Came a time when Rawley felt fit enough for work; and this investigation of the wild, improbable scheme of the Cramers would be work, with every faculty of the engineer on the alert for his clients. For the others he would not have attempted the thing he contemplated. He would have told them, more or less politely but nevertheless firmly, that the whole thing was out of his line and that he could not assume the responsibility. But for his Uncle Peter and for Nevada he would do the best that was in him.
Old Jess and Young Jess still looked at him with suspicious eyes, but they made no comment when he set off one morning with Peter to look over their work. They followed sullenly along the trail, ready, Rawley thought, to turn at the slightest indication of treachery and pitch him over the edge of the cliff—if they could—as Old Jess had naïvely suggested to Peter.
Back to the tunnel Peter led him,—and within it. It was smaller than the usual mine tunnel, and fifty feet back from the portal two crosscuts ran parallel with the face of the cliff for a distance of fifty feet in either direction. In the hard rock, working with hand drills, the excavations had been made at the expense of infinite labor, Rawley could see. No car or track was there for removing the muck, which had been taken out in a wheelbarrow. At the face of the tunnel, a winze had been sunk fifty feet, and from this two other crosscuts extended, apparently directly beneath the upper ones.
Rawley saw it all, riding down the winze in the bucket, since he had but one arm of any use. With Uncle Peter at the windlass he felt perfectly secure—though he would have refused the descent with one of the others, so great was his distrust of the Cramers, father and son.
When he returned, Peter conducted him down the stairway hewn into the cliff, and into the big launch.
“This is something we don’t let the world know about,” he remarked. “From Nelson we pack in supplies that any ordinary miner’s family would need—if they were just scratching a living out of their claims. You saw how we do it—with burros. Fifteen years ago we began to work on that stairway and landing. It was a long, hard job. But I knew that we were going to need some private way of getting supplies and material in for the dam. Now, we can slip down to Needles and get a boat-load and get back without these people around here knowing it. Early morning, just at peep of day, is the time I choose for running in here. On the far side of the river, none of the El Dorado prospectors would be apt to notice; and if they did, they would think I was on my way farther north. Now, I’m going to take you across the canyon.”
Once out and fighting the current, Rawley saw at once why it was that the Colorado was not considered a navigable river. There were no rapids in the canyon, properly speaking. But the pent volume of water rushed through like a dignified mill race, and it was only Peter’s skill and the power of the motor that landed them across the canyon.
Here, a small eddy, with a break in the bold, granite wall, made a fair landing. Peter tied the launch securely and led the way up a steep trail from the water’s edge to a natural shelf, where another tunnel with crosscuts was being run. As far as the contour of the cliffs would permit, the workings here were identical with those on the home shore, except that they were not finished. They had just completed the winze.
“We can’t work over here except when the weather and the river are favorable,” Peter explained. “And Old Jess kept us at the gold diggings until we balked. He’d got that one idea so firmly fixed in his mind that he wouldn’t let up when he had his million. He seemed to think a few months’ work would put the dam in, and it was next to impossible to pry him away from the gold grubbing. When we finally struck and refused to put in another shift in the mine, he yielded the point. Now he’s in a fever to get this done. He’ll sit and watch the river by the hour, just as you saw him that night he came down on us. Gloats and grudges by turns, I suppose. He doesn’t realize what a job it is—blowing enough rock into the canyon to dam the river.”
“I wonder if you do, yourself!” Rawley remarked laconically and led the way out. “I want to study these cliffs a bit from the outside. I’ve seen enough of your underground work.”
He spent two hours sitting on first one jutting rock pinnacle and then another, studying the cliffs and making sketchy diagrams and notes. A splendid dream, surely; but a dream wellnigh impossible, as he saw it.
That evening after supper, he sent word to Peter that he was ready to talk to him and would prefer to have the Cramers present. Wherefore Peter brought them over to the cabin; Old Jess vulture-like and grim, and fairly bristling with suspicion, Young Jess surly, but wanting to know what was going on between Peter and this stranger. Rawley dragged chairs out to the porch and laid a diagram sketch on the small table beside him.
“I want to say first, to all of you,” he began gravely, “that I don’t approve of the scheme from any point of view. Peter says that is because I think by rule; because the thing has never been done, and I therefore have nothing to work from. However that may be, I warn you at the start that I don’t like it. I don’t believe you can dam the river in the way you are going at it. It’s a cinch you will have to alter your plans in certain ways, if you are to have any hope whatever of accomplishing the feat.
“I want to warn you that the government will probably have something to say about your performance. If the river had not been declared unnavigable, you would be in trouble for obstructing the channel, if for nothing else. What Washington will say about it in the circumstances, I can’t predict. I don’t know. But if you persist in carrying out your scheme, be prepared for trouble with the authorities. Red tape may wind you up tighter than you anticipate.
