Scott Burton on the Range

by Edward G. Cheyney

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.