by Peter Dawson
“Jensen sent a man over here on his way down from the pass yesterday,” she said breathlessly. “I should have remembered. He was clearing stumps from one of his new fields and asked Dad if he could borrow the tools for a few days. What . . . does this mean we can’t . . . ?” She couldn’t speak for a moment. Then: “Oh, Streak! I’m to blame for not thinking of it!”
He caught the rising note of her voice and said: “Easy, Cathy. Come along.” He led the way on down the slope.
She saw the glance that passed between him and Kelso as he set the case down. “Why don’t you say it?” she said lifelessly. “It’s my fault! I’m nothing but . . .”
“Cathy!” Streak said sharply. Then, more mildly: “Let’s go out and have a look.”
He must have sensed her utter misery, for he reached out and laid a hand on her arm and made her join him as he started out the narrow path along the crown of the dam. Kelso, silent, followed.
When they stopped at the big gate wheel at almost the exact center of the dam’s span, Cathy felt a moment of near panic as Streak’s hand left her arm. Far below, the water foaming from the wide concrete apron of the water gate arced out and splashed into a lower rock pool, its roar remote and subdued by the distance. The gate marked the near bottom of the lake, some forty-five vertical feet, and even for the outsloping face of the dam the height was awesome. Cathy looked away toward the lake, and her uneasiness over the sheer drop eased at the friendly nearness of the still water only four feet down from the solid earth under her feet.
Streak stood with hands on the big wheel that operated the gear of the steel gate far below. He leaned over and looked down the long round-tiled shaft that ran through the heart of the dam to the big gate’s gear box far below. Feeble light coming in through the concrete mouth of the gate down there disclosed a few hazy details. He could catch the oily sheen of the water rushing down the apron and above it the gear box with its four sturdy arms bolted to the top of the thick steel slab that held back the water. At three points between the gate and the wheel, big double brackets held rigid the bearings of the wheel shaft. The wheel itself was waist high, supported above the crown of the dam by a broad-based standard that was capped by a big bearing to hold this upper limit of the shaft rigid. Around the wheel the water mason’s boots had flattened a circular footpath, the mark of his countless openings and closings of the gate below. When water was plentiful, he lived up here in the shack, but during the last month the Association members had agreed on a permanent setting of the gate, and the water mason had gone down to fill a riding job.
Kelso, standing behind Cathy, said: “I could climb down a ways and you could let the stuff down to me with a rope. It’d take some time, but there’s enough loose rock down there so I could pile it up and take a chance on the blast pushin’ through.”
Streak straightened and shook his head. “That’s too much earth to move. You couldn’t pile enough rock over this much dynamite in a week to push the blast in. We’ll have to try something else.”
The lawman nodded toward the water’s edge, close below. “We could use that busted shovel and bury the stuff here at the top. In time, the water that came through would eat deeper and do the job.”
“Then there wouldn’t be enough water going down the creek at one time to do what we’re after,” was Streak’s answer.
Kelso let out a long slow sigh and shrugged. “Then I give up.”
“What about using all the dynamite we’ve got, tying it to one long bundle and dropping it down along this shaft on a rope? We let it lie on one of those supports and set it on a long fuse. Save out two sticks on a short fuse and let them down ten feet or so to blow in the top of the hole first. Then, when the main blast comes, it’ll rip out the middle of the . . .”
“That’s it! Man, you’ve got it!” Kelso cut in. He swung around and headed back toward the shack, his broken stride hurrying as he leaned heavily on his cane.
Cathy looked at Streak, caught his seriousness, and asked haltingly: “Will it . . . have we a chance?”
“We aren’t licked until we try,” was his answer. Still, she could see that he was worried.
It seemed an interminable time before they were ready. Kelso had to make one trip up the hill to the horses after the coil of capped fuses, several rawhide saddle thongs, and the rope. When he came back with them, there was another delay when Streak had to remove several of the copper caps and tie lengths of fuse together. Cathy wondered at his careful handling of the small copper cylinders until Kelso stated: “You’ve worked with this stuff before, Mathiot.”
