Chapter XXVIII: The Battle From Above

The rain had stopped by morning, to the great relief of Colonel Illingworth, Severence and Curtiss, and the satisfaction of Helen Illingworth. There was little sun to dry the big, red sandstone mesa, its sides seamed into fantastic shapes, which rose grandly between the valley of the Picket Wire and the ravine of the Kicking Horse, and which the young woman intended to cross in her walk toward the dam with Rodney and Winters. The siding near the steel arch bridge was close to the rock wall of the ravine, which here had been so scoured out of the rocky side of the mesa by torrents of other days that it could fairly be called a gorge. Consequently the bank of clouds above the horizon to the northwest was hid behind the big butte from the occupants of the two private cars. Although the day did not promise to be fair, they had no idea of the further threat of storm presaged by the black masses to the northwest.

In sandy, porous soils such as here prevailed the rain is absorbed quickly. They could traverse the trails carpeted with the needles of centuries that ran through the dripping pines without getting muddy and with nothing more to fear than a wetting. Colonel Illingworth, Severence, and Curtiss announced their intention of going back to the town to continue their consultations and observations concerning the progress of work on the bridge. Shurtliff, who went about his business gravely reserved, frigidly cold and self-contained, had work to do at his desk. The woman and the two young men were for the dam.

After an early breakfast, therefore, the second car was uncoupled and the engine backed it down around the mesa toward the viaduct twenty miles below. Rodney and Winters prepared to go with Miss Illingworth across the wooded island, with its cresting of stone, so to speak, that lay between the ravine and the valley. The conductor of the train, a local employee of the railroad, told them that the shortest way was directly over the mesa. The sandstone of which this huge mound was mainly composed had been broken and disintegrated on all sides by centuries of erosion and weathering and there were practicable ascents and descents at both ends. The nearest ascent was at the side of the big tableland directly opposite which the car was placed.

The trails through the pines which covered the hill up to the very foot of the big butte were unfrequented and in bad repair, but practicable if the traveler was prepared for a wetting. The shortest and on the whole the easiest way to the dam would be to make their way to the foot of the mesa, climb it through the big ravine and cross it to the lower end, less than two miles away, where there was an easy descent to the dam.

"And if you get caught in the rain," said the conductor, "which ain't likely, for it's already rained more in the last twenty-four hours than in the last twenty-four years, it seems to me, there's a hut, half stone and half timber, up on the mesa that campers sometimes make use of when they want to see the sun rise, which is a mighty fine sight from there. It was in pretty fair shape when I visited it last year and you can find shelter there. It's at the highest point on the mesa. You can see a long way up the gulch there, and a longer way down and up the Picket Wire valley. Above the dam it used to show a level, fertile stretch between the hills, but it's all a lake now."

Shurtliff, of course, declined Miss Illingworth's invitation to accompany the party on plea of urgent duties and important papers to prepare. He had spoken no words to Rodney or Winters, and those gentlemen made no effort to engage him in conversation. They were, in truth, a little ashamed of their actions of the night before. They were exceedingly anxious as to whether their theories as to the possible effect of Miss Illingworth's action would be justified, so they carefully avoided the secretary, letting the leaven work if it would. To their disappointment it gave no sign of life or action.

Of the four most interested in Meade, Winters was the only one who had slept soundly that night. Rodney was too much in love with the woman ever to sleep soundly again, he thought, certainly not until her future had been settled and her relations to Meade finally determined. Shurtliff's feelings were painful in the extreme. Torn between the old habit of affection for the dead, his new habit of affection for the woman, his oft recurring compunction of conscience, his immediate resentment of the treatment of the two men, his acknowledgment of the splendid action of the woman, his suspicions, his uncertainty, as to how the younger Meade would take it if he told the truth, he slept not at all.

Into Helen Illingworth's mind also had come, although to her credit be it said not until she had retired and had thought over her action in the light of the hints given, that perhaps her generous interposition in behalf of Shurtliff might move his gratitude and that he might at last vouchsafe her the help which she felt more certain than ever he alone could give. She was glad when the thought came to her that she could look herself squarely in the face and declare to her conscience that it had not been back of her action, which had been purely spontaneous.

The possibility, although a faint one, that Meade might be working on the dam and that she might see him on the morrow would have sufficed to give her a wakeful night, Rodney was a more careful observer than Winters, but even the cattleman noticed that she looked worn and strained as he helped her out of the car for their tramp across the mesa to the dam.

"You know," he said, with rough and ready sympathy, "we haven't the least assurance that Meade is there. It's only a chance, and probably a long one."

"I shall never rest until it is decided absolutely one way or the other," said the woman.

