Scott Burton on the Range

by Edward G. Cheyney

The echoes of the first crash of thunder had not died away in the distant hills when the rain came down in torrents. A half hour of that and the reservoir would overflow even if the dam itself did not go out before that. The opening of the sluice gates was the only thing which he could do. He could not imagine those sluice gates taking care of the mad torrents which would soon be raging down the cañons from all those encircling barren peaks, but the storm might possibly cease as suddenly as it had begun.

Scott sprang to the gates and was already bending his back to the old-fashioned windlass when he remembered that Jed was on the other side of the meadow. Once he had opened those gates it would be impossible to get him across to the trail. He had to have Jed to get help for Dawson and carry the warning of the impending danger to the ranchers along the course that the flood would take if the dam should burst.

The rain continued to fall in a deluge which almost blinded him, but he managed to stagger across the meadow to the clump of willows where he had left Jed. He feared that the horse might have been frightened by the storm and run away. The booming of the thunder in those hollow cañons was enough to terrify either horse or man. But Jed had spent his life in the open. Thunder storms in the mountains were nothing new to him. Close in the lee of the bushes, with his tail to the storm, he was waiting patiently. He greeted Scott with a little nicker of recognition.

Scott jumped on to his slippery, wet back and rode across the darkening meadow toward the place where he had hidden the saddle. He put on the saddle while there was yet light and leaving Jed well up from the trail, he dashed once more for the sluice gates. In the trail at the foot of the dam he almost ran into a strange horse. The poor beast was saddled and bridled and steaming in the rain from hard riding. Its breath was coming in great gasps, its head hung down until its nose was almost on the ground, and its feet were spread wide, a sign of total exhaustion. Some one had ridden up that steep cañon trail at a killing pace.

“It must be Baxter,” Scott thought as he ran past the heaving horse and made for the sluice gates. There was not enough daylight left to recognize objects at any distance, but almost continuous lightning flashes made things stand out momentarily with vivid distinctness. Scott was just rounding a clump of bushes not more than ten yards from the sluice gates, when one of these lurid flashes revealed a picture which brought him to a sudden halt with his heart in his mouth.

Seated on top of the sluice gates was not Baxter, but Jed Clark.

He was crazy with drink. He was holding a forty-five in either hand. After every flash of lightning he waved the revolvers wildly in the air and shouted his vengeance against the forest service, the government and all law in general. He seemed to revel in the wildness of the storm. He was raving mad.

Scott stood as one stunned. He was in the shadow of the bushes and Jed had not seen him. He knew that Jed had come up there with the original intention of getting him. Failing to find Scott his crazed brain had now hit on the still more devilish scheme of reeking his vengeance on the forest service by bringing about the destruction of the dam. None knew the country better than he. None knew better than he how impossible it would be for that old dam to withstand the flood which was gathering against it. Now utterly regardless of his own danger he was seated on the sluice gates of the very dam he was planning to destroy, recklessly chanting his vengeance in the face of the raging elements.

The whole thing seemed so fiendish, so utterly inhuman, that Scott stared helplessly for a moment in an agony of dismay. His first impulse was to rush the maniac, for the gates must be opened and that quickly. But he gave up the idea almost as soon as he conceived it. Jed was well known to be a dead shot, drunk or sober, and the experience of the morning had shown Scott how perfectly helpless he would be.

There was only one way out. Dawson’s revolver. It had been in his way when he was ministering to Dawson’s hurts and he had taken it off. He started for the cabin and it suddenly occurred to him that Jed would have gone there the first thing. He remembered the unrecorded mortgage and Jed’s veiled threat at that night meeting below the chute. He trembled to think what he might find in the cabin. Shivering he groped his way across the room to the bed. He leaned over it and waited for the next flash of lightning. It came and the frozen look of horror in the wide staring eyes of the man before him made his blood run cold. He wanted to run from the cabin but Dawson grabbed him by the sleeve. He tried to tell Scott something but the mumbled words from the tightly bound jaws were lost in the raging of the storm.