Chapter 19. The Plotters

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_ CHAPTER XIX. THE PLOTTERS

When Blake came back with the baby, Isobel begged him for a full account of how Ashton had been wounded. In relating the affair he sought to minimize the danger that he had incurred, and he omitted all mention of the bullet shot at him the previous evening. But his account was frequently interrupted by exclamations from his wife and Isobel.

At the end he dwelt strongly on the cowardly haste of the assassin's flight; only to be met by a shrewdly anxious rejoinder from the girl: "He ran away after he attacked Lafe the other time. He will come back again!"

"Oh, Tom!" cried Genevieve--"if he does!"

"We will get him, that is all there is to it," replied her husband. "What do you say to that, Ashton?"

"We will not have the chance," said Ashton. "I don't believe he has nerve enough to try it the third time. But if he should--"

"No, no! I hope he keeps running forever!" fervently wished Isobel. "Don't you realize how close a miss that was, Lafe?--and the other time, too?"

"I like having one Miss close," he punned.

The girl blushed, but failed to show any sign of resentment.

Blake looked significantly at his wife. "Don't know but what I've changed my mind about a siesta," he remarked. "Here's Tommy gone to sleep just when I wanted to fight him. Do you think Miss Chuckie can keep him and Ashton from running away if I go to bring in the level?"

"You say you had started to run the line of levels across to the mountain?" she asked.

"Yes.... This little pleasantry has knocked us out of a day's work and you out of your trip to the canyon."

"But why couldn't I rod for you?" she suggested. "I noticed Lafayette the other day. It seems easier than golfing."

"It is."

"Then I shall do it. A good walk is exactly what I need."

"Genevieve!" hastily appealed Isobel. "Surely you'll not go off and leave me--us!"

"Thomas is asleep, and Lafayette needs to be quiet," was the demure reply. "Come, Tom. We'll run the levels over to the foot of the mountain, at least."

With a reproachful glance at the smiling couple, the girl slipped over to put Thomas Herbert between herself and Ashton. Blake found another bag and can, which last he filled with water from the bucket. Genevieve put on the cowboy hat that she had borrowed at the ranch, and sprang up to join him.

He paused for a question: "How about leaving the rifle?"

Isobel put her hand to a fold in her skirt and drew out her long-barreled automatic pistol. "I can do as well or better with this," she answered.

"What a wicked looking thing!" exclaimed Genevieve. "Surely, dear, you do not shoot it?"

"Shoot it!" put in Ashton. "Hasn't she told you about saving me from a rattler?"

"She did?"

"Yes," he replied, and he told about the rattlesnake in the bunkhouse.

"But I ought to have shot quicker," Isobel explained, when he finished. "I missed the head, though I aimed at it."

"The way we've left Thomas about on the ground!" exclaimed Genevieve. "Are there any of the horrid things around here? Is that why you carry the pistol?"

"No, no, don't be afraid. We've killed them out here, long ago, because of the cattle. I carry my pistol on the chance of killing wolves. They're dreadfully harmful to the calves and colts, you know."

"Good for you," praised Blake, as he picked up the rifle. "Well, we're off."

He started away, hand in hand with his wife. They were soon at the top of the dike slope and almost dancing along over the dry turf. It was months since they had been alone together in the open, and they were still deeper in love than at the time of their marriage--if that were possible.

They soon reached the place where the shooting had occurred. Here they picked up the lunch bag, Ashton's canteen and his hat, now punctured with another bullet hole; and at once started to carry the line of levels out across the valley. A few words of instruction made an efficient rodwoman of Genevieve, so that they soon reached the foot of the ridge up which her husband had led Ashton the previous day. Here he established a bench-mark, and turned along the base of the escarpment to the mouth of Dry Fork Gully, where he checked the line of levels that had been run up the bed of the creek.

"Good work--less than three tenths difference, and all that I am concerned about is an error in feet," he commented. "It's getting along towards noon. We'll go up the gulch, and eat our lunch in the shade. This place is almost as much of a sight as the canyon."

Genevieve more than agreed with her husband's opinion when he led her up into the stupendous gorge and the walls of rock began to tower on each side ever steeper and loftier.

"Oh, I do not see how anything can be so grand, so awesome as this!" she cried, gazing up the precipices. "It makes me positively giddy to look at such heights!"

"Better stop off for a while," advised Blake. "We are almost to where the bottom tilts skyward. You can stargaze while we are eating lunch. It's rougher along here. We can get on faster this way."

