Boulder Dam. Zane Grey
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him over, Gip.”
The second ruffian leaned close to scrutinize Lynn’s features.
“Never seen him before,” he said.
“Talk!” ordered the other, punching Lynn with the gun.
“Well, I’m a little—nervous to talk—if I knew anything to say,” replied Lynn. And the fact was that he could scarcely restrain from hitting out with all his might. On the instant, then, the man in the car leaned out, bareheaded, his face in the light. Lynn recognized Ben Sneed.
“Did you see a girl runnin’ along here?”
“No,” replied Lynn.
“We’re losing time,” called Sneed from the car. “Jump in. We’ll follow Ring.”
In another moment Lynn found himself watching the red tail-lights of the car vanishing in the direction the man called Ring had taken.
“Well, what do you know about this?” he muttered. “If I ever meet that bozo again I’ll know him, and will I sock him? I’m telling you. . . . Whew! A gun shoved in your belly doesn’t feel so hot.”
Lynn watched for the car to come back. He heard it for a moment longer. Then the hum ceased. He wondered if Sneed had caught the girl in the blanket.
“A naked girl running away in a blanket!” he muttered, perplexed and wondering. “By gum! That’s the white-slave stuff! But Sneed didn’t strike me as low-down as that.”
He waited there for a little while, watching and conjecturing. Several cars passed, traveling in both directions. At length Lynn decided he had better find his own car if he didn’t want to walk half the night to get home to his cabin. A search down the side street in the direction Sneed had taken failed to locate the car. He began to fear it had been stolen. The loss of the ramshackle vehicle would not concern him, but he wanted to get home. Then he retraced his steps down the street he had first searched, but on the opposite side, and found his car against a background of brush that had made it difficult to distinguish in the dark. Hopping in, he was soon on the move and turned on the road toward Boulder Dam.
Lynn had not noticed the cold until he got going, but with the desert wind whipping in at both sides of his car he became chilled through. He had a comfortable warm sensation, however, where the bulging pocket full of silver dollars sagged heavily against him.
Excitement lingered with him, despite his relief. It had been rather a momentous evening, and no doubt that augmented his thrilling sense of the desert. The bare windiness stretched vague under the stars to the black mountains on the horizon. The dry sweet tang of sage and greasewood stung his cold nose. Far ahead two bright eyes of a car pierced the darkness, and still farther on twinkled a couple of pinpoints. Five miles or more out the red-gold lights of Ben Sneed’s ranch burned against the white-walled hacienda with its dark arches. Lynn had dropped in at the resort several times, but not to stay long. Sneed did not run games of chance.
“I’m curious about that guy,” he mused, as he passed the notorious night club. “Wonder if he got the girl with the blanket? Some life round this Boulder Dam diggings!”
The tremendousness of that engineering project and the magnificence of its setting in the Black Canyon of the Colorado had struck Lynn with staggering force at his very first sight and conception of them. They had changed the direction of his life; they had set him at a man’s job; they had been responsible for the gradual development of his character; they had at length replaced the bitterness of failure and drifting to some vague dream of finding himself on the ladder to success.
It was the desert then that had taken intangible and subtle hold of Lynn Weston. Looking backward he could realize how by imperceptible degrees he had learned to love the lonely and desolate wasteland of rock that the torture of hard labor had blinded him to at first. There seemed to be something permanent for him out here in this Nevada. He conceived the idea right there—why not let this large sum of money he had won be a nucleus to a stake which he could add to during the years Boulder Dam would be in building? Then he could buy a ranch, or start a gold mine, or develop some business on the big inland lake which the dam would flood back into the canyon and basin and which in time would become a sportsman’s paradise. And suddenly he recalled what he had long forgotten—the scorn with which Helen Pritchard had ended their engagement and the more grievous fact of his family evidently having shared her conviction of his hopelessness. But she was wrong, thought Lynn, strangely finding himself free of the old pain; and his family might yet be embarrassingly forced to change their minds, if they did not actually receive help from him.
How this old desert brought home to a man the things that counted—endurance and strength and guts to make life possible and worth living!
Lynn slowed down at the government inspection post, where record was kept of all workers going and coming. He had a cheery word for the guard who passed him.
“Back early, Weston,” was the grinning reply. “Sober an’ broke, I’ll bet.”
“Wrong both ways, Dan. . . . How many cars ahead of me the last hour?”
“Two, I reckon. A truck, an’ a Ford full of micks.”
“So long. I won’t be seeing you for a spell.”
A few miles farther on Lynn clattered up a grade to the pass. That was a gateway to the rough brakes of the canyon country. Back from the road from benches and in coves between the hills gleamed the lights of the camps of the riffraff drawn from all over the United States. It was not a safe place to pass late at night. But Lynn drove slowly because he did not want to hit some murdered workman or outcast whose body might be tumbled from behind rock or brush out upon the road. Where the pass opened wide beyond the black hills he sped by Rankin’s Palace, a huge rambling structure gaudy with its many different-colored lights. Music came on the cold wind. If law had any jurisdiction over Rankin’s resort it had never been called upon. Money could buy anything there. But the laborers had learned to give it a wide berth. Visitors, tourists, adventurers, gamblers, rich men’s sons and society women out for a kick furnished Rankin with his pickings.
Beyond this no man’s land Lynn entered the government reserve and approached the broad plateau where a model town, Boulder City, was in the course of construction.
Lynn turned off the smooth asphalt thoroughfare into a gravel road that headed down into the huge desert basin back of Boulder Dam. Here he entered the canyon country. The road was lighted, but the lamps appeared only to accentuate the lonely desert. For miles downgrade there were no buildings, no works of any land, until he crossed the railroad track which had been built twelve miles down into the basin. This railroad forked below the crossing, the right-hand branch running down to the river and along the shore into the canyon to be dammed; and the left branch turned off into the basin toward the gravel pits from which millions of tons of sand and gravel were to be transported to the site of the dam.
Sand and gravel were Lynn’s job, but he did not think of them then. As always, and especially at night, he felt the call of that wonderful country. The hills along which he drove would soon be submerged under the largest body of water ever artificially made by labor of man, but Lynn did not think of that, either. He caught glimpses of the Colorado, gleaming palely under the bright stars and mirroring the great walls. Lynn did not trust that swirling, sullen, muddy river. He had worked along it for a year now. He had seen it once in flood. He questioned the effrontery of man’s egotism. The Rio Colorado had a voice, a low sullen murmur of unrestraint. In Lynn’s secret opinion only the elemental forces that had given birth to this strange river could ever change its course or dam it permanently.
On the Arizona side the black walls stood up ragged and bold, and beyond them, touching the stars, lifted the stark and ghastly mountains. The basin on Lynn’s left opened out into dim and obscure space, bounded by the distant Nevada hills. Across it the cold wind whipped, carrying alkali dust and grains of sand to sting Lynn’s face. He used to gaze out upon that lonely vague gloom as if it were his future. But that thought had gone, he didn’t remember when, and when he looked now it was to feel something vital and compelling to which he could