In the Shadow of the Hills by George C. Shedd (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📕

up into the seat.

"You--you will take care of yourself," Janet said, tremulously.

"I expect to. Still, this isn't going to be a croquet party; anything may happen. Good-by."

With that he swung about and breaking into a run made for a small building half-buried in the hillside and apart from the camp. There he stooped and picked up under each arm what looked like a cylinder of some size and went down towards the dam. For a time they could see him, but all at once he slipped behind an outcrop of rock and they saw him no more.

Janet turned to eye her companion. Once more her face was pale.

"Well?" she inquired of Mary.

"I reckon we'd better do as he says. He'd be awful mad if we didn't. Did you see his eyes when he talked to us?"

"But if he--he and others are wounded?"

Uneasily Mary gazed at the older girl and then down at the canyon. On the hillside the men led by her father were no longer in sight, somewhere concealed among the stones that dotted the earth. But down by the stream and now scarcely fifty yards from the white stretch of concrete barring the river bed through a tunnel in which the water foamed and escaped, the Mexicans were clearly visible, their hats bobbing about, their guns flinging upward an occasional gleam.

"It doesn't seem as if anything was going to happen," Mary went on in awed tones. "Things are so quiet and peaceful."

Still Janet delayed starting the car, divided in feelings between a wish to respect Steele Weir's insistent command and a growing fear for his safety. She could see nothing of him. Into the shadow of a rock he had disappeared and thither she gazed with straining eyes, hoping to see again his straight strong figure.

"Why, look down there at the dam," Mary said, whose eyes had been wandering from, point to point of the scene. "Isn't that him?"

Janet's heart gave a quicker beat, then seemed to sink in her breast as staring downward she recognized the engineer. He had come out all at once from the shade cast by a wooden framework. He had with him the burdens he had lifted from the ground before the little detached stone house at the edge of the camp, and these, the cylinders, he placed on the surface of the concrete core at the spot where he stood. Then he knelt down, struck a match, lighted a cigar--as if any man in his senses would stop to smoke in such a situation!--and busied himself at some task over the cylinders.

Only for an instant had he stood erect on the flat top of the dam. Apparently he had been unseen by the attackers, engaged in picking their footing: and now in his crouching position, retired from the upper edge of the dam's front as he was, it was very likely that he was wholly out of view of the band.

At last Weir moved his cylinders forward towards this edge. Afterwards he straightened up and standing hands on hips, smoking his cigar, the tiny crimson glow of which rose and fell, he watched the party nearing the foot of the white gleaming wall, fifty feet below him.

For Janet the sight was too much. His indifference to risk froze her; he appeared to be courting death; and she strove to open her lips to send down to him an imploring cry to draw back, but succeeded in uttering only a tremulous wail.

"They'll shoot him," Mary was saying, "oh, they'll kill him!"

A surge of terror swept Janet. Next thing she knew she was out of the car and running down the hillside among the stones and the stalks of sagebrush, frantic to reach him, to pull him out of view of the men beneath. Only a single one of them had to cast a glance upward and to raise his gun and fire, then he would die. He should not die! She should fling herself as a protection before him rather than that he should be slain!

On a sudden a hand reached up from a rock and seized her arm, stopping her with a jerk. Then she was roughly pulled down beside it. The man was Madden, the sheriff.

"What in hell are you doing?" he demanded harshly. "Have you gone crazy?"

His grip was not relinquished.

"But see him! Aren't you men going to help him? Are you going to let him be killed?"

Madden forced her to her knees, so that she was sheltered by the outcrop of stone.

"Any man who can smoke a cigar like that at such a time as this knows just what he's doing," was the answer. "Keep quiet and watch."

"Oh, I don't want to see," she said. But she continued to look with fascinated eyes at the lone, calm figure on the dam.

Presently Madden pushed his gun forward over the rock.

"They've caught sight of him," he stated.


CHAPTER XXVI

THE THUNDERBOLT

The greater part of the number of bandits had stopped in a group a few yards from the base of the white dam core, though a few stragglers were some way behind. Among these Steele Weir made out the figure of one whom he recognized as a white man; he whom the guard from the spring had mentioned as directing the company; and when at a number of exclamations from Mexicans who perceived the engineer the man lifted his face, Weir saw he was Burkhardt.

No more than this was needed to show whose the hand behind this treacherous conspiracy. Clear, too, it was that Burkhardt, determined that no mistake or abandonment of the operation should occur, had come to see it through in person. Weir could ask nothing better; he had one of the plotters caught in the act.

Apparently orders had been to carry through the first part of the diabolical plan of destruction in silence, that of gaining control of the dam, for when two or three Mexicans flung up rifles to shoot at Weir a sharp word from another Mexican, seemingly their leader, had checked the volley and shouted to Burkhardt.

The latter had stopped; he stared for a few seconds at the man on the white wall above and finally signaled with a wave of his arm.

"Come down here," he ordered.

But Weir made no move to obey. He continued to stand motionless, coolly regarding the party beneath. His eyes particularly considered two men who carried wooden boxes, square and stout, on their shoulders. At last he spoke.

"What do you want here?"

"Come down, then you'll learn," Burkhardt shouted up, making no effort to hide the enmity in his voice.

Weir puffed at his cigar, removed it from his lips to glance at its glowing end, while the Mexicans stared up at him in silence, puzzled by this lone guard who carried no rifle, who did not flee away to spread an alarm and seek aid, and who so unexpectedly had appeared as if anticipating their visit.

Murmurs broke out. Why were they not allowed to shoot him at once in the approved Mexican bandit fashion and proceed to their work? If he were not shot at once, he yet could escape for aid. The party had to ascend the hillside in order to mount to the top of the concrete work. Time would be required to place and fire their charges of dynamite--and they were eager to get at the loot in the buildings above.

"Kill him," Burkhardt roared suddenly, jerking forth his revolver and blazing at the engineer.

The bullet sang past Weir's head. He did not duck; indeed, kept his place calmly while the Mexicans were raising their guns, as if to show his supreme contempt for their power. But at the instant Burkhardt fired again and a dozen rifles blazed he sprang back and dropped flat, leaving the deadly missiles to speed harmlessly above the dam.

Raising himself cautiously he seized the end of a fuse projecting from one of the canisters and held the crimson end of his cigar against it until a sputter of sparks showed that it had caught. From this fuse he turned to the one in the second can and repeated the operation.

This was the essence of his plan of defense. With guns the defenders on the hillside would be outnumbered and probably killed in an attack. The information that the assailants were to steal up the canyon, however, was the key that would unlock a desperate situation, and his mind had grasped the mode and means of defeating the enemy.

With the first shots quiet had returned. The night seemed for Weir as peaceful as ever, the earth bathed in moonlight, the camp at rest. Only before him there was the sputter of the two fuses, one at the right, one at the left, as the trains of fire burned towards the holes in the canisters. He watched these calculatingly. His cigar no longer of service had been cast aside.

All at once he rose erect again. A few men were starting along the wall to climb the hillside, but the greater number were gathered about Burkhardt and the Mexican leader. Now Weir glanced at them and now at the fuses.

"I warn you to leave this dam and camp, Burkhardt," he shouted, when a few seconds had passed. "Don't say I didn't give you warning."

Every head jerked upward at this surprising reappearance and voice. 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 assailed his mind. Had the charges failed.

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