The Man from the Bitter Roots Part 31

"Keep her steady--straight away." He had not dared yet to lift his eyes to look behind save for that one glance.

"My G.o.d! they're comin' right together!"

The sharp cry from the hind sweepman made him turn. They had rounded the ledge abreast and Smaltz's boat inside was crowding Saunders hard.

Saunders and his helper were working with superhuman strength to throw the boat into the outer channel in the fraction of time before it started on the final shoot. Could they do it! could they! Bruce felt his lungs--his heart--something inside him hurt with his sharp intake of breath as he watched that desperate battle whose loss meant not only sunk machinery but very likely death.

Bruce's hands were still full getting his own boat to safety. He dared not look too long behind.

"They're goin' to make it! They're almost through! They're safe!"

Then--shrilly--"They're gone! they've lost a sweep."

Bruce turned quickly at his helper's cry of consternation, turned to see the hind-sweep wildly thres.h.i.+ng the air while the boat spun around and around in the boiling water, disappearing, reappearing, sinking a little lower with each plunge. Then, at the risk of having every rib crushed in, they saw the bailer throw his body across the sweep and hold it down before it quite leaped from its pin. The hind-sweepman was scrambling wildly to reach and hold the handle as it beat the air. He got it--held it for a second--then it was wrenched out of his hand. He tried again and again before he held it, but finally Bruce said huskily----

"They'll make it--they'll make it sure if Saunders can hold her a little longer off the rocks."

His own boat had reached quieter water. Simultaneously, it seemed, both he and his helper thought of Smaltz. They took their eyes from the boat in trouble and the hind-sweepman's jaw dropped. He said unemotionally--dully--as he might have said--"I'm sick; I'm hungry"--"They've struck."

Yes--they had struck. If Bruce had not been so absorbed he might have heard the bottom splintering when she hit the rock.

Her bow shot high into the air and settled at the stern. As she slid off, tilted, filled and sunk, Smaltz and Porcupine Jim both jumped. Then the river made a bend which shut it all from Bruce's sight. It was half a mile before he found a landing. He tied up and walked back, unexcited, not hurrying, with a curious quietness inside.

Smaltz and Jim were fighting when he got there. Smaltz was sitting astride the latter's chest. There were epithets and recriminations, accusations, counter-charges, oaths. The Swede was crying and a little stream of red was trickling toward his ear. Bruce eyed him calmly, contemplatively, thinking what a face he made, and how ludicrous he looked with the sand matted in his corn-silk hair and covering him like a tamale casing of corn-meal as it stuck to his wet clothes.

He left them and walked up the river where the rock rose like a monument to his hopes. With his hands on his hips he watched the water rippling around it, slipping over the spot where the boat lay buried with some portion of every machine upon the works while like a bolt from the blue the knowledge came to him that since the old Edison type was obsolete the factories no longer made duplicates of the parts.

XX

"THE FORLORN HOPE"

It was August. "Old Turtle-back" was showing up at the diggin's and the river would reach low water-mark with less than half a foot.

Pole in hand, big John Johnson of the crew stood on the rocking raft anch.o.r.ed below The Big Mallard and opposite the rock where the boat had sunk and smiled his solemn smile at Bruce.

"Don't know but what we ought to name her and break a bottle of ketchup over the bow of this here craft a'fore we la'nch her."

"The Forlorn Hope, The Last Chance, or something appropriate like that,"

Bruce suggested, although there was too much truth in the jest for him to smile. This attempt to recover the sunken boat was literally that. If it was gone, he was done. His work, all that he had been through, was wasted effort; the whole an expensive fiasco proving that the majority are sometimes right.

The suspense which Bruce had been under for more than two months would soon be ended one way or the other. Day and night it seemed to him he had thought of little else than the fate of the sunken boat. His brain was tired with conjecturing as to what had happened to her when the water had reached its flood. Had the force of it shoved her into deeper water? Had the sand which the water carried at that period filled and covered her? Had the current wrenched her to pieces and imbedded the machinery deep in the sediment and mud?

