The Daughter of a Magnate.
by Frank H. Spearman.
CHAPTER I
A JUNE WATER
The train, a special, made up of a private car and a diner, was running on a slow order and crawled between the bluffs at a snail"s pace.
Ahead, the sun was sinking into the foothills and wherever the eye could reach to the horizon barren wastes lay riotously green under the golden blaze. The river, swollen everywhere out of its banks, spread in a broad and placid flood of yellow over the bottoms, and a hundred shallow lakes studded with willowed islands marked its wandering course to the south and east. The clear, far air of the mountains, the glory of the gold on the June hills and the illimitable stretch of waters below, spellbound the group on the observation platform.
"It"s a pity, too," declared Conductor O"Brien, who was acting as mountain Baedeker, "that we"re held back this way when we"re covering the prettiest stretch on the road for running. It is right along here where you are riding that the speed records of the world have been made. Fourteen and six-tenths miles were done in nine and a half minutes just west of that curve about six months ago--of course it was down hill."
Several of the party were listening. "Do you use speed recorders out here?" asked Allen Harrison.
"How"s that?"
"Do you use speed recorders?"
"Only on our slow trains," replied O"Brien. "To put speed recorders on Paddy McGraw or Jimmie the Wind would be like timing a teal duck with an eight-day clock. Sir?" he asked, turning to another questioner while the laugh lingered on his side. "No; those are not really mountains at all. Those are the foothills of the Sleepy Cat range--west of the Spider Water. We get into that range about two hundred miles from here--well, I say they are west of the Spider, but for ten days it"s been hard to say exactly where the Spider is. The Spider is making us all the trouble with high water just now--and we"re coming out into the valley in about a minute," he added as the car gave an embarra.s.sing lurch. "The track is certainly soft, but if you"ll stay right where you are, on this side, ladies, you"ll get the view of your lives when we leave the bluffs. The valley is about nine miles broad and it"s pretty much all under water."
Beyond the curve they were taking lay a long tangent stretching like a steel wand across a sea of yellow, and as their engine felt its way very gingerly out upon it there rose from the slow-moving trucks of their car the softened resonance that tells of a sounding-board of waters.
Soon they were drawn among wooded knolls between which hurried little rivers tossed out of the Spider flood into dry waterways and brawling with surprised stones and foaming noisily at stubborn root and impa.s.sive culvert. Through the trees the travellers caught pa.s.sing glimpses of shaded eddies and a wilderness of placid pools. "And this," murmured Gertrude Brock to her sister Marie, "this is the Spider!" O"Brien, talking to the men at her elbow, overheard.
"Hardly, Miss Brock; not yet. You haven"t seen the river yet. This is only the backwater."
They were rising the grade to the bridge approach, and when they emerged a few moments later from the woods the conductor said, "There!"
The panorama of the valley lay before them. High above their level and a mile away, the long thread-like spans of Hailey"s great bridge stretched from pier to pier. To the right of the higher ground a fan of sidetracks spread, with lines of flat cars and gondolas loaded with stone, brush, piling and timbers, and in the foreground two hulking pile-drivers, their leads, like rabbits" ears laid sleekly back, squatted mysteriously. Switch engines puffed impatiently up and down the ladder track shifting stuff to the distant spurs. At the river front an army of men moved like loaded ants over the dikes. Beyond them the eye could mark the boiling yellow of the Spider, its winding channel marked through the waste of waters by whirling driftwood, bobbing wreckage and plunging trees--sweepings of a thousand angry miles. "There"s the Spider," repeated the West End conductor, pointing, "out there in the middle where you see things moving right along. That"s the Spider, on a twenty-year rampage." The train, moving slowly, stopped. "I guess we"ve got as close to it as we"re going to, for a while. I"ll take a look forward."
It was the time of the June water in the mountains. A year earlier the rise had taken the Peace River bridge and with the second heavy year of snow railroad men looked for new trouble. June is not a month for despair, because the mountain men have never yet scheduled despair as a West End liability. But it is a month that puts wrinkles in the right of way clear across the desert and sows gray hairs in the roadmasters"
records from McCloud to Bear Dance. That June the mountain streams roared, the foothills floated, the plains puffed into sponge, and in the thick of it all the Spider Water took a man-slaughtering streak and started over the Bad Lands across lots. The big river forced Bucks"
hand once more, and to protect the main line Glover, third of the mountain roadbuilders, was ordered off the high-line construction and back to the hills where Brodie and Hailey slept, to watch the Spider.
