Part 41 (2/2)

They had supposed him fled, the men down there, and were having a last hasty conference, doubtless as to the wisdom of now first attacking the camp. A grim smile came on the engineer's face. Their astonishment was comic--or would have been at a moment less perilous and fraught with less grave consequences.

An oath ripped from Burkhardt's lips. An angry curse it might have been at Madden that he had failed to arrest and hold the engineer according to plan. He gestured right and left, yelling something to the men around him. He himself began to run towards one end of the dam.

Weir stooped, picked up one of the canisters, blew on the fuse now burned so near the hole. Some men perhaps at this instant would have quailed for their own safety and at the prospect of hurling death among others. For death this tin cylinder meant for those below. But there was no tremor in Steele Weir's arm or heart.

He was the man of metal who had won the name ”Cold Steel”--calm, implacable, of steel-like purpose. With such enemies he could hold no other communion than that which gave death. For such there was no mercy. By the same sort of law that they would execute let them suffer--the law of lawlessness and force. Destruction they would give, destruction let them gain.

He straightened. He took a last look at the snapping, sparkling, smoldering fuse, then flung his burden full down upon the spot where the Mexicans were again pointing their guns at him. Swiftly picking up the second canister, while bullets whined by, he cast it down after the first. A glimpse of startled faces he had, of men attempting to scatter from before the huge missiles, then he flung himself full length upon the dam.

Interminably time seemed to stretch itself out as lying there he listened, waited, sought to brace himself for the impending shock. A quick doubt a.s.sailed his mind. Had the charges failed.

All at once the earth seemed rent by a roar that shook the very dam.

Followed instantly a second volume of sound more terrific, more blasting in its quality, more dreadful in its power, deafening, stunning, as if the world had erupted.

”Their dynamite!” Weir breathed to himself.

His ear-drums appeared to be broken. His hat was gone. His body ached from the tremendous dispersion of air. But that he could still hear he discovered when through his shocked auditory nerves he distinguished, as if far off, faint booming echoes from the hills.

He got to his knees, finally to his feet. Pressing his hands to his head he gazed slowly about. Stones and a rain of earth were still falling, as if from a meteoric bombardment. About him he perceived sections of woodwork shaken to pieces, collapsed.

Stepping to the edge of the dam he peered downward. A vast hole showed in the earth before the wall though the wall itself was uninjured and only smeared with a layer of soil. Huge rocks lay where there had been none before, uprooted and flung aside by the explosion, dispersed by the gigantic blast. On the hillside half a dozen men were picking themselves up and struggling wildly to flee. Nearer, a few other forms lay in the moonlight mangled and still, or mangled, and writhing in pain. Of all the rest--nothing.

Almost completely Burkhardt's predatory band had been blotted out.

Weir's thunderbolt had struck down into its very heart, and it had vanished.

As he turned and walked towards the end of the dam, he staggered a little. The sight had shaken even his iron nerve.

CHAPTER XXVII

WEIR STRIKES WHILE THE IRON IS HOT

In his runabout, with Sheriff Madden at his side, and followed by Atkinson and half a dozen men for guards in two other machines, Weir sped along the road to San Mateo. They carried with them Burkhardt, who had been found stunned and slightly injured, and two Mexican bandits who had been captured. Those of the party of attackers yet alive but seriously hurt were being treated at camp by Dr. Hosmer, while the young engineers, armed and eager, were scouring the mountain side for the few Mexicans who had got away.

It seemed a miracle that Burkhardt had escaped death, but the explanation was found no doubt in the fact he had started from the spot where the canisters fell and so at the moment of explosion was outside the area of its full destruction. To Weir the matter went deeper than that. Providence appeared to have saved him for punishment, for the long term of imprisonment he deserved for his crimes.

”I'd much rather have him alive than dead,” Steele had remarked to Madden, when the man was brought up from the canyon a prisoner.

The tremendous thunder-clap of sound from the camp had quickened the return of the superintendent and his men, already reached and warned by the doctor. More, it had startled even the drunken workmen so that when some one shouted that the dam had been blown up the debauch came to an immediate end, the house was deserted and the throng, incited by curiosity and wonder, went staggering and running for camp.

The first of these had arrived and the rest were tailing behind for half a mile when Weir and his companions set out for town, the blinding headlights of the machines scattering on either side of the road the approaching workmen. It was not likely many would go back to the house when they were told at headquarters how narrowly destruction of the works had been averted and how their spree had been a move in the plot. Between shame at being-duped and drowsiness resulting from drink they would, after a look at the hole blown in the earth at the base of the dam, want to seek their bunk-houses.

As they sped towards town Weir and Madden rapidly made their plans, for the sheriff having witnessed with his own eyes the enormity of the plotters' guilt was all for quick action.

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