scott sat for some minutes gazing absently at the rugged mountains. he felt tired and his mind wandered listlessly from one vague something to another, none of them connected with the present situation. the peace and quiet of his surroundings began to soak into him and a lassitude crept over him. he had been under a much greater nervous strain than he had realized and the reaction made him sleepy. he wanted to curl up right where he was and sleep. he had no interest in anything else. his heavy eyes closed wearily and he sank down beside the still unconscious man.
scott dreamed that he was lying on the battlefield with other wounded and dying men groaning all around him. the ambulance corps picked him up and carried him far back of the lines to a peaceful little french village surrounded by high mountains and put him in a little cabin beside a lake. he could hear the babbling of many small streams and the gentle lapping of tiny waves on a pebbly shore. they were soothing, lulling sounds but woven through them he could still hear the groans of the dying. the cabin was becoming unbearably warm and oppressive. he writhed about on his burning couch until the discomfort awoke him.
the groaning continued and scott sat up suddenly to find that dawson had regained consciousness. his jaw was badly broken, and it was his moaning that scott had heard in his dreams. the sun was shining directly on them both with a blistering heat unusual for that time of the year. scott did not know how long he had been asleep but it must have been a long time. the sun had shifted to the western half of the sky, a warm breeze was ruffling the surface of the reservoir, and black clouds were peeping over the horizon. dawson was half delirious from suffering and lack of water in the blazing sun. he was moaning constantly and talking incoherently. he did not seem to recognize scott or to know where he was.
scott picked up the suffering man as carefully as he could and carried him into the cabin. all his feeling against dawson was gone now and he saw only a human being in agony. he reproached himself for going to sleep and leaving him in such a condition. he realized now how panic-stricken he must have been to bind the wrists of a crippled man when he himself was armed with the cripple’s revolver. he removed the belt from dawson’s wrists and ran out to get some water from the reservoir. he poured some of it on the parched lips and the injured man swallowed eagerly though every movement of his mouth seemed to cause new agony. scott bathed his fevered brow, gave him a little more water to drink and then bound up his jaw with his handkerchief. he wondered how he could get him home. there were two horses there now, but jed was not well enough trained to be trusted with one end of a stretcher. a trailing pole stretcher on dawson’s horse would be too rough. he decided that his best move would be to ’phone down to baxter or benny for help.
his anxiety to aid the suffering man had so completely occupied scott’s attention that he had not noticed what was going on outside. a sudden gust of wind forced his attention. he ran to the door. the little black clouds which were just peeping over the horizon a short time before had spread over half the sky. the heat was oppressive and a warm, sultry wind which was blowing half a gale seemed only to accentuate it. angry little waves were beating on the shore now and the growing streams on the other side of the reservoir were beginning to roar ominously.
scott ran down to the edge of the reservoir to look at the mark he had set on the dam the day before. the water had already risen a foot since he had noticed it that morning and he knew from the rush of waters in the ca?ons that it was rising now at an alarming rate. he glanced at his watch. it was five o’clock. ordinarily the cool of the approaching evening had begun to tie up the springs of ice and snow in the hidden ca?ons before that time and the streams would be drying up, but to-day that hot wind was searching its way into every cranny of the rocks and melting the winter’s store of ice at a tremendous rate. nor would they cease to melt even with the setting of the sun as long as that wind continued. a warm rain on top of that was almost sure to be disastrous.
even while scott looked the last patch of blue was blotted from the sky and the little basin was thrown into semi-darkness. the swiftness of the onrushing storm was bewildering. he would ’phone baxter for help to get dawson out of there and then open the sluice gates without waiting for the level of the reservoir to reach the danger point. he feared that it would reach it all too quickly even with the sluice gates open.
scott rushed up the bank to the little camp and grabbed the telephone. he gave baxter’s ring and waited what seemed an age. he tried three times without getting any answer. baxter must be either out on the range or out of hearing of the ’phone. he tried benny. benny was always there.
“hello,” came the prompt answer.
