“I promised we wouldn’t go swimming and——” Then she said awkwardly: “There are two pistols in the glove compartment. Dad knows you. So I promised you’d put one in your pocket up at the lake.”
Joe drew a deep breath. She opened the glove compartment and handed him a pistol. He looked at it: .38, hammerless. A good safe weapon. He slipped it in his coat pocket. But he frowned.
“I was looking forward to—not worrying for a while,” he said wryly. “But now I’ll have to remember to keep looking over my shoulder all the time!”
“Maybe,” said Sally, “you can look over my shoulder and I’ll look over yours, and we can glance at each other occasionally.”
She laughed, and he managed to smile. But the trace of a frown remained on his forehead.
Joe drove and drove and drove. Once they came to a very small town. It may have contained a hundred people. There were gas pumps and a restaurant and two or three general stores, which were certainly too many for the permanent residents. But there were cow ponies hitched before the stores, and automobiles were also in view. The ground here was slightly rolling. The mountains had grown to good-sized ramparts against the sky. Joe drove carefully down the single street, turning out widely once to dodge a dog sleeping placidly in an area normally reserved for traffic.
Finally they came to the foothills, and then the road curved and recurved as it wound among them. And two hours from Bootstrap they reached Red Canyon. They first saw the dam from downstream. It was a monstrous structure of masonry, alone in the mountains. From its top a plume of falling water jetted out.
“The dam’s for irrigation,” said Sally professionally, “and the Shed gets all its power from here. One of Dad’s nightmares is that somebody may blow up this dam and leave Bootstrap and the Shed without power.”
Joe said nothing. He drove on up the trail as it climbed the canyon wall in hairpin slants. It was ticklish driving. But then, quite suddenly, they reached the top of the canyon wall and the top of the dam and the level of the lake at once. Here there was a sheet of water that reached back among the barren hillsides for miles and miles. It twisted out of sight. There were small waves on its surface, and grass at its edge. There were young trees. The powerhouse was a small squat structure in the middle of the dam. Not a person was visible anywhere.
“Here we are,” said Sally, when Joe stopped the car.