Finally Streak came erect. “That’ll about do it,” he drawled. Lying at his feet was a long cylindrical bundle of dynamite sticks with the black lengths of their fuses gathered at one end and wound to the main fuse, a scant two feet long. Near the head of the bundle one end of the long rope was secured. Three other sticks on a shorter fuse were tied to the lengths of rawhide the sheriff had taken from the saddles.
“Got a match, Sheriff?” Streak asked, looking up.
Kelso’s answer surprised Cathy. “No.”
“Come on,” Streak drawled. “You’re wasting time. This is my baby.”
The sheriff shook his head stubbornly. “Maybe so. But I take over from here on. Whoever lights them things is goin’ to have to drop that bundle sure and fast and get out faster. That means me, not you.”
Cathy understood now. They had used all the short lengths of fuse. Still, the man who stayed behind to light them, first to lower the big bundle down along the tiled shaft by the rope and then tie the small one so that it hung only eight or ten feet below the crown of the dam, was to be in real danger. Kelso’s insistence on doing the job himself, Streak’s equally insistent refusal to let him, was proof enough. They regarded each other a moment in stubborn silence. Finally Streak shrugged and reached into a pocket to bring out a silver dollar. “Call it,” he said, spinning the coin in the air, catching it, and covering it with his other palm.
“You call it,” Kelso growled.
“Heads.”
Kelso leaned over to look as Streak uncovered the coin. He cursed softly when he saw what it was. Then he nodded to Cathy. “We’d better get out of here.”
Cathy looked back when she and Kelso were halfway across to the shack. Streak was beside the wheel lighting the fuse of the big bundle. She stopped, watching him suddenly lift the bundle and drop it down the opening of the wheel shaft, the trailing length of black smoking fuse snaking after it. Then he was lighting a match and holding it to the fuse of the smaller bundle.
Beside her, Ledge’s sheriff breathed: “There’s a man, Cathy.”
They saw the short rope that was to hold the smaller charge in place play out through Streak’s stiff hands. He stood up, holding the end of the rope. Blue smoke fogged up out of the shaft hole as he deliberately reached over and began tying the end of the rope to the wheel rim.
“A single knot’ll hold!” Kelso shouted. “Get out of there!”
But Streak made sure, doubling his knot. Then he turned and started running toward them, waving them back.
As the lawman and Cathy turned away again, hurrying on, a hollow explosion marked the instant the earth trembled under their feet. Cathy cried out, tried to stop. But the sheriff pulled her on.
“He’s all right,” he said brusquely. “That’s the small one.”
They were abreast the shack, past it, and then several paces up the slope. Cathy pulled her arm loose and stopped. Streak was halfway to the shack.
She saw him suddenly stumble and fall to his knees. He was up again before she felt the ground under her shake with a violence that threatened to throw her off her feet. The muted yet terrific blast echoed in a concussion that hurt her ears. She saw a billowing mass of earth geyser out from the creek face of the dam, saw the path behind Streak drop out of sight into a cavernous break. Then she cried out as the very ground under his boots seemed to fall away.
Sensing his peril, Streak gav
e a lunging leap that carried him onto firm ground. For a moment it seemed that he would fall back onto the huge water-moved mass of shifting earth the blast had torn in the dam. Then, abruptly, he was standing straight, running across the last twenty feet of the dam’s crown and in toward the shack. He paused momentarily beside them, breathing deep gasping inhalations of air, his glance going to the awesome scene below. Slowly, majestically the center of the dam gave way, hung outward and seemingly motionless an instant, then started dropping with gathering speed before a solid wall of water.
“Run for it!” Streak called over the roll of mounting thunder. He took Cathy’s arm and started up the shoulder of the hill. Kelso stayed abreast of them, his choppy stride as fast as he could make it.
Streak saw one of the horses, the sheriff’s, wheel nervously and toss his head, whipping his trailing reins clear of the ground. He left Cathy and ran across to catch the animal’s reins, then managed to catch up the other two as the thunder of the tons of cascading water welled up out of the gorge in a deafening inferno of sound.