"Well, I'm not much of a walker," said the cattleman. "I generally prefer to get over the ground astride of a broncho, but I guess I can keep up with the party for two miles, if that's the distance."

It was dark and damp and wet under the pines. As the conductor had said, the trail was an execrable one. Although the two men cleared the way for her, holding branches back and shaking the water off the drooping boughs, it was well Helen Illingworth was protected from the wet. She had tramped hills and mountains many a time, camp and forest were familiar to her. She wore a short-skirted dress, stout boots and leggings, and a yellow western slicker.

The exertion of the upward climb, stumbling over broken branches and uprooted logs and floundering through boggy places on the trail, brought a touch of color to her face, and though damp, the air sweet and fragrant, clean and pure, refreshed and pleased her greatly; the men, too. It was a hard pull and she was out of breath when she reached the broken coulee, or ravine, which led to the top of the big red sandstone plateau.

"I'm terribly out of practice," she said to the two men, "but I don't believe I'm in any worse state than you are, Mr. Winters."

"I told you I wasn't any good on foot," said Winters, who was blowing like a grampus.

Rodney laughed at the two of them.

"Look at me," he said. "I'm as fresh as when I began."

"Well, you're used to walking," returned Winters. "It's this plugging along this broken trail that has knocked us out. The rich, they ride on--bronchos, you know."

"When we get on top of the mesa we will find it easier going," said Rodney encouragingly.

"Let us start," said the girl, suddenly serious, as she thought what might be at the end of the journey.

"Before we go any further," said Winters, staring up the ravine at the sky which showed above it, "just take a look at that."

He pointed to the black clouds rapidly rising, apparently against the wind, which swayed rather violently the tops of the tallest pines, although they were protected and in comparative quiet where they stood in the ravine.

"It looks as if there were more rain there," said Rodney.

"It's incredible," answered Winters, "after what we've had."

"But it certainly is coming down again and if I'm any judge it will be another cloudburst."

"Perhaps we'd better go back," suggested Winters to Miss Illingworth.

"Go back!" exclaimed the girl. "When I'm as near as this?"

"But it's only a possibility, you know."

"Possibility or not it would take a deluge in my path to stop me. Come."

She stepped toward the broken ravine. Rodney sprang before her. Winters brought up the rear. It was an entirely practicable climb, but rather a hard one on the wet, crumbling rocks. It did not take the three young people long to surmount the difficulties, however, and after a few minutes they stood on top of the mesa. It was bare of vegetation, save in scattered little earth pockets, grass-covered, where dwarfed pines grew, stunted trees centuries old. Its general surface was level, but the upturned expanse was seamed and guttered in every direction like the wrinkles in a face that had confronted the sky for how many thousand years no one knew, for the rock was the early old red sandstone of the triassic period.

Near at hand was the hut of which the conductor had spoken. It stood upon a little rise above the general level and from it one could obviously see far in every direction. There ran valley and gorge, there extended the high waters of the new-made lake, already dark under the clouds. Before them rose hill on hill, each overtowering the others until they merged into the high-land of the great rampart-like range, its serrated peaks showing whiter their crowns of snow against the blackness of the heavens. Between the hills and over the lower crest of Baldwin's Knob they could even see dimly the far-off plains, a little sickly yellow light still lingering there before the advance of the storm.

The hut was made of stone and logs. The doors and windows had long since vanished and the broad eaves overhanging the walls were rotting away, but the inside they found upon inspection was fairly dry. They had not any more than reached it before the storm began. Claps of thunder, flashes of lightning under which the army on the dam were fighting, were heard and seen with tenfold clearness by the little group on the huge upland.

It was a sight to awe the very soul of humanity. Miles and miles down the mountain side and among the hills the whirling battalions of clouds rolled and tumbled and tossed and clashed like aerial armies. The lightning, while it was not in sheets, was practically continuous, flash succeeding flash in uncountable and blinding succession. Again they noticed the strange coruscating, bursting effect as bolt after bolt apparently struck some granite ledge and was then thrown back in splinters of fire. The heavy awful roll of the thunder was continuous and terrific.

They stood staring through door and windows in silence, Meade and their quest forgot in the appalling tempest by all except the woman. It was she who recalled them.

"Let us hasten on," she said, and she had almost to scream to make herself heard in the wild tumult. "It's magnificent, wonderful, but----"

As a matter of fact all the manifestations of nature at its grandest would not have sufficed to turn her head away from her lover's face if she could have seen him.

"You can't go now," said Winters decisively, "the rain's bad enough as it is and that cloud will burst in a minute. Old Noah's flood won't be a circumstance to it."

"I'm protected from the rain," she answered.

Winters shook his head.

"The weight of it would almost beat you down, Miss Illingworth."

