The King of Arcadia
Page 6
VI
ELBOW CANYON
Ballard had his first appreciative view of his new field of labor beforebreakfast on the morning following his arrival, with Bromley as hissightsman.
Viewed in their entirety by daylight, the topographies appealedirresistibly to the technical eye; and Ballard no longer wondered thatBraithwaite had overlooked or disregarded all other possible sites forthe great dam.
The basin enclosed by the circling foothills and backed by the forestedslopes of the main range was a natural reservoir, lacking only acomparatively short wall of masonry to block the crooked gap in thehills through which the river found its way to the lower levels of thegrass-lands.
The gap itself was an invitation to the engineer. Its rock-bound slopespromised the best of anchorages for the shore-ends of the masonry; andat its lower extremity a jutting promontory on the right bank of thestream made a sharp angle in the chasm; the elbow which gave the outletcanyon its name.
The point or crook of the elbow, the narrowest pass in the cleft, hadbeen chosen as the site for the dam. Through the promontory a shorttunnel was driven at the river-level to provide a diverting spillway forthe torrent; and by this simple expedient a dry river-bed in which tobuild the great wall of concrete and masonry had been secured.
"That was Braithwaite's notion, I suppose?" said Ballard, indicating thetunnel through which the stream, now at summer freshet volume, thunderedon its way around the building site to plunge sullenly into its naturalbed below the promontory. "Nobody but a Government man would have hadthe courage to spend so much time and money on a mere preliminary. It'sa good notion, though."
"I'm not so sure of that," was Bromley's reply. "Doylan, the rock-boss,tells a fairy-story about the tunnel that will interest you when youhear it. He had the contract for driving it, you know."
"What was the story?"
Bromley laughed. "You'll have to get Mike to tell it, with the properIrish frills. But the gist of it is this: You know these hogbackhills--how they seem to be made up of all the geological odds and endsleft over after the mountains were built. Mike swears they drove throughlimestone, sandstone, porphyry, fire-clay, chert, mica-schist, and _mud_digging that tunnel; which the same, if true, doesn't promise very wellfor the foundations of our dam."
"But the plans call for bed-rock under the masonry," Ballard objected.
"Oh, yes; and we have it--apparently. But some nights, when I've lainawake listening to the peculiar hollow roar of the water poundingthrough that tunnel, I've wondered if Doylan's streak of mud mightn'tunder-lie our bed-rock."
Ballard's smile was good-naturedly tolerant.
"You'd be a better engineer, if you were not a musician, Loudon. Youhave too much imagination. Is that the colonel's country house up yonderin the middle of our reservoir-that-is-to-be?"
"It is."
Ballard focussed his field-glass upon the tree-dotted knoll a mile awayin the centre of the upper valley. It was an ideal building site for thespectacular purpose. On all sides the knoll sloped gently to the valleylevel; and the river, a placid vale-land stream in this upper reach,encircled three sides of the little hill. Among the trees, anddistinguishable from them only by its right lines and gable angles,stood a noble house, built, as it seemed, of great tree-trunks with thebark on.
Ballard could imagine the inspiring outlook from the brown-pillaredGreek portico facing westward; the majestic sweep of the enclosinghills, bare and with their rocky crowns worn into a thousand fantasticshapes; the uplift of the silent, snow-capped mountains to right andleft; the vista of the broad, outer valley opening through the gap wherethe dam was building.
"The colonel certainly had an eye for the picturesque when he pitchedupon that knoll for his building-site," was his comment. "How does heget the water up there to make all that greenery?"
"Pumps it, bless your heart! What few modern improvements you won't findinstalled at Castle 'Cadia aren't worth mentioning. And, by the way,there is another grouch--we're due to drown his power-pumping andelectric plant at the portal of the upper canyon under twenty feet ofour lake. More bad blood, and a lot more damages."
"Oh, damn!" said Ballard; and he meant the imprecation, and not the pileof masonry which his predecessors had heaped up in the rocky chasm athis feet.