“that you, benny? this is—”
he was interrupted by a blinding flash followed instantly by a deafening explosion. the receiver was apparently wrenched from his hand and he stood dazed while the reverberations of the mighty report were hurled crashing from peak to peak. the storm was on them. he grasped the ’phone again desperately but the fuses were burned out and the line was dead.
the echoes of the first crash of thunder had not died away in the distant hills when the rain came down in torrents. a half hour of that and the reservoir would overflow even if the dam itself did not go out before that. the opening of the sluice gates was the only thing which he could do. he could not imagine those sluice gates taking care of the mad torrents which would soon be raging down the ca?ons from all those encircling barren peaks, but the storm might possibly cease as suddenly as it had begun.
scott sprang to the gates and was already bending his back to the old-fashioned windlass when he remembered that jed was on the other side of the meadow. once he had opened those gates it would be impossible to get him across to the trail. he had to have jed to get help for dawson and carry the warning of the impending danger to the ranchers along the course that the flood would take if the dam should burst.
the rain continued to fall in a deluge which almost blinded him, but he managed to stagger across the meadow to the clump of willows where he had left jed. he feared that the horse might have been frightened by the storm and run away. the booming of the thunder in those hollow ca?ons was enough to terrify either horse or man. but jed had spent his life in the open. thunder storms in the mountains were nothing new to him. close in the lee of the bushes, with his tail to the storm, he was waiting patiently. he greeted scott with a little nicker of recognition.
scott jumped on to his slippery, wet back and rode across the darkening meadow toward the place where he had hidden the saddle. he put on the saddle while there was yet light and leaving jed well up from the trail, he dashed once more for the sluice gates. in the trail at the foot of the dam he almost ran into a strange horse. the poor beast was saddled and bridled and steaming in the rain from hard riding. its breath was coming in great gasps, its head hung down until its nose was almost on the ground, and its feet were spread wide, a sign of total exhaustion. some one had ridden up that steep ca?on trail at a killing pace.
“it must be baxter,” scott thought as he ran past the heaving horse and made for the sluice gates. there was not enough daylight left to recognize objects at any distance, but almost continuous lightning flashes made things stand out momentarily with vivid distinctness. scott was just rounding a clump of bushes not more than ten yards from the sluice gates, when one of these lurid flashes revealed a picture which brought him to a sudden halt with his heart in his mouth.
seated on top of the sluice gates was not baxter, but jed clark.
he was crazy with drink. he was holding a forty-five in either hand. after every flash of lightning he waved the revolvers wildly in the air and shouted his vengeance against the forest service, the government and all law in general. he seemed to revel in the wildness of the storm. he was raving mad.
scott stood as one stunned. he was in the shadow of the bushes and jed had not seen him. he knew that jed had come up there with the original intention of getting him. failing to find scott his crazed brain had now hit on the still more devilish scheme of reeking his vengeance on the forest service by bringing about the destruction of the dam. none knew the country better than he. none knew better than he how impossible it would be for that old dam to withstand the flood which was gathering against it. now utterly regardless of his own danger he was seated on the sluice gates of the very dam he was planning to destroy, recklessly chanting his vengeance in the face of the raging elements.
the whole thing seemed so fiendish, so utterly inhuman, that scott stared helplessly for a moment in an agony of dismay. his first impulse was to rush the maniac, for the gates must be opened and that quickly. but he gave up the idea almost as soon as he conceived it. jed was well known to be a dead shot, drunk or sober, and the experience of the morning had shown scott how perfectly helpless he would be.
there was only one way out. dawson’s revolver. it had been in his way when he was ministering to dawson’s hurts and he had taken it off. he started for the cabin and it suddenly occurred to him that jed would have gone there the first thing. he remembered the unrecorded mortgage and jed’s veiled threat at that night meeting below the chute. he trembled to think what he might find in the cabin. shivering he groped his way across the room to the bed. he leaned over it and waited for the next flash of lightning. it came and the frozen look of horror in the wide staring eyes of the man before him made his blood run cold. he wanted to run from the cabin but dawson grabbed him by the sleeve. he tried to tell scott something but the mumbled words from the tightly bound jaws were lost in the raging of the storm.
