“Ladies and gentlemen, that’s all. There won’t be any more. Folks, like it or not, you’ve got a dam in the Colorado River! She’s dammed, right this minute. It’s an accident, a slip-up in the plans, but—she’s there. You just heard a chunk of Black Canyon go into the river. The man that made the last speech said it couldn’t be done. It is done. Now, the government will have to do whatever else is to be done. Ladies and gentlemen, you have just heard the Cramer Dam go in!”
That stopped the panic automatically. Men and women waited to hear more. They were accustomed to blasting, if that were all. They accepted Peter’s statement that this was all of it, though the women were still white, still inclined to clutch their husbands and sweethearts and wonder if they were going to faint. Las Vegas was dazed. The Colorado Commission was collectively looking at Peter through narrowed lids.
Peter glanced down into the measuring, weighing eyes of the greatest man present. He flushed at what he read there, and he answered the look.
“It’s my fault,” he said simply. “I ought to have tied ’em up, or brought ’em with me. I should have placed a guard over that dam. I did hide the battery—but they must have found it.”
At a sudden thought he threw out both hands in the gesture with which a strong man meets the inevitable.
“Gentlemen,” he cried, and his voice was a challenge. “Fate has decreed that the thing should go through! I had no knowledge of this, but—” his eyes darkened and twinkled, the endearing King smile softened his face suddenly “—gentlemen, if you will stop over a day, I should like to show you the Cramer Dam, completed!”
He looked at the great engineer who had questioned him during dinner.
“You said it couldn’t be done! I’m not a gambling man, Mr. Brown, but I’ll bet you fifty thousand dollars against fifty cents, that she’s there!”
The man he challenged looked up at him. Slowly, as his thought crystallized, the blood drained out of the engineer’s face, leaving it dead white. He turned to his chief, but his voice went to the farthest corner of the hall.
“My God! What if she holds a while! Warn Needles, Yuma—send out a general warning below! Tell the people to hunt the highest points they can reach! Gentlemen, if that damned Cramer Dam holds for forty-eight hours, there’ll be the greatest disaster in the history of the West!”