“You may as well listen to me,” said Rawley in the incisive tone which big responsibilities had taught him. “I am your friend. My only object in coming here is to be of service to you. If you do not listen to what I have to say, you will have to listen to the Federal Reclamation Service, acting under the Secretary of the Interior. That may be more convincing to you—but believe me, it will be less pleasant!”
“You were keen for the dam, last time you were here,” Peter reminded him drily. “You called it a big idea. You’ve had a change of heart, son.”
“I have. I have come to tell you that there are other ideas bigger than yours, and a power behind them that will make yours look like building a toy dam in the sand, like kids. You must have read of it in the papers. There’s been all kinds of publicity given to the project.”
“You’re right. There’s been a heap of talk,” Peter retorted. “The papers have done the talking, and we’ve been sawing wood and keeping our mouths shut. While they’re still talking and arguing and speechifying, we’ll put ’er in. There’s nothing the matter with that, is there? Take the wind out of their sails, maybe, especially the fellows that have their speeches all written out, ready for the next banquet. But,—the dam will be in! They’ll have some work, trying to get around that point.
“You ask if we’ve read the papers. I have. They’ve been talking about spending a hundred million dollars. We’ve spent one. They’ve been fiddling along the river, looking to see if it’s feasible. We’ve kept right on digging. They thought we were mining—the only party that discovered our diggings. They were very patronizing, very polite, and they talked about the wonderful things a dam would do for us. Is that what you came to tell us, son?”
Rawley leaned back against the wall and laid one foot across the other knee, tapping his boot with his finger tips. He was facing them all. He must convince them, somehow, and he must batter down the dream of a lifetime to do it.
“No, you’ve read most of the talk,” he told Peter. “I admit the thing has almost been talked to death. It begins to look as though the general public is tired of reading about damming the Colorado. If that were all there is to it, Peter, I’d never say a word. But there are some facts we can’t get around with talk, or defiance. I came here to show them to you—just plain, hard facts—and let you see for yourself what they mean.
“In the first place—and this is probably the hardest fact you have to face—the Colorado is an international stream. It flows through a part of Mexico. The Constitution of the United States has decreed that such rivers must at all times and in every particular be under the control of the Federal Government. There are seven States bordering this river, yet not one of them dare build a dam without the consent and supervision of the government. Get that firmly planted in your minds, folks.”
Young Jess turned his head an inch and slanted a look at Old Jess. Old Jess crossed his legs, folded his arms and trotted one rusty boot, waggling his beard while he chewed tobacco complacently. No one could fail to read his mind, just then. He was thinking that what seven States were afraid to do, he, Jess Cramer, had dared. The joke was on the seven States, according to Old Jess’s viewpoint.
“Arizona,” Rawley went on, after a minute of contemplating the complete satisfaction of Old Jess, “Arizona wants water for irrigation. One hundred and fifty thousand acres of desert land can be made fertile with the water of the Colorado, properly diverted into a system of canals.”
“They kin have the water,” the Vulture conceded benificently. “We don’t want it. Glad to git rid of it. You kin tell ’em I said so.”
Young Jess laughed hoarsely.
“Sure. Glad to git it off’n our hands!”
“The State of Nevada wants power for her mines. The copper interests are after a dam up the river here, so that they can resume the output of copper. They want a smelter, operated by power from the Colorado. Two million brake horse-power of electric energy is slipping past your door, worse than wasted.
“California wants more power for her industries—”
“She’s welcome,” Old Jess stated smugly. “We ain’t hoggin’ no electric energy ’t I know of.”
“You are, if you interfere with the building of a dam of sufficient size and strength to conserve that power.”
Young Jess leaned forward, grinning impudently into Rawley’s face.
“Hell! There’s thousands uh miles up river that we ain’t doin’ a thing to. They kin build dams from here to Denver, fer all we care! That’s all poppycock, our interferin’. Everybody with ten cents in his pocket is talkin’ about buildin’ a dam in the Colorado. Why the hell don’t they go ahead and do it? We ain’t stoppin’ nobody!”
