VThe Cloud-Bursters
IT was an article in the news columns ofThe Brewster Morning Tribunewhich first called attention—the attention of the Brewsterites and the inter-mountain world in general—to the plans and purposes of the Mesquite Valley Land and Irrigation Company.
Connabel, a hard-working reporter onThe Tribune, had been sent over to Angels, the old head-quarters of the Red Butte Western on the other side of the Timanyonis, to get the story of a shooting affray which had localized itself in Pete Grim’s place, the one remaining Angelic saloon. Finding the bar-room battle of little worth as a news story, and having time to kill between trains, Connabel had strolled off up the gulch beyond the old copper mines and had stumbled upon the construction camp of the Mesquite Company.
Being short of “copy” on the fight story, the reporter had written up the irrigation project, taking the general outlines from a foreman on thejob whose tongue he loosened with a handful of Brewster cigars. A big earth dam was in process of construction across the mouth of the rather precipitous valley of Mesquite Creek; and the mesa below, which, to Connabel’s unrural eye, seemed to be a very Sahara of infertile desolation, was to be made to blossom like the rose.
Kendall, managing editor ofThe Tribune, had run the story, partly because real news happened to be scarce at the moment, and partly out of sheer astonishment that an enterprise of the magnitude of the Mesquite project had not already flooded the country with the brass-band publicity literature which is supposed to attract investors.
That a land and irrigation company should actually wait until its dam was three-fourths completed before it began to advertise was a thing sufficiently curious to call for editorial comment. Why Editor Kendall did not comment on the news item as a matter of singular interest is a query which had its answer on the loggia porch of the Hotel Topaz in the evening of the day on which Connabel’s write-up appeared.
It was Kendall’s regular habit to close his desk at seven o’clock and to spend a leisurely hour over his dinner at the Topaz before settling down to his night’s work. On the evening in question hehad chanced to sit at table with Maxwell, the general superintendent of the railroad, and with Maxwell’s friend and college classmate, Sprague. After dinner the three had gone out to the loggia porch to smoke, and it was the big chemistry expert who spoke of the Mesquite news story which had appeared that morning inThe Tribune.
“Yes,” said the editor; “Connabel got on to that yesterday. I sent him over to Angels to write up a shooting scrape, and he had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with. We’ve all known, in a general way, that an Eastern company was doing something over there, but I had no idea that they’d got their dam pretty nearly done and were about ready to open up for business.”
“It’s wild-cat, pure and unadulterated!” cut in the railroad man snappily. “What they are going to do to a lot of woolly investors will be good and plenty. That Mesquite Mesa land is just about as fertile as this street pavement here.”
Kendall was a dried-up little wisp of a man, with tired eyes and a face the color of old oak-tanned leather.
“That is what you would think—that they are out for the easy money,” he agreed. “But there is something a little queer about it. They haven’t advertised.”
“Not here,” supplemented Maxwell. “It would be a trifle too rank. Everybody in the Timanyoni knows what that land is over in the edge of the Red Desert.”
“They haven’t advertised anywhere, so far as I can ascertain,” put in the editor, quietly. “What is more, Jennings, who is the engineer in charge of the dam-building and who seems to be the only man in authority on the ground, came in this afternoon and raised sand with me for printing the news story. He said they were not exploiting the scheme here at all; that their money and their investors were all in the East, and they were asking no odds of the Brewster newspapers.”
“Bitter sort of devil, that fellow Jennings,” was Maxwell’s comment; but it was the big chemist who followed the main thread of the argument.
“What reason did he give for making such an extraordinary break as that, Mr. Kendall?”
“Oh, he had his reason pat enough,” rejoined the editor, with his tired smile. “He said he realized that we have irrigated land of our own over here in the Park upon which we are anxious to get settlers, and that public sentiment here would naturally be against the Mesquite project. He asked, as a matter of fairness, that we simply let the desert project alone. He claimed that it hadbeen financed without taking a dollar out of the Timanyoni, so we could not urge that there were local investors to be protected.”
“Umph! that argument cuts both ways; it’s an admission that the Eastern investors might need protection,” scoffed the railroad superintendent. Then he added: “They certainly will if they expect to get any of the money back that they have been spending in Mesquite Valley. Why, Kendall, Mesquite Creek is bone-dry half the year!”