"I haven't had any experience with it, but I think Winters is right," said Rodney.

"I'll go on alone, then," said the girl passionately, stepping out of the house, "if you gentlemen don't care to come."

The next moment, with a culminating scream like the shriek of all the lost souls of creation heard above the furious detonating roll of the thunder, the wind added its quota to the demonstration of natural force, and now the rain fairly dropped upon them in apparently solid sheets. Of course clouds do not burst. Such a thing is scientifically and meteorologically impossible, but anyone who has ever experienced the suddenness and fury and weight of a western deluge in a normally dry land will understand the term. The wind swept over the plateau where it had free course like a hurricane; the rain came down in masses apparently. Until their eyes became accustomed to it, the falling water blotted out the landscape.

The woman was hurled against the side of the house by the sudden and violent assault of the hurricane. The two men half dragged, half carried her around to the lee side of the cabin. The roof of the hut had given way here and there, and within it was soon flooded. Where they stood, however, by chance happened to be the solidest part of the overhang of the roof and they were in some degree protected, that is from the direct violence of the downpour. They were, of course, drenched in a few minutes in spite of their raincoats. With one man on either side of her to give her as much protection as possible, the woman leaned against the stone wall and stared through the rain down the valley, seeking to see the dam, perhaps a mile and a half away. Of course the maximum of the downpour could not last any more than the maximum of the gale, but the deluge was succeeded by a heavy driving rain still swept on by a strong wind.

Below the mesa the lake was whipped into foam by the beat of the rain and rolled into waves by the assault of the wind. All three of them knew what this deluge portended. The downpour would raise the level of the lake so that it would overflow the dam, which would be swept away, the valley would be inundated by a flood, like a tidal wave, the incompleted viaduct would be ruined, the town would be overwhelmed, the loss of life and property would be appalling.

"The spill-way ought to take it," shouted Winters, knowing what was in the minds of the other two by what was in his own.

"It's not finished," roared Rodney.

Winters threw up his hands.

"Will the dam hold it?" cried the woman, understanding.

"Until the water rises above it. Just as soon as it begins to wash over it will go, and the quicker for these waves," answered Rodney at the top of his voice.

"And the bridge and the town," screamed the woman.

"They, too."

"And father?"

"He'll be all right, they've had warning. The engineers on the dam must know the danger now. They're working like mad."

He had brought a small six-power field glass with him and he was straining his eyes through it. The violence of rain and wind had sensibly abated, although it was still coming down in torrents. With his knowledge of what would probably be attempted, Rodney was able to see through his glass something of what was being done even at that distance.

"They're building palisades on top of the dam and backing it with an earth mound. See, they are dropping sand bags over," he stated, handing the glass to the other man.

"By heaven," shouted Winters, "they're making a magnificent fight."

In his excitement he left the shelter of the hut and stalked through the rain toward the edge of the mesa, where he could have a better and nearer view. In spite of Rodney's remonstrances, even though backed by his outstretched arm, the woman followed. Presently all three, indifferent to the beat of the rain and the assault of the wind, stood watching the battle on the dam. It was abating still more, fortunately, or else they could scarcely have sustained the attack of that wind and rain, nor could they have seen at all, even with that glass.

Staring down at the dam after a moment Helen Illingworth took the glass from Rodney. She focused it rapidly and looked steadily through it. She knew what she was seeking as she stood steadying herself with splendid nerve and resolution and swept the length of the dam back and forth.

"I don't see him. He's not there," she said at last, handing the glass back to its owner.

"If he were there, you'd see him all right," said Winters enthusiastically, "because he'd be in the thick of the fight."

"I doubt if you can recognize anyone even through the glass, at such a distance," said Rodney, after he had focused it and taken a look himself. "Yet if he were there he certainly would be in the thick of it. He's that kind. You look, Dick."

"I can't see him," said Winters in turn. "But what a fight they are making to save that dam."

"Will it hold?" asked the woman.

"Impossible," said Rodney.

"I give it one hour," said Winters, handing over the glass.

"Not more than that," assented the other, after another look. "See for yourself, Miss Illingworth."

From where they stood high up on the roof of the world they were spectators of a great battle, witnesses of a terrible contest, in which herculean effort, desperate courage, human will, all exerted to the limit, finally degenerated into blind, mechanical habit of continuous and frenzied endeavor. The spirit of reckless continuance had got into them and moved them to the impossible. As men in a battle-charge go on even with wounds enough to kill them in ordinary circumstances, as soldiers at Winchester, though shot in the heart, actually struggled after Sheridan until they fell, or even as a common horse may so be imbued with blind intensity of determination that he gallops on until he drops dead, so these men gave their all in unmatchable persistence.

