Part 14

“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 mid-day 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 Timanyoni’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 anticipatin’ 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.