Cathy and Kelso came up to him and the three of them stood speechless, watching. A solid wall of water a little lower than the dam itself had already filled the narrow notch downstream and was plummeting toward the valley, tearing out loose boulders from the hillsides, uprooting the few towering yellow bark pines along the slopes as though they were slender twigs. Where the dam had been, only an oily glistening mass of water showed, flowing so swiftly that the shack, floating away, seemed to travel out of sight with the speed of an express train.
“That’ll do it!” Kelso shouted over the thundering roar that was gradually increasing in tone.
Half a mile below, they saw a scattering of huge boulders and outcrops mowed off the face of a hill by the roiled and foaming wall of water. In a short time they saw that mass of water flatten slightly as it reached a broader expanse of ground. It struck the first thick stand of timber and bowled over the trees like matchwood, the giant boles of the pines upending and wheeling along with the swift current. Close downward, the lake had fallen twenty feet, and still that relentless solid mass of water flowed over the crumbling lower sections of the dam, eating its foundations away. Now the roar had increased to a treble note, like the sound made by a high wind, a silky rush of overtones that became almost a shriek, with the distant thunder of the water wall far downward adding depth to the terrific note.
Kelso put a hand on Streak’s shoulder, squeezed it and shouted: “It’s good you’re here, boy! I couldn’t have made it.”
Streak looked at Cathy, his expression sober with a strong amusement in his eyes. He reached into his pocket to bring out the silver dollar he had used in deciding the issue down there on the dam. It lay in his palm, showing heads. He showed it to Kelso. He turned it over. It still showed heads.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tom Buchwalter was scared. He was getting out, leaving this country fast. He took his last unregretful look at Fencerail shortly after 2:00 that afternoon and cut quickly into the friendly cover of the timber trail, his blanket roll tied to the saddle behind him. Too much had happened today for him to keep his usual peace of mind, and his confidence, supreme when he held the whip hand, had been shaken mightily by things he didn’t understand. He had read the signs and had decided that he was finished in this country, that his luck had run out.
Back there at the hide-out, Buchwalter had regained consciousness with a tender scalp, a splitting headache, and the flash memory of Mathiot striking him down. How Mathiot had escaped jail a second time he had no way of knowing, nor could he guess where Mathiot had gone on leaving the hide-out. But below the slitted entrance to the cañon pocket he had found two more sets of tracks besides that of his own strangely missing pony and realized with sudden numbing apprehension that someone besides Mathiot now knew his secret. Still, when he walked back to the camp in Prenn’s meadow, he’d had no thought of leaving, for he could easily explain being there in the hide-out. Hadn’t he as much right as anyone else to be curious, to have gone in there for a look around? But when the fires were spotted high in the timber in the east, when the word came that there was not one fire but three, some inner sixth sense told Buchwalter that he had reached the end of his rope here, that it was only a matter of time before his murder-fed intrigue with Pete Dallam would come to light. He had always been a man to look out for himself first and the other fellow afterward. Making Prenn an excuse of having to ride across to Fencerail on business, he had left the west slope crews as they began moving the sheep to the far side of the meadow.
At Fencerail he had spent some minutes burning a bundle of papers and gathering only his necessary belongings to roll in a ground sheet and blanket. He seldom carried a gun, yet one thing to which he now gave careful attention was the strapping on of a shoulder holster under his coat and an inspection of the short-barreled Colt in it. While he worked, Buchwalter thought back on the morning, on Pete Dallam’s all-consuming rage at learning of last night’s raid on the meadow. Buchwalter himself was partly to blame for those three fires raging on the east slope for, as he left Prenn there at the meadow shortly after dawn, he’d had the idea that Pete could even the score with Bishop by that day putting the torch to the Crescent B. However, Pete had amplified that idea. The sheer magnitude of his revenge impressed Buchwalter as nothing he had ever had a hand in.