“You may be, without knowing it,” Rawley explained patiently, determined to educate them beyond their single-track idea, if possible. “I see how it looks to you, of course. But I’ll explain how it looks to the greatest engineers in the country, Jess. You remember I was rather keen for it, myself. It was out of my line, and I didn’t know.
“Now the fact is, you are attempting, with a certain amount of rock blown into the river from the sides, to dam a river second only to the Mississippi.
“I know, the Missouri is wider, but I am speaking now of the volume of water that passes through this canyon right here. It is a swift river, and it is a deep river. You don’t realize, any of you, just how deep and how swift it is, though you have lived beside it all your lives.
“Peter has spoken of the amount of money they are talking of spending to build a dam at Boulder Canyon, up here. The canyon there is as narrow as this; perhaps narrower. And to hold back the tremendous volume of water that flows past your door, engineers have said that they must go down one hundred and fifty feet, to bed rock, and start there to build their dam. They say that the dam will—must—to hold back the terrific pressure of water, rise something like six hundred feet above low-water mark. It will keep several thousand men working for eight or ten years to complete the dam, its spillways and main canals. It will cost around one hundred million dollars, and it will bring both protection and prosperity to thousands and thousands of people. That,” he declared, leaning forward, “is what it means to dam the Colorado.”
“It don’t mean that to us,” Old Jess stated, turning his quid to the other cheek. “We aim to show ’em something about buildin’ dams.” He grinned and showed yellow snags of teeth.
“Yeah. Wait till they see how we aim to do it,” snickered Young Jess. “We’ll be rakin’ in the gold whilst they’re still standin’ around with their mouths open.”
Peter had fallen into a taciturn, grim mood, staring somber-eyed at the river. Beside him, Nevada leaned chin upon her cupped palm and stared also. Several thousand men, working for eight years! That was as long as the years back to her first sight of the convent where Peter took her to be educated. Thousands of men working all that time—thousands! Was it, then, so deceptively vast, that river? Would the cliffs they had undermined fall in and be swept disdainfully away? Did it really belong to the government, that river, so that no man living all his life on its bank might say what should be done with it? Had Uncle Peter, and Young Jess and her grandfather been children, playing all these years beside a stream they must not touch or tamper with?
“It sounds as big as the stars,” she observed vaguely. “As if we had been waving a handkerchief at Mars, down here by the river, and then some one comes along and pushes us back and says, ‘Here, here, you must stand back. You are obstructing the view. The President wants to wave his handkerchief. You annoy him.’ Do you think,” she flashed at Rawley, “it is going to make any difference to the river—who dams it first?”
“You don’t get the point,” Rawley protested. “I am not responsible because the undertaking is so stupendous that it is beyond any private enterprise. You can’t shoot a lot of rock into the river and call that a dam. And if you could, you must not. Don’t you see? The welfare of too many thousands of people are involved. It’s a job for the government. You can’t take it for granted that, just because you have lived beside it all your lives, and because it doesn’t seem to belong to anybody, any more than the clouds belong, that you can claim it, or even claim the right to do as you please with it. There’s a right that goes away beyond the individual—”
“The gold down there is ours,” Old Jess cried fiercely. “We own placer claims on both sides of the river, and the lines run across. We’ve got a right to placer the gold in the river bed. It’s ours. We got a right to git it any way we kin! The gov’ment can’t stop us, neither.”
“Oh, yes, it can!” Rawley rashly contradicted. “When you come down to fine points, the government owns this river. It owns the river bed and whatever gold is there. By ‘right of eminent domain’, if you ever heard of that.”
“Right of eminent hell!” Young Jess got up and stood over Rawley threateningly. “Tell me a bunch uh swell-heads back in Wash’n’ton, that never seen this river, can set and tell us what we can do an’ what we can’t do? We own claims both sides the river, and we got a right to what’s in the river. You can’t come here and tell us, this late day, ’t we got to quit, and lose our time an’ money, because the gov’ment or somebody wants to build a dam. Hell, we ain’t stoppin’ nobody! They better nobody try an’ stop us, neither!”