“You couldn’t stay away, could you?” said the white-haired colonel, grinning up from his seat on the last of the sand-bags. “I told the boys here you’d be turning up as soon as your railroad track was open.”
“We’ve had a mighty anxious night,” Stillings put in. “The river is up five feet, and we couldn’t tell what was happening over here. Great Jonah! but you men must have had your hands full!”
“We did,” said Smith; “but it’s all over now.”
“All but the shouting,” said Maxwell. “But post your guards and let’s get back to town. My car is at Angels, and we came up special. When we left Brewster the plaza was black with people waiting for news.”
It was on the way down the flood-swollen canyon that the chemistry expert explained to the private-car company at the breakfast-table how he had been able to diagnose the case of the cloud-bursters.
“It was merely a bit of what you might call constructive reasoning,” he said modestly. “I knew by personal investigation in the line of my proper work—soil-testing—that there was no arable land within reach of the Mesquite project. The other steps followed, as a matter of course. Starbuck, here, is wondering why I risked his life and mine to get a few photographs for The Tribune, but if any of you will examine the snap-shots carefully under a magnifier, you will see that they prove the existence of the central pit in the dam, and that one of them shows the pipe-line through which the fuse was to run. For the possible legal purpose I was anxious to have this evidence in indisputable form. That’s all, I believe.”
“Not quite all,” Maxwell broke in. “How did you know that Jennings would be hanging over the wire at Angels while you people were making your flying trip across the mountain in the auto?”
Sprague laughed good-naturedly.
“Call it a guess,” he said. “It was evident that Jennings wasn’t anxious to kill a lot of innocent people. His inquiries about the strength of the High Line dam proved that. It ran in my mind that he wouldn’t touch off his earthquake until he could be reasonably sure that the flood wouldn’t catch a train in transit in the canyon. That would have been a little too horrible, even for him. Now you’ve got it all, I guess.”
“But you haven’t got yours yet,” laughed Stillings. “When this thing gets out in Brewster the whole town will mob you and want to make you the next mayor, or send you to Congress, or something of that sort.”