so that if the courts have anything to say about this night's work——"
Maxwell cut in quickly.
"There's nobody left to make the fight. Jennings went east from Angels on the first train that got through. He was badly blinded, so Disbrow says; got a fall from his horse, was the story he told. We'll fix this lay-out so it will stand just as it is until everybody who wants to has seen it!"
"You couldn't stay away, could you?" said the white-haired colonel, grinning up from his seat on the last of the sand-bags. "I told the boys here you'd be turning up as soon as your railroad track was open."
"We've had a mighty anxious night," Stillings put in. "The river is up five feet, and we couldn't tell what was happening over here. Great Jonah! but you men must have had your hands full!"
"We did," said Smith; "but it's all over now."
"All but the shouting," said Maxwell. "But post your guards and let's get back to town. My car is at Angels, and we came up special. When we left Brewster the plaza was black with people waiting for news."
It was on the way down the flood-swollen canyon that the chemistry expert explained to the private-car company at the breakfast-table how he had been able to diagnose the case of the cloud-bursters.
"It was merely a bit of what you might call constructive reasoning," he said modestly. "I knew by personal investigation in the line of my proper work—soil-testing—that there was no arable land within reach of the Mesquite project. The other steps followed, as a matter of course. Starbuck, here, is wondering why I risked his life and mine to get a few photographs for The Tribune, but if any of you will examine the snap-shots carefully under a magnifier, you will see that they prove the existence of the central pit in the dam, and that one of them shows the pipe-line through which the fuse was to run. For the possible legal purpose I was anxious to have this evidence in indisputable form. That's all, I believe."
"Not quite all," Maxwell broke in. "How did you know that Jennings would be hanging over the wire at Angels while you people were making your flying trip across the mountain in the auto?"
Sprague laughed good-naturedly.
"Call it a guess," he said. "It was evident that Jennings wasn't anxious to kill a lot of innocent people. His inquiries about the strength of the High Line dam proved that. It ran in my mind that he wouldn't touch off his earthquake until he could be reasonably sure that the flood wouldn't catch a train in transit in the canyon. That would have been a little too horrible, even for him. Now you've got it all, I guess."
"But you haven't got yours yet," laughed Stillings. "When this thing gets out in Brewster the whole town will mob you and want to make you the next mayor, or send you to Congress, or something of that sort."
"Not this year," said the big man, with another mellow laugh. "And I'll tell you why. Just before this train reaches town it's going to stop and let us law-breakers get off, scatter and drop into town as best we can without calling attention to ourselves. And to-morrow morning you'll read in The Tribune how the Mesquite dam, weakened by the recent storms and cloud-bursts, went out by littles during the night, watched over and kept from going as a disastrous whole by a brave little bunch of"—he looked around the table and winked solemnly—"by a brave little bunch of cowboys from the 'Lazy X.’" Then, with sudden soberness: "Promise me that you won't give it away, gentlemen all. It's the only fee I shall exact for my small part in the affair."
And the promise was given while the locomotive whistle was sounding for the Brewster yard limits, and Maxwell was pulling the air-cord for the out-of-town stop.