Part 16

“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 cutout 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 moon-light 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 reconnaissance 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 make shift 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 hill-side, 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 cowpunch’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 hill-side 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.