“With the understanding, then, that I absolutely disapprove of the idea, I am going to give you my opinion of the most feasible method of making it a success. Of course, I needn’t point out to you the very obvious fact that, if you don’t make a success of it, you will lose every dollar you put into it, and probably get into trouble just the same. If you spend a fortune throwing rock into the river and fail to dam the flow so that you can carry on whatever operations you have in mind on the river bed below, you will be worse off than if you had not started. Therefore, I’m going to tell you how I think you should do it.”
“In other words, ‘Don’t do it—but if you do do it, do it this way,’” Nevada murmured mischievously.
“Something like that,” Rawley grinned. “In the first place, your work is far from finished. You will have to put in relievers, to break the rock between your crosscuts and the face. That can be done by raising, or you can sink incline shafts from the surface. My diagram here shows approximately what I mean. Later, when my arm is well, I will, if you like, run your lines for you. I have a small instrument for my own use.
“These relievers must be shot with dynamite, of course. I suppose, having had long experience in mining, you know that you should use some dynamite for breaking the rock, and black powder to lift and heave it over into the river. Since dynamite gives a quick concussion, the whole can be fired simultaneously; the black powder will follow the dynamite.
“What you should have, of course, is the advice of expert engineers who specialize in this sort of thing. It’s out of my line, and I am merely giving you my opinion for whatever it is worth—in soundness,” he added, catching a miserly chill in Old Jess’s eyes. “I couldn’t sell advice on a matter outside my profession, and in any case I am glad to do whatever I can to help you avoid mistakes. I am trying to see it as a mining problem—the opening of a glory hole, we’ll say.
“Your idea of crosscutting at different levels is a good one, but you should by all means break your rock to the surface, and so give your main explosives a chance to lift it over. You see what I mean?” He lifted the diagram and held it up for them to see. “Here are your tunnel, winze and crosscuts. Then here are your relievers. An incline to the surface—or close to the surface—as high as you wish the cliff to break. I shall have to survey that for you, to give you the proper pitch. Then these ‘coyote holes’ between the apex and your adit—these will be filled with dynamite. I wonder if you have formed any definite idea of how much powder and dynamite you are going to need!”
“Nevada and I have been working on that for five years,” Peter said, and smiled. “We intend to use plenty.”
“I should hope so,” Rawley exclaimed. “Better a few tons too much, than to have all your work and money go for nothing. Make a dead-sure job of it, or—drop the scheme right here.”
This brought an ominous growl from the old man and Young Jess. Peter was studying the diagram. He passed it along to Young Jess, who scowled down at it intently, his slower mind studying each detail laboriously. Old Jess reached out a grimy claw and bent over it like a vulture over a half-picked bone.
“I’m afraid you’ll have trouble getting your explosives,” Rawley observed. “The war is taking enormous quantities to Europe. And I’m afraid we’re going to be dragged into the scrap ourselves. In which case, the government will probably shut off private buyers entirely.”
Young Jess laughed a coarse guffaw. “We should worry!” He leered at Rawley. “We got a glory hole a’ready, back at the diggin’s. We been five years gittin’ powder in here. Gosh! We c’d blow up Yerrup if we wanted to, ourselves! Y’ain’t showed him our powder cache, have yuh, Pete?”
“I didn’t know anything about that. It isn’t necessary that I should,” Rawley broke in impatiently. “My concern is merely the engineering problem you’ve got on your hands. As to the details and the means of putting the idea into execution, I’m not sure that I want to know. I might be hauled up as a witness, sometime—and what I don’t know I won’t have to lie about.”
“That’s right. That’s the way to talk,” Young Jess approved. The diagram had evidently impressed him considerably. He stared at Rawley from under his heavy, lowering brows. Though he spoke as any illiterate white man of the West would speak, he looked like a full-blooded Indian. Rawley wondered which side of him did the thinking,—if any. The worst of both sides, he guessed shrewdly.
“We ain’t tellin’ more’n we’re obleeged to tell,” Old Jess grumbled, lifting his greedy old eyes from the sketch. “We ain’t sharin’, neither! You’re eatin’ my grub—two of ye—”
“Grandfather!” Nevada sprang up and faced the old man furiously. “How can you dare! Have you forgotten that Mr. Rawlins and his partner saved my life and Grandmother’s? Oh, what a groveling lot of brute beasts we have become!”
“Mr. Rawlins is my affair,” Peter said sternly, catching Nevada’s hand as she would have passed him and pulling her down to his knee. “I brought him here. He is doing this work for me. You two will profit by it, though it will not cost you so much as a crust of bread. Nevada is right, except that you strike me as being more like vultures. All you think of is what lies at the bottom of the river.
“The bigness of the achievement, the real significance of a lifetime’s devotion to one tremendous demonstration of man’s dominion over nature means less than nothing to you two. I asked Rawlins to look over our work and advise us. He’s doing it. It’s only by courtesy that you two were called in to hear what he has to say. It’s out of friendship for me that he’s going on with his study of the problems we have to solve.
“Why, damn you,” he flared out suddenly—for all the world like King, of the Mounted—“you couldn’t hire this man to do for you what he’s doing for me for nothing!”