“I reckon we’d better do as he says. He’d be awful mad if we didn’t. Did you see his eyes when he talked to us?”
“But if he––he and others are wounded?”
Uneasily Mary gazed at the older girl and then down at the canyon. On the hillside the men led by her father were no longer in sight, somewhere concealed among the stones that dotted the earth. But down by the stream and now scarcely fifty yards from the white stretch of concrete barring the river bed through a tunnel in which the water foamed and escaped, the Mexicans were clearly visible, their hats bobbing about, their guns flinging upward an occasional gleam.
“It doesn’t seem as if anything was going to happen,” Mary went on in awed tones. “Things are so quiet and peaceful.”
Still Janet delayed starting the car, divided in feelings 254 between a wish to respect Steele Weir’s insistent command and a growing fear for his safety. She could see nothing of him. Into the shadow of a rock he had disappeared and thither she gazed with straining eyes, hoping to see again his straight strong figure.
“Why, look down there at the dam,” Mary said, whose eyes had been wandering from, point to point of the scene. “Isn’t that him?”
Janet’s heart gave a quicker beat, then seemed to sink in her breast as staring downward she recognized the engineer. He had come out all at once from the shade cast by a wooden framework. He had with him the burdens he had lifted from the ground before the little detached stone house at the edge of the camp, and these, the cylinders, he placed on the surface of the concrete core at the spot where he stood. Then he knelt down, struck a match, lighted a cigar––as if any man in his senses would stop to smoke in such a situation!––and busied himself at some task over the cylinders.
Only for an instant had he stood erect on the flat top of the dam. Apparently he had been unseen by the attackers, engaged in picking their footing: and now in his crouching position, retired from the upper edge of the dam’s front as he was, it was very likely that he was wholly out of view of the band.
At last Weir moved his cylinders forward towards this edge. Afterwards he straightened up and standing hands on hips, smoking his cigar, the tiny crimson glow of which rose and fell, he watched the party nearing the foot of the white gleaming wall, fifty feet below him.
For Janet the sight was too much. His indifference to risk froze her; he appeared to be courting death; and she strove to open her lips to send down to him an imploring 255 cry to draw back, but succeeded in uttering only a tremulous wail.