Edward G. Cheyney

AT THE RESERVOIR

Scott and Baxter lay awake far into the small hours of the morning discussing the events of the past evening. Baxter had been in the West long enough to have lost his aversion to a gun, if indeed he had ever had any, and could not understand Scott’s scruples.

“If ever a man had need of gun,” he exclaimed, “you have now. Here you are traipsing around the country with a bad man on your trail and not so much as a cap pistol in your belt. Why, man, if you’d had a gun there to-night you could have blown that skunk into kingdom come and ended all this rumpus.”

“And thought about it all the rest of my life,” Scott replied.

Baxter looked at him hopelessly and gave it up. “Well, you ought to be pretty safe up there at the dam if they don’t know you are there. Ramsey is evidently looking out for you down there and I’ll keep a weather eye on the pass here. Let’s go to sleep so that you can get away from here in the morning before anybody sees you.”

The nerves of youth are easily settled and Scott was soon sleeping as peacefully as though nothing had happened. At his first snore Baxter raised up cautiously and crawled out of bed. He slipped on his clothes and took his seat at the open doorway with his revolver lying within easy reach. “Let that devil come snooping around here,” he muttered, “and I’ll see how my scruples work on him.”

At the first streak of day the faithful guardian arose and quietly prepared breakfast. “Come out of it, Burton, and throw some of this into you,” he called to Scott when all was ready.

“Why didn’t you call me earlier?” Scott complained.

“Because I had not been out dodging bullets all night and did not need the sleep.”

“How about grub up there at the dam?” Scott asked. “I don’t know anything about the place and never thought about provisions last night.”

“Strange, not having anything else to think about,” Baxter commented sarcastically. “Better take along a few things from here to make sure, but the cabin up there is usually pretty well stocked, I think. If you are ready we better be going; we are not so likely to meet any one on the trail now.”

He threw such perishable provisions as he happened to have into a bag and started for the corral. Scott saw him pick his revolver up from the bench by the door and stick it into his holster.

It was just light enough to see when they started up the trail which led over the pass. They were nearly to the place where they were fighting the fire the day before when Baxter turned from the trail into the heavier timber.

“What’s the big scare now,” Scott asked looking curiously around.

“May not be anything in it,” Baxter replied, “but old Benny up there in the lookout tower has eyes like a hawk. If he sees anything moving within fifty miles he hauls out those old field glasses and identifies it. He might recognize you and spread the news all over the country. He is all right and would not tell any one if he knew why you were going, but he doesn’t know and has nothing to do but talk gossip over the ’phone.”

So they stuck to the hillside in spite of the rough going and managed to keep out of Benny’s sight.

“Now you are all right,” Baxter assured him. “This trail is not very good but you can follow it easy enough and it will lead you straight to the dam. There is not supposed to be any one up that way, but if you should see any one duck.”

“I suppose there is a telephone up there?” Scott asked.

“Yes, and you better listen in on every call you hear, because some of us may want to warn you, but don’t talk unless you are sure who it is. They might try to locate you that way.”

“Well, so long,” Scott said, “I certainly appreciate what you have done for me.”

“Haven’t had a chance yet,” Baxter replied cheerfully, “but I am praying for the opportunity. Don’t you think you better take my gun? I have another at the cabin.”

“No,” Scott laughed, “I might shoot myself. So long.”

Once more he was alone with his thoughts, taking to the hills like a hunted animal and not knowing who might be on his trail or where. At least he felt certain that no enemies were ahead of him and he did not fear those who followed as long as he was in the open. He was going into a new country and that always pleased him. The thought of his dangers was soon wiped out by the wildness and ruggedness of the mountains around him.

This trail was little more than a cow track and he lost sight of it several times, but Jed followed it as easily as a hound no matter how vague it seemed to Scott. If this was the only trail to the dam he thought the supervisor had picked a very good hiding place for him. Here and there the mountains receded enough to make a fairly respectable valley, but for the most part they crowded in pretty close and left little more than a narrow caÑon. There were traces of a dry stream bed in the bottom of it and Scott guessed that it was the spillway for the dam in time of flood. He noticed that if there should be much of a run-off there would be scant room for the trail.

