They walked on, heads turned toward the spectacle. The sun, rising higher, splashed a mellow light into the deep crannies between the bowlders, set the bald pates of smoothed granite rocks a-gleam,—rocks never before uncovered in the history of man.
Rawley turned and looked curiously at Peter, whose eyes were upon the river bed while his feet stumbled along the trail. They were anxious to reach the dam, every man of them. The engineer was stepping out briskly, keen glances going to the cliffs up-river; but for all their haste they could not forebear to gaze down at the stark, denuded canyon bottom, where a great river had been halted in its headlong rush.
“Well, Uncle Peter, you’ve had your wish,” Rawley said at last. “You said you were waiting for the day when you could show the Colorado who was boss. You wanted to stop it. It’s stopped.”
Peter looked at him, smiling faintly.
“I was just thinking of Johnny Buffalo, that last night,” he said, speaking so that the others, straggling along the trail, would not hear. “What was that he said? ‘You will succeed, and fail in the succeeding. And from the failure you will rise to greater things’—or something like that. It just struck me. I wonder if he meant,—this.” He tilted his head toward the river. “I’ve succeeded. I’ve stopped the Colorado, and shown it who’s boss. But it isn’t like I dreamed it, after all. I’ve got a hunch, boy, that we’ll never work that dredger. Maybe the government will have other ideas about that. It was a self-centered plan, I admit that now. It had no right to succeed. The folks below need the river. I hadn’t figured them into the calculations at all.”
Jerry Newton overheard that last observation and stepped faster until he was just behind them.
“Did you ever see a flood, Mr. Cramer? I covered Pueblo and several other places; was down South, that last big one. Families down below here are getting out,—and believe me, they are making it snappy! I’ll bet you couldn’t find a breakfast cooked in its own kitchen, down below here, to save your life! They know what a flood means, and this is going to be like the crack o’ doom when it comes. Sudden, what I mean. They’ve been tickling the gas levers, believe me, since that blast went off.”
Peter turned and looked at him, frowning.
“What makes you all take it for granted the dam won’t hold?” he queried resentfully. “It would, I’d stake my life on it almost, though it should have been shot in low water, or falling water. This high water is not going to last. It’s the run-off of a big general storm, and I believe the peak is past, anyway. You don’t realize the size of the Cramer Dam. And you seem to forget altogether the auxiliary dam that can be thrown in, any time it seems necessary.”
Jerry Newton saw the point, but he saw something else, and being a blunt young man by nature, he blurted a retort.
“If you’re so sure of its holding, Mr. Cramer, what are you so worried about?”
Peter’s eyes hardened.
“Lives, young fellow. Two of them dear to me.”
The A. P. man was silenced. He looked contritely at Peter’s back, but he could not think of anything to say.
“Look there!” The engineer, hurrying along in the lead, stopped and pointed. “That’s what I call enterprise. But it’s taking a chance I shouldn’t care about, myself.”
The party pulled up, facing the river. They had reached the lower edge of the basin, about where Rawley and Johnny Buffalo had camped. The bank here was high and rocky as the canyon opened slowly its mouth. The river had been forced to a narrower channel, and it held therefore a deeper bed.
Away down there in the middle of it, almost at the edge of the channel fighting still to hold its own, a bent figure was groping, bent almost double, eyes to the ground. Now and then it knelt and clawed in slimy pools. Then it went on, inch by inch, like a child picking pretty pebbles on a beach.
“Old Jess!” cried Rawley. “Peter, it’s Old Jess! Call to him! He’ll step into a hole—there’s quicksand—or if the dam breaks—”
“He’s crazy!” several of the party spoke the words at once, as sometimes happens, unconsciously forming an impromptu chorus. “Call him out of there!”
“He wouldn’t come!” Peter was starting toward the edge, seeking a trail down. Rawley, running ahead to the place where he used to bring up water, was down before him.
“Go back! I’ll get him,” shouted Peter, scrambling after, and those left at the top gesticulated and shouted.
“You go back,” Rawley cried over his shoulder. “One’s enough!” Then, having reached the bottom, he started out.