He picked her up in his arms as though she were a feather, and carried her on up the gulch to the foot of the Titanic chute. Here, resting on a flat rock in the cool semi-twilight of the gorge bottom, they ate their lunch and talked with as much zest as if they were still new acquaintances.

"Those awful cliffs!" she murmured, lowering her gaze from the colossal walls above her. "I cannot bear to look at them any longer. They overpower me!"

"Wait till you look down into the canyon," replied her husband. "In some ways it is more tremendous than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado--the width is so much narrower in proportion to the depth."

"What makes these frightful chasms?--earthquakes?"

"Water," he replied.

"Water? Not all these hundreds and thousands of feet cut down through the solid rock!"

"Every foot," he insisted. "Think of water flowing along in the same bed and always washing sand and gravel and even bowlders downstream--grind, grind, grind, through the centuries and hundreds of centuries."

"But there is no water here, Tom."

"Not now, and no chance of any this time of year, else I wouldn't have brought you in here. A sudden heavy June rain up above there would pour down a torrent that would drown us before we could run three hundred yards. Imagine a flood roaring down that bumpy shoot-the-chutes."

"I can't! It's too terrifying. Is that the way it will be if you get the water and dig the tunnel?"

"No. At this end, the tunnel may terminate any place from down here to a thousand feet up, but in any event far below the top. I hope it proves to be well up. The greater the drop to the level of the mesa, the more turbines could be put in to generate electricity."

"That sounds so inspiring! But, Dear--" Genevieve looked at her husband with a shade of anxiety--"even if this project is feasible, do you feel you should carry it through?"

"You mean on account of Miss Chuckie and her father," he replied. "I have considered their side of the matter, and even at the first I saw how--Listen, Sweetheart. No one knows better than you that I'm an engineer to the very marrow of my bones. My work in life is to construct,--to harness the forces of nature and compel them to serve mankind; and to save waste--waste material, waste energy--and put it to use."

"Don't I know, Tom!"

"Well, then," he went on, "in the bottom of Deep Canyon is a river--waste waters down there beyond the reach of this rich but waterless land, down in the gloom, doing no good to anything or anybody, frittering away their energy on barren rocks. Why, it's as bad as the way Ashton, with all the good qualities we now see he has in him--the way he dissipated his strength and his brains and his father's money."

"Ah, Dear! wasn't it a splendid thing when he was thrown out of his rut of wastefulness?"

"Otherwise known as the primrose path, or the great white way," added Blake. "It certainly was a throw out. I'm as pleased as I am astonished that he seems to have landed squarely on his feet."

"What a marvelous change it has made in him!" exclaimed Genevieve. "Sometimes I hardly can believe it really is Lafayette. He is so serious and manly."

"Good thing he has changed," replied Blake. "If Miss Chuckie hadn't told us he had made a clean breast of that bridge, I should begin to feel worried about--Do you know, Sweetheart, it's the strangest thing in the world the way I feel towards that girl. It's not because she is so lovely. Of course I enjoy her beauty, but that's not it. If Tommy were a girl and grown up--that's how I feel."

"She is a very dear, sweet girl."

"So are several of your friends--our friends," said Blake. "This is different. The very first day we met her, there was something about her voice and face--seemed as though I already knew her."

"She knew you, through what she had read of you. She warned me, in that frank, charming way of hers, that you were a hero to her and I must not mind if she worshiped you openly."

Blake laughed pleasedly. "Isn't she the greatest! And the way she chums with me! Wonder if that is what makes Ashton so sore at me? The idiot! Can't he see the difference?"

"Lovers always are blind," said Genevieve.

"I'm not," he rejoined, his eyes, as he gazed down into hers, as blue and tender as Isobel's.

The young wife blushed deliciously and rewarded him with a kiss.

"But about Chuckie?" she returned to the previous question. "You were going to tell me--"

"I am going to tell you something you will think is very fanciful--and it is! Do you know why I am so taken with that girl? It's because she reminds me of my sisters--what they might have grown to be!... God!--" he bent over with his face in his shaking hands--"God! If only they had gone any other way than--the way they did!"

"My poor dear boy!" soothed his wife, her hand on his downbent head. "Let us trust that they are in a happier world, a world where sorrow and pain--"

"If only I could believe that!" he groaned.

Genevieve waited a few moments and with quiet tactfulness sought to divert him from his grief: "If Chuckie reminds you of them, Dear--"

"She might be either--only Mary, the older one, had dark brown eyes. But Belle's were blue like Chuckie's."

"What a pure blue her eyes are--the sweet true girl! Why can't you regard her as your sister, and--and give over further thought of this irrigation project?"

