Out of the Depths

by Bennet, Robert Ames

  “Wait a week or so,” cautioned Ashton. “In my opinion, Blake already sees a possibility.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XV

  LEVELS AND SLANTS

  At sunrise the next morning Blake screwed his level on its tripod and set up the instrument about a hundred yards away from the ranch house. Ashton held the level rod for him on a spike driven into the foot of the nearest post of the front porch. Blake called the spike a bench-mark. For convenience of determining the relative heights of the points along his lines of levels, he designated this first “bench” in his fieldbook as “elevation 1,000.”

  From the porch he ran the line of level “readings” up the slope to the top of the divide between Plum Creek and Dry Fork and from there towards the waterhole on Dry Fork. At noon Isobel and Mrs. Blake drove out to them in the buckboard, bringing a hot meal in an improvised fireless-cooker.

  “And we came West to rough-it!” groaned Blake, his eyes twinkling.

  “You can camp at the waterhole where Lafe did, and I’ll send Kid out for that bobcat,” suggested the girl. “You could roast him, hair and all.”

  “What! roast Gowan?” protested Blake. “Let me tell you, Miss Chuckie––you and my wife and Ashton may like him that much, but I don’t!”

  “You need not worry, Mr. Tenderfoot,” the girl flashed back at him. “Whenever it comes to a hot time, Kid always gets in the first fire, without waiting to be told.”

  “Don’t I know it?” exclaimed Ashton. “Maybe you haven’t noticed this hole in my hat, Mrs. Blake. He put a bullet through it.”

  “But it’s right over your temple, Lafayette!” replied Mrs. Blake.

  “Lafe was lifting his some-berero to me, and Kid did it to haze him––only a joke, you know,” explained Isobel. “Of course Lafe was in no danger. It was different, though, when somebody––we think it was his thieving guide––took several rifle shots at him. Tell them about it, Lafe.”

  Ashton gave an account of the murderous attack, more than once checking himself in a natural tendency to embellish the exciting details.

  “Oh! What if the man should come back and shoot at us?” shuddered Mrs. Blake, drawing her baby close in her arms.

  “No fear of that,” asserted Isobel. “Kid found that he had fled towards the railroad. That proves it must have been the guide. He would never dare come back after such a crime.”

  “If he should, I always carry my rifle, as you see,” remarked Ashton; adding, with a touch of bravado, “I made him run once, and I would again.”

  “I’m glad Miss Chuckie is sure he will not come back,” said Blake. “I don’t fancy anyone shooting at me that way.”

  “Timid Mr. Blake!” teased the girl. “Genevieve has been telling me how you faced a lion with only a bow and arrow.”

  “Had to,” said Blake. “He’d have jumped on me if I had turned or backed off.––Speaking about camping at that waterhole, I believe we’ll do it, Ashton, if it’s the same thing to you. It would save the time that would be lost coming and going to the ranch.”

  “Save time?” repeated Isobel. “Then of course we’ll bring out a tent and camp kit for you tomorrow. Genevieve and I can ride or drive up to the waterhole each day, to picnic with you.”

  “It will be delightful,” agreed Mrs. Blake.

  “You ride on ahead and wait for us in the shade,” said her husband. “We’ll knock off for the day when we reach that dolerite dike above the waterhole.––If you are ready, Ashton, we’ll peg along.”

  He started off to set up his level as briskly as at dawn, though the midday sun was so hot that he had to shade the instrument with his handkerchief to keep the air-bubble from outstretching its scale. His wife and the girl drove on up Dry Fork to the waterhole.

  Mrs. Blake was outstretched on her back, fast asleep, and Isobel was playing with the baby under the adjoining tree, when at last the surveyors came up on the other side of the creek and ended their day’s run with the establishment of a bench-mark on the top of the dike above the pool. Blake seemed as fresh as in the morning. He took a moderate drink of water dipped up in the brim of his hat, and without wakening his wife, sat down beside her to “figure up” his fieldbook.