The vulture saw them, and flapped his arms and screamed vituperations in a reasonless rage, greed-mad, thinking they were come to rob him.
Slipping, sliding among the bowlders that piled the river bed in places, the two ran out, instinctively avoiding the treacherous bars of engulfing mud that lay upstream from some larger obstruction, the deep pools where fish were leaping. Neither would turn back. Both men realized that.
The vulture picked up a rock as big as his fist and threatened them with it. They went on, straight for him. Old Jess gave a maniacal scream, hurled the rock and fled. Rawley ducked. But Peter, coming just behind him, was caught in the chest. He lurched, slipped on a slimy spot and went down backward on a rock.
Rawley did not see. He was hot after the old man, who ran awkwardly, his pockets weighted so that they sagged the full stretch of the cloth, a sample bag over his shoulder knocking heavily against his back. He headed straight for the current that boiled, a miniature Colorado, in the channel.
He meant to jump it and gain the other side. He had lost all sense of proportion. He did not see that a horse could scarcely clear the racing flood. Rawley shouted a warning just as Old Jess reached the brink. The old vulture gave a scream, sprang out, and the current caught him and dragged him down.
Rawley ran for a few steps down the plunging stream, put one foot in the quicksand and hurled himself back just in time. The black, tumbled object that was Old Jess whirled on.
“The river never gives up its dead; he said it himself,” Rawley exclaimed in an awed tone to Peter, and turned. But Peter was not behind him, as he had supposed. Then he saw him lying among a litter of small, mossy rocks.
Up on the bank men were shouting, pointing upriver when Rawley heaved Peter up on his back and started picking his way toward shore. Rawley glanced up, saw the stretched arms, looked, and began running.
Up the river, close against shore, looking as if it were hugging the rocks for protection, a narrow, white line came leaping down upon him. The Colorado was not a river to submit tamely to the will of man. It had found a weak spot close inshore, and in the few hours that it had been fretting against its barrier, it had eaten a way through. Now a slim skirmisher came surging down through the tunnel the water had made.
Men scrambled down the bluff toward him; well-groomed men with patent leathers that slipped on the steep bank. They could not help, but neither could they stand up there with their hands in their pockets and watch.
Rawley did not see them. He did not see that gamboling white line, after the first glance. He did not see anything, save the next place where he must set his foot, the next mud bar which he must avoid. His shoulders were bent under the two-hundred-pound weight of a man he loved as he had never before loved any man, and he knew that safety might lie in a second,—in one long stride.
The rocks seemed to grow more slippery, more slimy as he went on. The mud banks seemed to slide in upon him. He had to turn back once, just in time to avoid a patch of ooze. He imagined that the shore receded, or that he stood still and moved his feet in one spot. But he fought that notion and forced himself to believe that he was making time against the small, devouring flood that was racing down at him. He kept telling himself that the water had twice as far to travel in order to engulf him as he must go to escape it.
He was right. The water had farther to travel, and he made time. Indeed, the spectators swore that he made a new record for speed. Running with two hundred pounds on his back was a feat for any man on smooth going, they told him. Over that course, it was not an achievement at all; it was a miracle.
However that may be, Rawley used his last ounce of energy to reach the bank. A gloved hand reached down and caught him. Its mate seized the other wrist. He gave a final dig with his toes and a scrambling wriggle, and crawled up as some one pulled Peter off his back and the small torrent swept past.
On a shelf of rock above the watermark he lay back for a minute to breathe before he essayed to climb the high bank. He looked down at the rush of water, his eyes wide.
“Lord, I thought it was the whole river coming at me!” he panted disgustedly, looking up into the face of the Governor, whose hand had reached down to him. “Why, I could jump that,—almost.”
“Hardly, with a load,” the Governor retorted. “And then, the whole dam may give way at any moment, now it has started.”
Peter stirred and struggled to sit up. His dazed eyes went down to the new torrent. The sight stung him to full consciousness. He came up like a lion wounded but full of fight.
“Come on! We’ve got to shoot in that auxiliary dam,” he shouted thickly. “I—was going to—anyway. And let this flood down—easy.”