After two hours of steady climbing Jed emerged into a small flat, grassy and an ideal meadow. At the upper end of the flat was a heavy mason work wall, twenty feet high in the middle and stretching clear across from slope to slope. Back of it was a great amphitheater surrounded by mountain peaks. It was a magnificent picture and Scott sat for a few minutes drinking it in. The grandeur of it awed him a little, but it had a wonderful, mysterious beauty that fascinated him. He had often read of the eagle’s eyrie on the mountain peaks and now he felt that he had found it. The prospect of a week in that little cabin on the end of the dam would have been an unadulterated joy to him if it had not been for the silent hunter on the slopes below.

“Well, Jed, old boy, they were mighty considerate of you, anyway. I don’t know what there is in that cabin but if it is half as well stocked as this meadow I’ll be satisfied.”

He threw the saddle and bridle on the ground in one corner of the meadow near the end of the dam and turned Jed loose to graze. A tiny stream trickled through the dam, in one place, filling a little basin in the sod of the meadow. Jed drank long and deep and seemed perfectly contented with his surroundings. There was no danger of his wandering off even if he had not been so faithfully attached to Scott. No dog could have thought more of its master.

An examination of the cabin showed ample supplies to withstand a long siege. The view back into the encircling mountains was superb and down through the cut of the caÑon was a vista of hill and gorge that extended clear to the main valley miles away. There was eighteen feet of crystal clear water in the reservoir which was about twenty acres in extent. To a man from the lake-sprinkled section of New England it was a welcome sight. It was the most water he had seen in that semi-arid country.

The dam itself was a rather poorly constructed mason work affair and its safety was a matter of anxiety every spring to the ranchers who lived in the valley below. Since it had come into the hands of the Service, a man had been stationed there whenever the melting of the snows in the surrounding mountains threatened an overflow. Scott could not imagine a more pleasant job under normal conditions. He even felt that he could enjoy it now for he felt very little fear of not being able to take care of himself in such a place.

He marked the height of the water so that he could note its progress and went back into the cabin to fix it up for his occupancy. It was a cozy little place but Scott had not been in there long when he began to feel uneasy. The same old feeling of being trapped was stealing over him once more. He kept going to the door to peer down the caÑon, and was constantly glancing at the window, half expecting to see Dugan’s leering face and that glittering something in his hand. He tried his best to forget it and busy himself with the work in hand, but he could not do it. A few minutes in the open restored his nerve perfectly, but it began slipping again as soon as he returned to the cabin.

Scott hated to give in to these fears which he felt were almost entirely unwarranted, but he was forced to recognize that it would be out of the question for him to stay in the cabin. He would go crazy in there. It was a new sensation for a man who had always prided himself on not having any nerves, and just because it was new it was harder to bear.

“It’s no use,” Scott admitted to himself after struggling for an hour to stick it out. “I might as well own up to being a coward and act accordingly.”

He went outside and looked for a good place to camp. There was no tent in the outfit but he did not need one. It seldom rained and if it should the cabin was there for shelter. He selected a little flat bench on the side of the caÑon, near the cabin and slightly above it. It was backed by steep, overhanging rocks and could be approached only from the direction of the cabin. He could overlook the trail up the caÑon but was protected from view by a thin screen of aspens.

He soon had a cozy little nest rigged up there and felt all his old assurance returning. The house was the handicap; here in the open he felt on an even footing with every man. The telephone was his problem now. He was supposed to listen for messages from below and yet he felt that he could not even listen intelligently cooped up there in the cabin corner with that ’phone where he could not even see out of the door or window.

A brilliant idea occurred to him. Why not move the ’phone up to the camp? There were tools for repairing the telephone line in all the cabins; he had everything that he needed. In an hour he had moved the instrument to the trunk of a little tree beside his camp and had reconnected it by extension wires. He ran his ground wire down into the water of the reservoir. He remembered his experience in trying to hold up a receiver for two or three hours and made a crude wire sling to hold it. Thus equipped like a telephone central he could listen indefinitely without inconvenience.

His new home satisfactorily furnished and equipped with all the modern conveniences, he set out to make a more comprehensive examination of the reservoir. There were a number of small streams running into it. During the heat of the day when the sun shone warm on the ice-capped peaks and melted the drifting snow in the deep packed caÑons these streams delivered a considerable volume of water, but in the cool of the night they shrunk to a mere trickle, some of them ceasing to flow altogether.