  Ashton had come down to the pool panting from heat and exertion. It was the first time that he had walked more than half a mile since coming to the ranch, for he had immediately fallen into the cowboy practice of saddling a horse to go even short distances. He had his reward for his work when, having soused his hot head in the pool and drunk his fill, he came up to rest in the shade of Isobel’s tree. Very considerately the baby fell asleep. To avoid disturbing him and his mother, the young couple talked in low tones and half whispers very conducive to intimacy.

  Ashton did his utmost to improve his opportunity. Without openly speaking his love, he allowed it to appear in his every look and intonation. The girl met the attack with banter and raillery and adroit shiftings of the conversation whenever his ardent inferences became too obvious. Yet her evasion and her teasing could not always mask her maidenly pleasure over his adoration of her loveliness, and an occasional blush betrayed to him that his wooing was not altogether unwelcome.

  He was in the seventh heaven when Mrs. Blake awoke from her health-giving sleep and her husband closed his fieldbook. The girl promptly dashed her suitor back to earth by dropping him for the engineer.

  “Mr. Blake! You can’t have figured it out already?” she exclaimed. “What do you find?”

  “Only an ‘if,’ Miss Chuckie,” he answered. “If water can be stored or brought by ditch to this elevation, practically all Dry Mesa can be irrigated. Our bench-mark there on the dike is more than two hundred feet above that spike we drove into your porch post.”

  “Is that all you’ve found out today?”

  “All for today,” said Blake. “I could have left this line of levels until later, but I thought I might as well get through with them.”

  “You would not have run them if you had thought they would be useless,” she stated, perceiving the point with intuitive acuteness.

  “I like to clean up my work as I go along,” he replied. “If you wish to know, I have thought of a possible way to get water enough for the whole mesa. It depends on two ‘ifs.’ I shall be certain as to one of them within the next two days. The other is the question of the depth of Deep Cañon. If I had a transit, I could determine that by a vertical angle,––triangulation. As it is, I probably shall have to go down to the bottom.”

  “Go down to the bottom of Deep Cañon?” cried the girl.

  “Yes,” he answered in a matter-of-course tone. “A big ravine runs clear down to the bottom, up beyond where your father said you first met Ashton. I think it is possible to get down that gulch.––Suppose we hitch up? We’ll make the ranch just about supper-time.”

  Ashton hastened to bring in the picketed horses. When they were harnessed Isobel fetched the sleeping baby and handed him to his mother; but she did not take the seat beside her.

  “You drive, Lafe,” she ordered. “I’m going to ride behind with Mr. Blake. It’s such fun bouncing.”

  All protested in vain against this odd whim. The girl plumped herself in on the rear end of the buckboard and dangled her slender feet with the gleefulness of a child.

  “Mr. Blake will catch me if I go to jolt off,” she declared.

  The engineer nodded with responsive gayety and seated himself beside her. As the buckboard rattled away over the rough sod, they made as merry over their jolts and bounces as a pair of school-children on a hayrack party.

  Mrs. Blake sought to divert Ashton from his disappointment, but he had ears only for the laughing, chatting couple behind him. The fact that Blake was a married man did not prevent the lover from giving way to jealous envy. Chancing to look around as he warned the hilarious pair of a gully, he saw the girl grasp Blake’s shoulder. Natural as was the act, his envy flared up in hot resentment. Except on their drive to Stockchute, she had always avoided even
touching his hand with her finger tips; yet now she clung to the engineer with a grasp as familiar as that of an affectionate child. Nor did she release her clasp until they were some yards beyond the gully.

  Mrs. Blake had seen not only the expression that betrayed Ashton’s anger but also the action that caused it. She raised her fine eyebrows; but meeting Ashton’s significant glance, she sought to pass over the incident with a smile. He refused to respond. All during the remainder of the drive he sat in sullen silence. Genevieve bent over her baby. Behind them the unconscious couple continued in their mirthful enjoyment of each other and the ride.

  When the party reached the ranch, the girl must have perceived Ashton’s moroseness had she not first caught sight of her father. He was standing outside the front porch, his eyes fixed upon the corner post in a perplexed stare.

  “Why, Daddy,” she called, “what is it? You look as you do when playing chess with Kid.”

  “Afraid it’s something that’ll annoy Mr. Blake,” replied the cowman.