Blake looked up, completely diverted. "You little schemer! So that's what you've been working around to?"

"But why not?" she insisted.

"I'll tell you. It is because I am so fond of Chuckie that I am determined to get water on Dry Mesa, if it is possible."

"But--"

"To make use of those waste waters," he explained; "to turn this dusty semi-desert into a garden; and to benefit Chuckie by doubling the value of her father's property."

"How could that be, when the farmers would divide up his range?"

"He owns five sections, Chuckie told me. What are they worth now? But with water on them, even without a single tree planted, they would sell as orchard land for more than all his herd; and he would still have his cattle. He could sell them to the settlers for more than what he now gets shipping them over the range."

"I begin to see, Tom. I might have known it."

"I'm telling you, of course. We're to keep it from them as a happy surprise, because it may not come off. There's still the question whether the water in the canyon--"

"But if it is! How delightful it will be to help Mr. Knowles and Chuckie, besides, as you say, turning this desert into a garden!"

"That valley is a natural reservoir site to hold flood waters," continued the engineer. "All that's needed is a dam built across the narrow place above the waterhole, with the dike for foundation. I would build it of rock from the tunnel, run down on a gravity tram."

"You've worked it all out?"

"Not all, only the general scheme. If the tunnel comes through high enough up here, we shall be able to manufacture cheap electricity to sell. Just think of our settlers plowing by electricity, and their wives cooking on electric stoves."

"You humorous boy!"

"No, I mean it. There's another thing--I wouldn't whisper it even to you if you weren't my partner as well as my wife. I have reason to believe the creek bed above the dike is a rich placer. I've planned to take Knowles and Ashton in on that discovery--Gowan, too, if Knowles asks it."

"A placer?"

"Yes, placer mine--gold washed down in the creek bed. But it's a small thing compared with another discovery I've made. Up there--" Blake pointed up the steep ledges that he had climbed--"I found a bonanza."

"Bonanza? What is that, pray?"

"A mint, a John D. bank account, a--Guess?"

"A gold mine! Oh, Tom, how romantic!"

"Yes; it's free-milling quartz. We can mill it ourselves, and not have to pay tribute to the Smelting Trust. That's romance--or at least sounds like it. You will pay for all the development work, in return for one-third share. I shall take a third, as the discoverer, and Chuckie gets the remaining third as grub-staker."

"As what?"

"She is staking us with grub--food and supplies. If she had not sent for me to come and look over the situation, I should not have been here to stumble on this mine. So she gets a share."

"I'm glad, glad, Tom! Isn't it nice to be able to do fine things for others? I'm so glad for Chuckie's sake, because, if Lafayette keeps on as he is doing now, he may win his father's forgiveness."

"What has that to do with Chuckie?"

"You and I know what she is, Dear; yet if she had no money, his father might insist on regarding her as a mere farm girl. He is as--as snobbish as I was when we were flung ashore by the storm, there in Mozambique."

"I fail to see that it matters any to Chuckie what Ashton senior thinks."

"Of course you don't see. You're as blind as when I--" the lady blushed--"as when I had to fling myself at you to make you see. The dear girl is as deeply in love with Lafayette as he is with her."

"No? She doesn't show it. How can you tell?"

"You know that Mr. Gowan is desperately in love with her."

"That stands to reason. He couldn't help but be. Can't say I like the fellow. He may be all right, though. Must have some good qualities--Chuckie seems to be very fond of him."

"As fond as if he were a brother. No; Lafayette is to be the happy man--unless he backslides. We must help him."

Blake nodded. "That's another thing that hangs on this project. If it proves to be feasible, I can give Ashton a chance to make good as an engineer. I used to think he must have bought his C.E. Now I see he has the makings."

"He can be brilliant when he chooses. If only he were not so--so scatter-brained."

"What he needed was a jolt heavy enough to shake him together. It seems as though his father gave it to him."

"That shock, and being picked up by Chuckie," agreed Genevieve.

"We'll help her keep him braced until the cement sets," said her husband. "It's even worse to let brains go to waste than water."

"Far worse! What is the good of all your engineering--of all the machinery, yes, and all the culture of civilization, if not to uplift men and women? May the next generation work for the uplifting of all mankind, both materially and spiritually!"

"We might make a try at it ourselves," said Blake. "As for the future, I know it will not be your fault if our member of the next generation fails to do his share of uplift work."

The young mother placed her hand on her bosom, and sprang up. "We should be going back, Dear. Thomas will be wakening." _

Read next: Chapter 20. Indian Shoes

Read previous: Chapter 18. On The Brink

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