"They'd better get off that dam," said Rodney. "When it once fails it'll go with a rush and then it'll be too late."

"Look at them. They're not going to get off," said Winters. "They're going down with it. Damned fools, God bless 'em!" he shouted, throwing up his arms in exultation over manhood and courage and determination.

"Perhaps you had better go back, Miss Illingworth," said Rodney, thinking of the horror she might witness at any moment.

"I wouldn't be elsewhere for the world," said the brave girl, white but with firm lips--she was made of the same stuff as the fighting men, it seemed--"Even if he were there, fighting that great battle, I should wait to see the end."

"We're not the only people in this wilderness. Look yonder!" cried Winters.

He pointed down through the ceaseless rain toward the lower edge of the mesa. There far below him were three sodden figures. The water in the lake had risen so that it had overflowed the lowlands, it had flooded the slope of the hill and on that side it was lapping the base of the cliff. The trail had, of course, been covered and there was no way of progress except by taking advantage of the broken rock at the foot of the cliff, which here and there still stood above the water. It was a place apparently where men could only pass by carefully choosing their way and calculating the distance of the next point toward which to leap.

These three were moving like madmen, splashing through the water, hurling themselves from rock to rock, falling against the wall, clutching a tree or shrub, slipping into the lake, saving themselves from drowning apparently only by the caprice of complacent fortune, which they were trying to the utmost limit. They had raincoats on; two of them, however, had lost their hats, the light slicker of the last one was torn to rags; the first stopped a moment, jerked off his coat, and went on without it as if the stiff and sodden garment impeded his action.

One man carried a miner's pick, a spade and a surveyor's range pole, the other another spade and two long stakes which looked like the separate legs of a tripod. The bareheaded man, who had thrown his rubber coat down in the reddish-yellow water, carried a good-sized oilskin bag. He was the most hurried of the three. He ran some distance in front of the others. They noticed how carefully he sought to protect the bag. When he slipped or seemed about to fall he always thrust it frantically away from the rock with outstretched arm.

What the three men would be at of course no one knew. It was obvious that they were in a desperate hurry and that the thing in the bag must be carefully carried. Naturally the watchers connected the men with the dam builders. They were dressed as the men engaged in such labor would be dressed. The pick, the spades, and the pole and stakes bore out that conclusion.

"What's in the bag?" asked the woman.

"He carries it as though it might be gold or diamonds," said Winters.

Rodney shook his head. Suddenly he divined the reason for the extreme care with which the bag was carried. The men were immediately below the three watchers now. He could make out pretty well what was the size and shape of the objects that bulged the waterproof bag.

"I have it," he shouted. "Dynamite."

"What for?"

Rodney shook his head again. The man in front was in plain view. He was a tall figure, his face was heavily bearded. From the angle at which they saw him it was impossible for them to recognize him, nor was he in his frantic progress assuming the usual attitude and bearing of a man under ordinary conditions which sometimes betray him to those who know him well. Nor could Helen Illingworth with her trembling hands focus the glass, which she took from Rodney before the struggling adventurers had passed; and yet there was something in the figure below that made her heart beat faster.

She pressed her hand to the wet garments over her heart and stared. Suddenly Rodney raised his voice and shouted at the very top of it. Winters joined in and even Helen Illingworth found herself screaming. The three men below were not more than five or six hundred feet away, but evidently they could not possibly hear in that tumult of nature. No voices would carry through any such rain and wind. They were too intent on their paths and on what they had to do to look upward. They rounded the shoulder of the mesa and disappeared in the pines at its feet.

The three on the top looked at each other.

"The dam still holds," said Rodney, quite unsuspecting what was in the woman's heart.

Even as he spoke Helen Illingworth turned away. She ran heavily in her sodden garments along the broken mesa top past the house to the upper edge. There below her were the three men just emerging from the fringe of trees. Rounding the end of the mesa they had at last struck firmer ground. Helen Illingworth could see them through the pines on the old trail. The going was bad enough, but it was nothing compared to what they had passed over and presently they burst out of the woods and ran along the greasy, well-rounded hog-back that divided the valley from the ravine.

The woman had no idea what was toward, what was their purpose. She could only stare and stare at the rapidly moving far-off figure indomitably in the lead and the others following after. There Winters joined her.

"Rodney sent me to look after you; he feels that he must stay back and watch the dam for his paper."

"Look," said Helen, pointing far down. The men halted at the very narrowest part of the hog-back. They were clustered together. The bag lay on the ground behind them. One man bent over it, evidently opening it. Another man swung the shovel viciously, the third grabbed the pick. Winters had been too far removed from engineering even yet to figure out what was toward. They could only watch and wonder.