Chapter VII: Part 7

“That is about all we have had to do with them 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 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.

“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 submerge 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 naïve 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 car-load 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.