“Who is the floor-walker?” asked Sprague.
“I couldn’t get a fair squint at him, but he looked mightily like the fellow I been keepin’ cases on for the last two or three days.”
“Gentlemen, we’re in luck, for once,” Sprague said impressively. “That’s Jennings, without doubt; and he is waiting for a wire—the right kind of a wire—to come from Brewster. You remember what I told Maxwell, as we were leaving? That was one time when a guess was as good as a prophecy. Go on, Billy, and head straight for the Mesquite. And you gentlemen back there, get your weapons ready. If there happens to be a guard at the dam, we’ll have to rush it.”
Singularly enough, when the short run was accomplished they found that there was no guard. The shack camp was deserted, with all the disorder of a hasty evacuation strewn broadcast. But in the valley itself there was a startling change. The lake, which, three days earlier, had reached only half-way up the earth embankment, was now lapping within a foot of the dam top, the result of the continued storms and cloud-bursts reported by the Brewster weather station.
Starbuck eased the big car up to the dam head, and Williams and Tarbell made a quick quartering of the deserted camp. “Nobody here,” the engineer reported, when they came back to the car; and then Sprague asked Starbuck to relight the head-lamps.
With the acetylenes flinging their broad white beam across the earthwork, another change was made apparent. In the centre of the dam a square pit, plank-lined like the shaft of a mine, had been either sunk or left in the building. Over this pit stood a three-legged hoist, with the block-and-tackle still hanging from its apex.
“What is that thing out there?” queried the colonel, shading his eyes with his hand.
“Jennings would probably tell you that it is a new kind of spillway, by which, in case of need, the reservoir lake can be emptied,” suggested Sprague. “But we haven’t time to investigate it just now. Our job at the present moment is to take the law into our hands and empty this lake, and to do it, if we can, without bringing on the catastrophe it was designed to accomplish.”
“Heavens!” ejaculated Colonel Baldwin. “That’s a criminal offence, isn’t it?—and in the face of Judge Watson’s injunction, at that!”
“It is criminal,” was the calm reply; “unless we shall find sufficient justification for it as we go along. There is one chance in a dozen that we may find it first. Tarbell, take this little flash-light of mine and skip out there and look into that pit.”