“What caused that rise—rains?”
“Rains and cloud-bursts, in the season of the melting snows. It was just as Smith was turning heaven and earth upside down to get the dam completed, and for a little spell they sure was anticipatin’ trouble a-plenty; thought they were going to be plumb paralyzed.”
“I want to meet that man Smith,” said the expert, going off at a tangent, as his habit was. “Stillings, your friend the lawyer who has his offices next door to my laboratory, says he’s a wonder.”
“Smith is all right,” was Starbuck’s verdict. “He’s a first-class fighting man, and he doesn’t care much who knows it. He got big rich out of that High Line fight, married old Colonel Baldwin’s little peach of a daughter, and is layin’ off to live happy ever afterward.”
From that on, the rear platform talk had to do chiefly with Mr. J. Montague Smith and his plucky struggle with the hydro-electric trust which had tried, unsuccessfully as the event proved, to steal the High Line dam and water privilege. In due time the train shot out of the gorge, and after a dodging course among the Park hills, came to the skirting of the High Line reservoir lake lying like a silver mirror in its setting of forested buttes and spurs.
At the lower end of the lake, where the white concrete dam stretched its massive rampart across the river gorge, the train halted for a moment in obedience to an interposing block-signal. It was during the momentary stop that a handsome young fellow with the healthy tan of the hill country browning his frank, boyish face, came out of the near-by power-house, ran up the embankment and swung himself over the railing of the observation platform.
“Hello, John!” said Starbuck; and then he introduced the new-comer to his companion.
“Glad to know you, Mr. Sprague,” said the young man, whose hearty hand-grip was an instant recommendation to the good graces of the big expert. “I’ve been hearing of you off and on all summer. It’s a saying with us out here that any friend of Dick Maxwell’s owns Brewster—or as much of it as he cares to make use of.”
“I have certainly been finding it that way, Mr. Smith,” Sprague rejoined, in grateful recognition of the Brewster hospitality. And then: “We were just talking about you and your dam as we came along, Starbuck and I. You have a pretty good head of water on, haven’t you?”
“An unusually good head for this time of the year. The heavy storms we have been having in the eastern foot-hills account for it. Our power plant is working at normal load, and our ranchmen are all using water liberally in their late irrigating, and yet you see the quantity that is going over the splash-boards.”