Except for knowing that at least one other man besides Mathiot was on a warm trail that might eventually lead to Dallam, Buchwalter would have seen in those fires a sure way for Dallam to become kingpin in this country and a secure future for himself. But there was that very possible chance that Dallam’s secret would soon be exposed, and himself with it. So, reluctantly, he went to the big iron safe in the office and took from it $2,300, what remained of the $4,000 Laura had collected on Pete’s insurance. It wasn’t much, he decided, but it would give him some kind of a start in a new country.
Only when he had put the banknotes and gold coins in a money belt and strapped the belt about his waist under his shirt did real fear begin to plague him. He was stealing money from Pete, and of all the men he had ever known, Pete Dallam, in one of his late half-insane rages, could be the most dangerous. For this reason Buchwalter felt keen relief once he was well into the trees along the town trail. He would follow it a few miles and then strike a little-used side trail that would eventually put him onto the Agua Verde road well over the hill hump that marked the western limit of the valley. He had better than four hours to get to Agua and take the stage out. Not bad, he decided.
Life for Tom Buchwalter had been a series of just such happenings as this. He had known cards and used them professionally before he was fifteen. By his twentieth year his real name, Shropshire, had graced Reward dodgers posted on all the Mississippi and Ohio riverboats and he’d had to move on. In Montana he’d had some brief success at cattle rustling and selling stolen beef to a crooked Indian agent. Then the Army caught up with him, forcing him into the business he had stuck with ever since. He knew sheep, knew the men who worked them, although he hadn’t ever owned any himself. A shrewd and brainy man, he had more than once realized that he might do better on his own than in working for someone else. Still, there was in him a warped sense of values that turned drab the prospect of years of hard work to build an honest stake. He had been tempted to try it but had never given way to the temptation. Now, at fifty-four, he knew that it was too late. So he played with what goodness was left in him by showing a benign and gentle face to the world, using it as an outward mask behind which to hide his truer self.
He was unhurriedly riding a section in which trees were sparse as these thoughts of the past came to him. He was so absorbed in his thinking that the quick wary lift of his pony’s ears passed unnoticed. Only when the animal whickered nervously was he aware of anything wrong, and by that time it was too late.
Pete Dallam, elbow leaning on the full swell of his saddle, sat his grulla horse squarely across the trail only fifty feet ahea
d. Buchwalter’s look was so openly amazed that Dallam laughed.
“Sort of spooked, ain’t you, Tom?” he drawled.
The older man’s recovery was quick and sure. He smiled broadly. “You’re a damned cat the way you get around,” he said. “Sure I was spooked.”
His casualness didn’t quite carry, for Dallam had caught him an instant unawares, when his face was without its guarded expression.
“Goin’ somewhere?” Dallam asked, staring pointedly at the tarp-covered roll laced to the cantle of Buchwalter’s saddle.
The Fencerail foreman did some quick and straight thinking. No use in trying to lie his way out of this, he decided. So, for once, he put his trust in the truth. “I’m on my way out,” he said. “Mathiot gun-whipped me up there at the hide-out. When I came to, I found he wasn’t the only one that had been there. So I figured we’d about played out our string.”
Something he said laid a sharp graven cast over Dallam’s face. “You’re tellin’ me someone else besides Mathiot knows about this?” he queried flatly.
“Looks that way.”
Dallam’s look turned ugly, then eased as he sat a moment in deep thought. Then: “Tom, we’ve got to find out who this other jasper is, get to him before he can talk. Any guesses?”
“If I was you, I’d worry about Mathiot first.”
“He’s dead.”
That answer, hardly surprising, started Buchwalter on a new line of thinking. If Mathiot was dead, and if, as Pete said, the other man could be found and silenced, then there was still hope of a future for him here. He cast back over the happenings of the night before and that day, and said finally: “Paight sort of took to Mathiot from the first. But he’s been up at the needle rock since before sunup waiting for word from me to blow that channel clear. So it couldn’t have been . . .” He paused abruptly, then breathed: “Kelso. He must be the one. Mathiot was in jail last night. No one I know of busted him out. Riggs sure didn’t. I didn’t. So he must’ve talked Kelso into letting him out and siding him to the hide-out. There’s your man, Pete.”