Bromley chuckled. "That is what the colonel is apt to say when youmention the Arcadia Company in his hearing. Do you blame him so verymuch?"
"Not I. If I owned a home like that, in a wilderness that I haddiscovered for myself, I'd fight for it to a finish. Last night when youshowed me the true inwardness of this mix-up, I was sick and sorry. If Ihad known five days ago what I know now, you couldn't have pulled meinto it with a two-inch rope."
"On general principles?" queried Bromley curiously.
"Not altogether. Business is business; and you've intimated that thecolonel is not so badly overmatched in the money field--and when all issaid, it is a money fight with the long purse to win. But there is apersonal reason why I, of all men in the world, should have stayed out.I did not know it when I accepted Mr. Pelham's offer, and now it is toolate to back down. I'm a thousand times sorrier for Colonel Craigmilesthan ever you can be, Loudon; but, as the chief engineer of the ArcadiaCompany, I'm pledged to obliterate him."
"That is precisely what he declares he will do to the company," laughedBromley. "And there,"--pointing across the ravine to an iron-bound doorclosing a tunnel entrance in the opposite hillside--"is his advancedbattery. That is the mine I was telling you about."
"H'm," said the new chief, measuring the distance with his eyes. "Ifthat mining-claim is the regulation size, it doesn't leave us much elbowroom over there."
"It doesn't leave us any--as I told you last night, the dam itselfstands upon a portion of the claim. In equity, if there were any equityin a law fight against a corporation, the colonel could enjoin us rightnow. He hasn't done it; he has contented himself with marking out thatdead-line you can see over there just above our spillway. The colonelstaked that out in Billy Sanderson's time, and courteously informed usthat trespassers would be potted from behind that barricade; that therewas a machine-gun mounted just inside of that door which commanded theapproaches. Just to see if he meant what he said, some of the boysrigged up a scarecrow dummy, and carefully pushed it over the line oneevening after supper. I wasn't here, but Fitzpatrick says the colonel'sMexican garrison in the tunnel fairly set the air afire with a volleyfrom the machine-gun."
Ballard said "H'm" again, and was silent what time they were climbingthe hill to the quarries on their own side of the ravine. When he spoke,it was not of the stone the night shift had been getting out.
"Loudon, has it ever occurred to you that the colonel's mine play is avery large-sized trump card? We can submerge the house, the grounds, andhis improvements up yonder in the upper canyon and know approximatelyhow much it is going to cost the company to pay the bill. But when thewater backs up into that tunnel, we are stuck for whatever damages hecares to claim."
"Sure thing," said Bromley. "No one on earth will ever know whetherwe've swamped a five-million-dollar mine or a twenty-five-cent hole inthe ground."
"That being the case, I mean to see the inside of that tunnel," Ballardwent on doggedly. "I am sorry I allowed Mr. Pelham to let me in forthis; but in justice to the people who pay my salary, I must know whatwe are up against over there."
"I don't believe you will make any bad breaks in that direction,"Bromley suggested. "If you try it by main strength and awkwardness, asMacpherson did, you'll get what he very narrowly escaped--a young leadmine started inside of you by one of the colonel's Mexican bandits. Ifyou try it any other way, the colonel will be sure to spot you; and yougo out of his good books and Miss Elsa's--no invitations to the bighouse, no social alleviations, no ice-cream and cake, no heavenly summernights when you can sit out on the Greek-pillared portico with a prettygirl, and forget for the moment that you are a buccaneering bully oflabouring men, marooned, with a lot of dry-land pirates like yoursel
f,in the Arcadia desert. No, my dear Breckenridge; I think it is safe toprophesy that you won't do anything you say you will."
"Won't I?" growled the new chief, looking at his watch. Then: "Let's godown to breakfast." And, with a sour glance at the hill over which theroof-smashing rock of the previous night must have been hurled: "Don'tforget to tell Quinlan to be a little more sparing with his powder uphere. Impress it on his mind that he is getting out building stone--notshooting the hill down for concrete."