Scott followed one of the larger ones away back and up to its hidden sources. He found side caÑons packed with snow to the very rims and out of the bottom of each there trickled a tiny stream of ice cold water. In other places there were miniature glaciers thrusting their icy beaks out into the main caÑon and melting as they advanced. The snow in the open was pretty well gone and there seemed to be little danger of a flood from those frozen reservoirs hidden so effectually from the direct rays of the sun.

There was only one great danger. Rain!

A heavy rainstorm on those barren peaks would inevitably mean an overwhelming flood. Most of the watershed was bare rock and there was very little vegetation to hold the rush of the assembled waters from the smooth worn channels of the ancient streams. Nor were there any pools or backwaters to delay the floods; nearly all were straight, narrow chutes leading to the reservoir below.

“One good thunder storm like we have at home,” Scott thought, “would spill the water over the top of that dam before a fellow had a chance to open the flood gates; but they don’t have them here, it just snows summer and winter.” And so it did as a rule. Only a storm on an exceptionally warm day would produce rain at that altitude.

He climbed one of the lower peaks and there, perched on a block of old volcanic rock, he had the whole country laid out before him. The group of old Benny’s lookout, which had seemed so high on the ridge above the valley cliffs, lay far below him. He could see the line of the cliffs and the fringe of trees along the stream in the main valley. A jutting rock was all that cut off the view of the town. The reservoir looked like a toy lake on the stage. There was quite a breeze up there on the rocks, but not a ripple marred the reflections on the surface of the pond. He could even see Jed feeding peacefully in the little meadow which appeared like a splotch of bright green paint spilled in the middle of an otherwise sombre picture. There was no limit to the view.

He searched all those miles of country within his vision for another moving object; there was none to be seen. He heaved a little sigh of relief and wondered when the time would come that he would be freed from the anxiety of watching for that pursuing shadow. It had been haunting him less than twenty-four hours, but they seemed to him like an eternity.

However, the worry had not yet affected his appetite and he started for the camp. He had climbed farther than he had realized. It took almost an hour of steady climbing to get down to the reservoir. He approached the camp cautiously but there was no trace of any one having been there and a nicker of welcome from the meadow told him that all was well with Jed. He ate his supper in comfort, put on his improvised head gear, and settled back against a mossy rock to listen to the gossip of the evening.

He watched the shadows chase the retreating sunlight up the eastern peaks and saw those shadows slowly deepen into darkness as the short twilight faded and disappeared. The world had gone to sleep and there came to his ear on the hushed night air the tinkling trickle of the little mountain streams and the plash of the water dripping through the dam. Suddenly the tips of the western peaks glowed white and the shadows came slowly down before the silver rays of the rising moon.

And not a word from the telephone. Either the people were unusually silent to-night or he had made some mistake in reconnecting his instrument. He was half dozing now, gazing dreamily at the moon herself balanced on the rim of the eastern peaks when he heard a faint click. It might have been the click of a receiver on the line or it might have been the cocking of a revolver.

Scott was wide awake now, as wide awake as he had ever been in all his life. He had been asleep and had that dreaded shadow stolen on him unawares, or was it only the telephone line? He had been too nearly asleep to know. For the next few minutes he sat with every sense alert and nerves on edge while he searched every shadow with anxious eye and listened in vain for the slightest suspicious sound. With a second slight click in the receiver he relaxed with a gasp of relief that could have been heard at the other end of the line if he had been anywhere near the transmitter.

It was another of those silent calls such as he had intercepted once before. He would have sworn that there were two men on that line now waiting to see if they had a clear field.

“Benson?” Scott recognized Dawson’s voice. Benson was the grouchy clerk in the supervisor’s office. So he belonged to the ring! Scott was glad of it; he had never liked the man but this was the first evidence that he had discovered against him.

“Well?” came the answer after a pause.

“Where did they assign the boob?”

“To watch the dam. Tried to tell you last night.”

“Dugan and I were calling on him then.”

“Going up?”

“To-morrow.”

“Shoot one for me.”

Two soft clicks and all was still.

So Mr. Dawson was coming to call in the morning. Well, Scott was glad to know it. Moreover, it made him feel that he was fairly safe from any visitors before that time. With this assurance he rolled in his blanket and went to sleep.