  “What is it?” asked Blake, who was handing his wife from the buckboard.

  As the engineer faced Knowles, Gowan sauntered around the far corner of the house. At sight of the ladies he paused to adjust his neckerchief.

  “Can’t understand it, Mr. Blake,” said the cowman. “Somebody has pulled out that spike you drove in here this morning.”

  “Pulled the spike?” repeated Gowan, coming forward to stare at the post. “That shore is a joke. The Jap’s building a new henhouse. Must be short of nails.”

  “That’s so,” said Knowles. “I forgot to order them for him. I’m mighty sorry, Mr. Blake. But of course the little brown cuss didn’t know what he was meddling with.”

  “Jumping Jehosaphat!” ejaculated Gowan. “That shore is mighty hard luck! I reckon pulling that spike turns your line of levels adrift like knocking out the picket-pin of an uneasy hawss.”

  Blake burst into a hearty laugh. “That’s a fine metaphor, Mr. Gowan. But it does not happen to fit the case. It would not matter if the spike-hole had been pulled out and the post along with it, so far as concerns this line of levels.”

  “It wouldn’t?” muttered Gowan, his lean jaw dropping slack. He glowered as if chagrined at the engineer’s laughter at his mistake.

  Without heeding the puncher’s look, Blake began to tell Knowles the result of his day’s work. While he was speaking, they went into the house after his wife and the girl, leaving Gowan and Ashton alone. Equally sullen and resentful, the rivals exchanged stares of open hostility. Ashton pointed a derisive finger at the spike-hole in the post.

  “‘Hole ... and the post along with it!’” he repeated Blake’s words. “On bridge work it might have caused some trouble. But a preliminary line of levels––Mon Dieu! A Jap should have known better––or even a yap!” With a supercilious shrug, he swung back into the buckboard and drove up to the corral.

  Gowan’s right hand had dropped to his hip. Slowly it came up and joined the other hand in rolling a thick Mexican cigarette. But the puncher did not light his “smoke.” He looked at the spike-hole in the post, scowled, and went back around the house.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XVI

  METAL AND METTLE

  At dawn Blake and Ashton drove up to the waterhole on Dry Fork with their camp equipment. There they left the outfit in the buckboard and proceeded with the line of levels on up the creek bed into the gorge from which it issued.

  For more than a mile they carried the levels over the bowlders of the gradually sloping bottom of that stupendous gash in the mountain side. So far the work was fairly easy. At last, however, they came to the place where the bed of the gulch suddenly tilted upward at a sharp angle and climbed the tremendous heights to the top of High Mesa in sheer ascents and cliff-like ledges. Blake established a bench-mark at the foot of the acclivity, and came forward beside Ashton to peer up the Titanic chute between the dizzy precipices. From where they stood to the head of the gulch was fully four thousand feet.

  “What do you think of it?” asked the engineer.

  “I think this is where your line ends,” answered Ashton, and he rolled a cigarette. He had been anything but agreeable since their start from the ranch.

  “We of course can’t go up with the level and rod,” said Blake, smiling at the absurdity of the suggestion. “Still, we might possibly chain it to the top.”

  Ashton shrugged. “I fail to see the need of risking my neck to climb this goat stairway.”

  “Very well,” agreed Blake, ignoring his companion’s ill humor. “Kindly take back the level and get out the chain.”

  Ashton started off without replying. Blake looked at the young man’s back with a regretful, half-puzzled expression. But he quickly returned to the business in hand. He laid the level rod on a rock and inclined it at the same steep pitch as the uptilt of the gorge bottom. Over the lower end of this he held a plumb bob, and took the angle between the perpendicular line of the bob-string and the inclined line of the rod with a small protractor that he carried in his notebook. The angle measured over fifty degrees from the horizontal.

  Having thus determined the angle of inclination, the engineer picked a likely line of ascent and started to climb the gulch chute. He went up in rapid rushes, with the ease and surefootedness of a coolheaded, steel-muscled climber. He stopped frequently, not because of weariness or of lack of breath, but to test the structure and hardness of the rocks with a small magnifying glass and the butt of his pocket knife.

