Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation

by Robert Ames Bennet

Blake smiled in his good-natured way. “You forget the first rule of engineering. Always check when you can, then re-check and check again.––Now, if you’ll kindly give me a reading off that bench.” 208

Ashton complied, though with evident ill will. He had wakened in good spirits, but was fast returning to his sullenness of the previous day. He took his time in going from the bench-mark to the first turning point. Blake moved up past him with inspiring briskness, but the younger man kept to his leisurely saunter. In rounding the corner of the hill twice as much time was consumed as was necessary.

When they came to the last turn at the foot of the rocky slope, where the line struck out across the valley towards the foot of the mountain side, Ashton paused to roll a cigarette before holding his rod for the reading. Small as was the incident, it was particularly aggravating to an engineer. The reading would have taken only a moment, and he could then have rolled his cigarette and smoked it while Blake was moving past him for the next “set up.” Instead, he deliberately kept Blake waiting until the cigarette had been rolled and lighted.

Blake “pulled up” his level and started forward, his face impassive. Ashton leaned jauntily on the rod, sucked in a mouthful of smoke, and raising his cigarette, flicked the ash from the tip with his little finger. At the same instant a bullet from the crags above him pierced the crown of his hat. He pitched forward on his face, rolled half over, and lay quiet.

Most men would have been dumfounded by the frightful suddenness of the occurrence––the shot and 209 the instant fall of Ashton. It was like a stroke of lightning out of a clear sky. Blake did not stand gaping even for a moment. As Ashton’s senseless body struck the ground, he sprang sideways and bent to lay down his instrument, with the instinctive carefulness of an old railroad surveyor. A swift rush towards Ashton barely saved him from the second bullet that came pinging down from the hill crest. It burned across the back of his shoulder.

Heedless of the blood spurting from the wound in the side of Ashton’s head, Blake snatched up the automatic rifle and fired at a point between two knobs of rock on the hill crest. Promptly a hat appeared, then an arm and a rifle. It might have been expected that a bullet would have instantly followed; yet the assassin was strangely deliberate about getting his aim. Blake did not wait for him. He began to fire as fast as the automatic ejector and reloader set the rifle trigger. Three bullets sped up at the assassin before he had time to drop back out of sight.

Blake started up the hillside, his pale eyes like white-hot steel. He was in a fury, but it was the cold fury of a man too courageous for reckless bravado. He went up the hill as an Apache would have charged, dodging from cover to cover and, wherever possible, keeping in line with a rock or tree in his successive rushes. At every brief stop he scanned the ridge crest for a sign of his enemy. But the assassin did not 210 show himself. For all that Blake could tell, he might be waiting for a sure shot, or he might be lying with a bullet through his brain.

To avoid suicidal exposure, the engineer was compelled to veer off to the right in his ascent. He reached the ridge crest without a shot having been fired at him. Leaping suddenly to his feet, he scrambled up to the flat top of a high crag, from which he could peer down upon the others. The natural embrazure from which the assassin had fired was exposed to his view; but the place was empty. He looked cautiously about at the many huge bowlders behind which a hundred men might have been crouching unseen by him, advantageous as was his position. To flush the assassin would require a bold rush over and around the rocks.

Blake set his powerful jaw and gathered himself together for the leap down from his crag. At that moment his alert eye caught a glimpse of a swiftly moving object on the mesa at the foot of the far side of the hill. It was a horse and rider racing out of sight around the bend of a ridge point.

Blake whipped the rifle to his shoulder. But the cowardly fugitive had disappeared. He lowered the rifle and started back down the hill faster than he had come up. Leaping like a goat, sliding, rushing––he raced to the bottom in a direct line for Ashton.