Part 37 (2/2)
Ballard shook his head. ”Not now; they are all on the high land.” Then, remembering Bromley's report of the empty ranch headquarters and corrals: ”You think there is danger?”
”I don't think, suh: I _know_. Look thah,” waving an arm toward the dissolving mine dump on the opposing slope; ”when the wateh reaches that tunnel and finds its way behind the bulkhead, Mistuh Ballard, youh dam's gone--doomed as surely as that sinful world that wouldn't listen to Preachuh Noah!”
”But, Colonel--you can't know positively!”
”I do, suh. And Mistuh Pelham knows quite as well as I do. You may have noticed that we have no pumping machinery oveh yondeh, Mistuh Ballard: _That is because the mine drains out into youh pot-hole below the dam!_”
”Heavens and earth!” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Ballard, aghast at the possibilities laid bare in this single explanatory sentence. ”And you say that Mr.
Pelham knows this?”
”He has known it all along. I deemed it my neighbo'ly duty to inform him when we opened the lower level in the mine. But he won't be the loseh; no, suh; not Mistuh Howard Pelham. It'll be those po' sheep that he brought up here to-day to prepare them for the shearing--if the riveh gives him time to make the turn.”
”The danger is immediate, then?” said Bigelow.
The white-haired King of Arcadia was standing on the brink of the mesa cliff, a stark figure in the white moonlight, with his hand at his ear.
”Hark, gentlemen!” he commanded; and then: ”Youh ears are all youngeh than mine. What do you heah?”
It was Ballard who replied: ”The wind is rising on the range; I can hear it singing in the pines.”
”No, suh; that isn't the wind--it's wateh; torrents and oceans of it.
There have been great and phenomenal storms up in the basin all day; storms and cloud-bursts. See thah!”
A rippling wave a foot high came sweeping down the gla.s.sy surface of the reservoir lake, crowding and rioting until it doubled its depth in rus.h.i.+ng into the foothill canyon. Pa.s.sing the mine, it swept away other tons of the dump; and an instant later the water at the feet of the onlookers lifted like the heave of a great ground-swell--lifted, but did not subside.
Ballard's square jaw was out-thrust. ”We did not build for any such brutal tests as this,” he muttered. ”Another surge like that----”
”It is coming!” cried Elsa. ”The power dam in the upper canyon is gone!”
and the sharer of the single Cantrell Christian name shrieked and took shelter under Bigelow's arm.
Far up the moon-silvered expanse of the lake a black line was advancing at railway speed. It was like the ominous flattening of the sea before a hurricane; but the chief terror of it lay in the peaceful surroundings.
No cloud flecked the sky; no breath of air was stirring; the calm of the matchless summer night was unbroken, save by the surf-like murmur of the great wave as it rose high and still higher in the narrowing raceway.
Instinctively Ballard put his arm about Elsa and drew her back from the cliff's edge. There could be no chance of danger for the group looking on from the top of the high mesa; yet the commanding roar of the menace was irresistible.
When the wave entered the wedge-shaped upper end of the Elbow it was a foam-crested wall ten feet high, advancing with the black-arched front of a tidal billow, mighty, terrifying, the cold breath of it blowing like a chill wind from the underworld upon the group of watchers. In its onrush the remains of the mine dump melted and vanished, and the heavy bulkhead timbering at the mouth of the workings was torn away, to be hurled, with other tons of floating debris, against the back-wall of the dam.
Knowing all the conditions, Ballard thought the masonry would never withstand the hammer-blow impact of the wreck-laden billow. Yet it stood, apparently undamaged, even after the splintered ma.s.s of wreckage, tossed high on the crest of the wave, had leaped the coping course to plunge thundering into the ravine below. The great wall was like some ma.s.sive fortification reared to endure such shocks; and Elsa, facing the terrific spectacle beside her lover, like a reincarnation of one of the battle-maidens, gave him his rightful meed of praise.
”You builded well--you and the others!” she cried. ”It will not break!”
But even as she spoke, the forces that sap and destroy were at work.
There was a hoa.r.s.e groaning from the underground caverns of the zirconium mine--sounds as of a volcano in travail. The wave retreated for a little s.p.a.ce, and the white line of the coping showed bare and unbroken in the moonlight. Silence, the deafening silence which follows the thunderclap, succeeded to the clamour of the waters, and this in turn gave place to a curious gurgling roar as of some gigantic vessel emptying itself through an orifice in its bottom.
The white-haired king was nearest to the brink of peril. At the gurgling roar he turned with arms outspread and swept the onlooking group, augmented now by the men from Garou's cook camp, back and away from the dam-head. Out of the torrent-worn pit in the lower ravine a great jet of water was spurting intermittently, like the blood from a severed artery.
”That is the end!” groaned Ballard, turning away from the death grapple between his work and the blind giant of the Boiling Water; and just then Blacklock shouted, s.n.a.t.c.hed, wrestled for an instant with a writhing captive--and was left with a torn mackintosh in his hands for his only trophy.
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