  At last, nearly a thousand feet up, his ascent was stopped by a sheer hundred-foot cliff. He had seen it beetling above him and knew beforehand that he could not hope to scale such a precipice; yet he clambered up to it, still examining the rock with minute care. As he walked across the waterworn shelf at the foot of the sheer cliff, his eye was caught by a wide seam of quartz in the side wall of the gulch.

  Going on over to the vein, he looked at it in several places through his magnifying glass. Everywhere little yellow specks showed in the semi-translucent quartz. He drew back across the gorge to examine the trend of the vein. It ran far outward and upward, and in no place was it narrower than where it disappeared under the bed of the gorge.

  His lips pursed in a prolonged, soundless whistle. But he did not linger. Immediately after he had estimated the visible length and dip of the seam, he began his descent. Arriving at the foot without accident, he picked up the level rod and swung away down the gulch.

  He saw nothing of Ashton until he had come all the distance down across the valley to the dike above the pool. His assistant was in the grove below, assiduously helping Miss Knowles to erect a tent that the girl had improvised from a tarpaulin. Genevieve and Thomas Herbert were interesting themselves in the contents of the kit-box. The two ladies had ridden up to the camp on horseback, Isobel carrying the baby.

  When Blake came striding down to them, the girl left Ashton and ran to meet him, her eyes beaming with affectionate welcome.

  “What has kept you so long?” she called. “Lafe says the gulch is absolutely unclimbable. I could have told you so, beforehand.”

  “You are right. I tried it, but had to quit,” replied Blake, engulfing her outstretched hand in his big palm.

  When he would have released her, she caught his fingers and held fast, so that they came down to his wife hand in hand. Oblivious of Ashton’s frown, the girl dimpled at Mrs. Blake.

  “Here he is, Genevieve,” she said. “We have him corralled for the rest of the morning.”

  “Sorry,” replied Blake, stooping to pick up his chuckling son. “We can’t knock off now.”

  “But if you cannot continue your levels?” asked his wife. “From what Lafayette told us, we thought you would not start in again until after lunch.”

  “No more levels until tomorrow,” said Blake. “But I must settle one of my big ‘ifs’ by night. To do it, Ashton and I will have to go up on High Mesa and measure a line. There’s still two hours till noon. We’ll borro
w your saddle ponies, Miss Chuckie, and start at once, if Jenny will put us up a bite of lunch.”

  “Immediately, Tom,” assented Mrs. Blake, delighted at the opportunity to serve her big husband.

  “When shall we take Genevieve to see the cañon?” asked the girl. “I am sure she can ride up safely on old Buck.”

  “We have only the two saddle horses today,” replied Blake. “If our measurement settles that ‘if’ one way, I shall start a line of levels up the mountain tomorrow morning, if the other way, any irrigation project is out of the question, and we shall go up to the cañon merely as a sightseeing party.”

  “Ah!” sighed the girl. “‘If!’ ‘if’––I do so hope it turns out to be the last one!”

  Blake looked at her with a quizzical smile. “Perhaps you would not, Miss Chuckie, if you could see all the results of a successful water system.”

  “You mean, turning our range into farms for hundreds of irrigationists,” she replied. “I suppose I am selfish, but I am thinking of what it would mean to Daddy. Just consider how it will affect us. For years this land has been our own for miles and miles!”

  “Well, we shall see,” said Blake, his eyes twinkling.

  “Yes, indeed!” she exclaimed. “Lafe, if you’ll help me saddle up and help Mr. Blake rush up to do that measuring, I’ll––I’ll be ever so grateful!”

  Though all the more resentful at Blake over having to leave her company, Ashton eagerly sprang forward to help the girl saddle the ponies. When they were ready, she filled his canteen for him and took a sip from it “for luck.” Genevieve had packed an ample lunch in a gamebag, along with her husband’s linked steel-wire surveyor’s chain.

  Ten minutes after Blake’s arrival, he handed the baby to its mother and swung into the saddle. Ashton had already mounted, fired by a kind glance from the girl’s forget-me-not eyes. In his zeal, he led the way at a gallop around the craggy hill and across the intervening valley to the escarpment of High Mesa. Had not Blake checked him, he would have forced the pace on up the mountain side.