“And the other half?” inquired Sprague.
“It’s a cloud-burst proposition, like a good many of the foot-hill arroyos,” Maxwell explained. “Once, in a summer storm, I saw a wall of water ten feet high come down that stream-bed, tumbling twenty-ton bowlders in the thick of it as if they had been brook pebbles. Then, for a month, maybe, it would be merely a streak of dry sand.”
“Perhaps they are counting upon storing the cloud-burst water,” commented Kendall dryly. Then as he rose to go back to his work: “As you say, Maxwell, it has all the ear-marks of the wild-cat. But so long as it doesn’t stick its claws out at us, I suppose we haven’t much excuse for butting in. Good-night, gentlemen. Drop in on me when you’re up my way. Always glad to see you.”
The two who remained on the hotel porch after the editor went away smoked in comradely silence for a time. The night was enchantingly fine, with a first-quarter moon swinging low in a vault of velvety blackness, and a gentle breeze, fragrant with the breath of the mountain forests, creeping down upon the city from the backgrounding highlands. Across the plaza, and somewhere in the yards behind the long two-storied railroad head-quarters building and station, a night crew was making up trains, and the clank and crash of coupling cars mingled with the rapid-fire exhausts of the switching engine.
The big-bodied chemistry expert was the first to break the companionable silence, asking a question which had reference to the epidemic of disaster and demoralization which had recently swept over Maxwell’s railroad.
“Well, how are things coming by this time, Dick? Are the men responding fairly well to that little circular-letter, man-to-man appeal we concocted?”
“They are, for a fact,” was the hearty assurance. “I have never seen anything like it in railroading in all my knocking about. They’ve been coming in squads to ’fess up and take the pledge, and to assure me that it’s the water-wagon for theirsfrom now on. By George, Calvin, it’s the most mellowing experience I’ve ever had! It proves what you have always said, and what I have always wanted to believe: that the good in the mass definitely outweighs the bad, and that it will come to the front if you only know how to appeal to it.”
“That’s right,” averred the chemist. “It is the strong hope of the country that there is justice and fairness and sane common-sense at the American bottom of us, if you can only get at it. I think you can call the booze-fight and demoralization round-up a trouble past and begin to look around you for the signs and symptoms of the next biff you’re going to get.”
The stockily built little man who stood as the railroad company’s chief field-officer on the far-western fighting line moved uneasily in his chair.
“I have been hoping there wasn’t going to be any ‘next time,’” he said, chewing thoughtfully upon his cigar.
“I should hope with you, Dick, if we had been able, in any of the former scrimmages, to secure good, indubitable court evidence against the men who are backing these buccaneering raids on your securities. The one thing that big money really fears to-day is the law—the law as the Federal courts are likely to construe and administer it.But to obtain your day in court you’ve got to have evidence; and thus far we haven’t been able to sweat out anything that would implicate the man or men higher up. Therefore, you may continue to sleep on your arms, keeping a sharp eye out for surprises.”
“I guess that is pretty good advice,” was the ready admission; “but it is rather difficult to put into practice, Calvin. There are five hundred miles of this railroad, and my job of operating them is big enough to keep me busy without doing any detective stunts on the side.”
“I know,” Sprague nodded reflectively, “and for that reason I’ve been half-way keeping an eye out for you myself.”
“You have? Don’t tell me you’ve been finding more grief!”
Sprague threw away his outburned stub and found and lighted a fresh cigar.
“I don’t want to pose as an alarmist,” he offered at length, “but I’d like to dig a little deeper into this Mesquite irrigation scheme. How much or little do you know about it?”
“Next to nothing. About two months ago Jennings, the construction engineer, made application for the through handling, from Copah, of a train-load of machinery, tools, and camp outfit.He asked to have the stuff delivered at the end of the old copper-mine spur above Angels. We put the spur in shape for him and delivered the freight.”
“Well, what else?”
“That is about all we have had to do with 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 whenthe 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 atWimberley’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 smallremuda.
“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 liveround 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 thatfollowed, 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 layerof 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 engineeringpractice 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 wereclosing 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 theforeign laborers—the shift off duty—came pouring out of the bunk houses and shacks.