Questioning his own judgment, doubtful as to whether he was right or wrong, he had gone on with the work as though the machinery was to be recovered, yet all the time he was filled with sickening doubts. But it seemed as though his inborn tenacity of purpose, his mulish obstinacy, would not let him quit, driving him on to finish the flume and trestle 40 feet high with every green log and timber snaked in and put in place by hand; to finish the pressure box and penstock and the 200 feet of pipe-line riveted on the broiling hillside when the metal was almost too hot to touch with the bare hand. The foundation of the power house was ready for the machinery and the Pelton water-wheel had been installed.

It had taken time and money and grimy sweat. Was it all in vain?

Asking himself the question for which ten minutes at most would find the answer Bruce sprang upon the tilting raft and nodded--

"Shove off."

As Bruce balanced himself on the raft while the Swede poled slowly toward the rock that now arose from the water the size of a small house, he was thankful that the face can be made at times to serve as so good a mask. Not for the world would he have had John Johnson guess how afraid he was, how actually scared to death when the raft b.u.mped against the huge brown rock and he knew that he must look over the side.

Holding the raft steady, Johnson kept his eyes on Bruce's face as he peered into the river and searched the bottom. Not a muscle of Bruce's face moved nor an eyelid flickered in the tense silence. Then he said quietly--

"John, she's gone."

A look of sympathy softened the Swede's homely face.

Bruce straightened up.

"Gone!" he reiterated--"gone."

Johnson might guess a little but he could never guess the whole of the despair which seemed to crush Bruce like an overwhelming weight as he stood looking at the sun s.h.i.+ning upon the back of the twisting green snake of a river that he had thought he could beat; Johnson never had risked and lost anybody's money but his own, he never had allowed a woman he loved to build her hopes upon his judgment and success. To have failed so quickly and so completely--oh, the mortification of it! the chagrin!

Finally Johnson said gently:

"Guess we might as well go back."

Bruce winced. It reminded him what going back meant. To discharge the crew and telegraph his failure to Helen Dunbar, Harrah and the rest, then to watch the lumber dry out and the cracks widen in the flume, the rust take the machinery and the water-wheel go to ruin--_that's_ what going back meant--taking up his lonely, pointless life where he had left it off, growing morbid, eccentric, like the other failures sulking in the hills.

"There were parts of two dynamos, one 50 horse-power motor, a keeper, and a field, beside the fly-wheel in the boat." Bruce looked absently at Johnson but he was talking to himself. "I wonder, I wonder"--a gleam of hope lit up his face--"John, go up to Fritz Yandell's and borrow that compa.s.s that he fished out of the river."

Johnson looked puzzled but started in a hurry. In an hour or so he was back, still puzzled; compa.s.ses he thought were for people who were lost.

"It's only a chance, John, another forlorn hope, but there's magnetic iron in those dynamos and the needle might show it if we can get above the boat."

Johnson's friendly eye shone instantly with interest. Starting from the spot of the wreck, he poled slowly down the river, keeping in line with the rock. Ten, twenty, thirty--fifty feet below the rock they poled and the needle did not waver from the north.

"She'd go to pieces before she ever travelled this far." The glimmer of hope in Bruce's eyes had died. "Either the needle won't locate her or she's drifted into the channel. If that's the case we'll never get her out."

Then Johnson poled back and forth, zig-zagging from bank to bank, covering every foot of s.p.a.ce, and still the needle hung steadfastly to its place.

They were all of fifty feet from where the boat had sunk and some forty feet from sh.o.r.e when Bruce cried sharply:

"Hold her steady! Wait!"

The needle wavered--agitated unmistakably--then the parts of the dynamos and the motor in the boat dragged the reluctant point of steel slowly, flutteringly, but surely, from its affinity, the magnetic North.

Bruce gulped at something in his throat before he spoke----

"John, we've GOT her!"

"I _see_ her!" Johnson executed a kind of dance on the rocking raft.

"Lookee," he pointed into the exasperatingly dense water, "see her there--like a shadow--her bow is shoved up four--five feet above her stern. Got her?"

Bruce nodded, then they looked at each other joyfully, and Bruce remembered afterward that they had giggled hysterically like two boys.