The special halted on a tongue of high ground flanking the bridge and extending upstream to where the river was gnawing at the long dike that held it off the approach. The delay was tedious. Doctor Lanning and Allen Harrison went forward to smoke. Gertrude Brock took refuge in a book and Mrs. Whitney, her aunt, annoyed her with stories. Marie Brock and Louise Donner placed their chairs where they could watch the sorting and unloading of never-ending strings of flat cars, the spasmodic activity in the lines of laborers, the hurrying of the foremen and the movement of the rapidly shifting fringe of men on the danger line at the dike.
The clouds which had opened for the dying splendor of the day closed and a shower swept over the valley; the conductor came back in his raincoat--his party were at dinner. "_Are_ we to be detained much longer?" asked Mrs. Whitney.
"For a little while, I"m afraid," replied the trainman diplomatically.
"I"ve been away over there on the dike to see if I could get permission to cross, but I didn"t succeed."
"Oh, conductor!" remonstrated Louise Donner.
"And we don"t get to Medicine Bend to-night," said Doctor Lanning.
"What we need is a man of influence," suggested Harrison. "We ought never to have let your "pa" go," he added, turning to Gertrude Brock, beside whom he sat.
"Can"t we really get ahead?" Gertrude lifted her brows reproachfully as she addressed the conductor. "It"s becoming very tiresome."
O"Brien shook his head.
"Why not see someone in authority?" she persisted.
"I have seen the man in authority, and nearly fell into the river doing it; then he turned me down."
"Did you tell him who we were?" demanded Mrs. Whitney.
"I made all sorts of pleas."
"Does he know that Mr. Bucks _promised_ we should be In Medicine Bend to-night?" asked pretty little Marie Brock.
"He wouldn"t in the least mind that."
Mrs. Whitney bridled. "Pray who is he?"
"The construction engineer of the mountain division is the man in charge of the bridge just at present."
"It would be a very simple matter to get orders over his head,"
suggested Harrison.
"Not very."
"Mr. Bucks?"
"Hardly. No orders would take us over that bridge to-night without Glover"s permission."
"What an autocrat!" sighed Mrs. Whitney. "No matter; I don"t care to go over it, anyway."
"But I do," protested Gertrude. "I don"t feel like staying in this water all night, if you please."
"I"m afraid that"s what we"ll have to do for a few hours. I told Mr.
Glover he would be in trouble if I didn"t get my people to Medicine Bend to-night."
"Tell him again," laughed Doctor Lanning.
Conductor O"Brien looked embarra.s.sed. "You"d like to ask particular leave of Mr. Glover for us, I know," suggested Miss Donner.
"Well, hardly--the second time--not of Mr. Glover." A sheet of rain drenched the plate-gla.s.s windows. "But I"m going to watch things and we"ll get out just as soon as possible. I know Mr. Glover pretty well.
He is all right, but he"s been down here now a week without getting out of his clothes and the river rising on him every hour. They"ve got every grain bag between Salt Lake and Chicago and they"re filling them with sand and dumping them in where the river is cutting."
"Any danger of the bridge going?" asked the doctor.
"None in the world, but there"s a lot of danger that the river will go.
That would leave the bridge hanging over dry land. The fight is to hold the main channel where it belongs. They"re getting rock over the bridge from across the river and strengthening the approach for fear the dike should give way. The track is busy every minute, so I couldn"t make much impression on Mr. Glover."
There was light talk of a deputation to the dike, followed by the resignation of travellers, cards afterward, and ping-pong. With the deepening of the night the rain fell harder, and the wind rising in gusts drove it against the gla.s.s. When the women retired to their compartments the train had been set over above the bridge where the wind, now hard from the southeast, sung steadily around the car.
Gertrude Brock could not sleep. After being long awake she turned on the light and looked at her watch; it was one o"clock. The wind made her restless and the air in the stateroom had become oppressive. She dressed and opened her door. The lights were very low and the car was silent; all were asleep.