scott realized that jed had been to the cabin. he apparently had not in his drunken search noticed dawson, but the injured man, helpless as he was, had been dreading his return. when scott leaned over him he had thought that it was jed and felt that his time had come. he held onto scott now until the next flash could show him pointing to the dam. “jed,” he tried to say between his closed teeth.
scott understood. he leaned close to dawson’s ear and shouted above the booming of the storm, “i saw him. i’m going after him now.”
he picked up the revolver from the table and started out of the cabin. the last of the daylight was gone now and the frequent flashes of blinding lightning were separated by short periods of stygian darkness. the recurring echoes of one mighty crash of thunder never died away till there was another crash that seemed louder yet. the effect was cumulative. it was as though all the storms of the ages had been dumped into that little caldron in the midst of the mountain peaks.
if the ground had been more familiar it would have been an easy matter for scott to have utilized the lightning flashes to locate the next patch of shelter and to have run to it in the ensuing darkness, but he had not been there long enough for that. the vivid flashes confused him and everything looked strange in the weird light. it did not matter how much noise he made for nothing would be heard above the storm but he had to keep under cover for the lightning made objects stand out with uncanny clearness.
he trembled to think what he was going to do. it seemed the irony of fate that he, who had always shunned the use of a revolver and shuddered at the thought of shooting a man even in the heat of action, should now be called upon to shoot a man in cold blood. but there was nothing else to do. the lives of women and children in the valley below hung on the chance of getting that maniac away from the sluice gates. scott accepted the call of fate, closed his senses to his own feelings, and crept on with unwavering determination. his mind was made up. he would shoot this man as he would shoot a mad dog to save the lives of others.
he had made his way almost to the clump of bushes where he had first discovered jed—he had to get close or he knew that he would miss—when a flash of lightning revealed another object crawling around that same clump of bushes. surprised as he was he recognized it even in that brief flash. he recognized the cautious snake-like crawl, and that gleaming steel. it had been graven on his memory that evening at the cabin when he had sat in the shadow of the forest and watched that same snake-like object crawl toward his cabin window. he could recognize it instantly anywhere.
but what was dugan doing there at this out-of-the-way dam in a raging storm, and crawling inch by inch with a gun in hand toward the man who had been his friend? either he had not recognized jed and thought that he was stalking scott, or had some ulterior motive which scott did not know anything about for disposing of jed. it was probably the former. scott noticed that jed was no longer brandishing his guns and shouting curses in the teeth of the storm. a fit of sullen depression had apparently come over him and he was crouched in a heap so that it was difficult even to recognize him as a man, to say nothing of determining his identity.
dugan evidently wanted to make sure. he could easily have picked the man off from where he was, but he wormed his way steadily nearer. he was beyond the last piece of cover now and was working his way across the narrow open space which separated him from the sluice gates of the dam.
the storm instead of abating seemed to be increasing in fury. flash followed flash almost without cessation. the crashing of the thunder sounded like a barrage of hundreds of big guns. and through it all there sounded the rush of waters. there seemed to be but one inanimate object in the whole scene. trees and rocks and mountain peaks seemed to be dancing in the fickle flashes of light. the man on the sluice gates only seemed motionless. perhaps he had gone to sleep in that perilous position on those groaning sluice gates.
scott watched with a curious fascination. it seemed to him that fate had thought better of her irony and was sending this special agent to relieve him of his odious task. he was perfectly willing to have it so. it was like a reprieve from a horrible sentence. it had but one disagreeable feature. it was so maddeningly slow. he dreaded lest he should hear the dam giving way almost any minute.
dugan did not seem to be in any hurry. he wanted to make sure. he evidently doubted whether the motionless object on the sluice gates was his man. he was lying perfectly still now watching it. he did not want to risk a shot at a scarecrow and sound a warning. convinced at last that he was mistaken he rose to his feet and took a step toward the sluice gates.
there was a spit of flame, the roar of a forty-five, accompanied by a mocking laugh from the motionless object on the sluice gates, and dugan staggered. he was hard hit but he was not the man to go alone. he steadied himself. there were two more reports almost simultaneously and the flashes from the two revolvers almost met.
jed pitched backwards into the deep boiling waters of the reservoir and dugan sank silently beside the sluice gates. fate worked it out without scott’s aid.
