Out Of The Depths Part 32

"Yes," he replied, and he told about the rattlesnake in the bunkhouse.

"But I ought to have shot quicker," Isobel explained, when he finished. "I missed the head, though I aimed at it."

"The way we've left Thomas about on the ground!" exclaimed Genevieve.

"Are there any of the horrid things around here? Is that why you carry the pistol?"

"No, no, don't be afraid. We've killed them out here, long ago, because of the cattle. I carry my pistol on the chance of killing wolves. They're dreadfully harmful to the calves and colts, you know."

"Good for you," praised Blake, as he picked up the rifle. "Well, we're off."

He started away, hand in hand with his wife. They were soon at the top of the dike slope and almost dancing along over the dry turf. It was months since they had been alone together in the open, and they were still deeper in love than at the time of their marriage--if that were possible.

They soon reached the place where the shooting had occurred. Here they picked up the lunch bag, Ashton's canteen and his hat, now punctured with another bullet hole; and at once started to carry the line of levels out across the valley. A few words of instruction made an efficient rodwoman of Genevieve, so that they soon reached the foot of the ridge up which her husband had led Ashton the previous day. Here he established a bench-mark, and turned along the base of the escarpment to the mouth of Dry Fork Gully, where he checked the line of levels that had been run up the bed of the creek.

"Good work--less than three tenths difference, and all that I am concerned about is an error in feet," he commented. "It's getting along towards noon. We'll go up the gulch, and eat our lunch in the shade. This place is almost as much of a sight as the canon."

Genevieve more than agreed with her husband's opinion when he led her up into the stupendous gorge and the walls of rock began to tower on each side ever steeper and loftier.

"Oh, I do not see how anything can be so grand, so awesome as this!"

she cried, gazing up the precipices. "It makes me positively giddy to look at such heights!"

"Better stop off for a while," advised Blake. "We are almost to where the bottom tilts skyward. You can stargaze while we are eating lunch.

It's rougher along here. We can get on faster this way."

He picked her up in his arms as though she were a feather, and carried her on up the gulch to the foot of the t.i.tanic chute. Here, resting on a flat rock in the cool semi-twilight of the gorge bottom, they ate their lunch and talked with as much zest as if they were still new acquaintances.

"Those awful cliffs!" she murmured, lowering her gaze from the colossal walls above her. "I cannot bear to look at them any longer.

They overpower me!"

"Wait till you look down into the canon," replied her husband. "In some ways it is more tremendous than the Grand Canon of the Colorado--the width is so much narrower in proportion to the depth."

"What makes these frightful chasms?--earthquakes?"

"Water," he replied.

"Water? Not all these hundreds and thousands of feet cut down through the solid rock!"

"Every foot," he insisted. "Think of water flowing along in the same bed and always was.h.i.+ng sand and gravel and even bowlders downstream--grind, grind, grind, through the centuries and hundreds of centuries."

"But there is no water here, Tom."

"Not now, and no chance of any this time of year, else I wouldn't have brought you in here. A sudden heavy June rain up above there would pour down a torrent that would drown us before we could run three hundred yards. Imagine a flood roaring down that b.u.mpy shoot-the-chutes."

"I can't! It's too terrifying. Is that the way it will be if you get the water and dig the tunnel?"

"No. At this end, the tunnel may terminate any place from down here to a thousand feet up, but in any event far below the top. I hope it proves to be well up. The greater the drop to the level of the mesa, the more turbines could be put in to generate electricity."

"That sounds so inspiring! But, Dear--" Genevieve looked at her husband with a shade of anxiety--"even if this project is feasible, do you feel you should carry it through?"

"You mean on account of Miss Chuckie and her father," he replied. "I have considered their side of the matter, and even at the first I saw how--Listen, Sweetheart. No one knows better than you that I'm an engineer to the very marrow of my bones. My work in life is to construct,--to harness the forces of nature and compel them to serve mankind; and to save waste--waste material, waste energy--and put it to use."

"Don't I know, Tom!"

"Well, then," he went on, "in the bottom of Deep Canon is a river--waste waters down there beyond the reach of this rich but waterless land, down in the gloom, doing no good to anything or anybody, frittering away their energy on barren rocks. Why, it's as bad as the way Ashton, with all the good qualities we now see he has in him--the way he dissipated his strength and his brains and his father's money."

"Ah, Dear! wasn't it a splendid thing when he was thrown out of his rut of wastefulness?"

"Otherwise known as the primrose path, or the great white way," added Blake. "It certainly was a throw out. I'm as pleased as I am astonished that he seems to have landed squarely on his feet."

"What a marvelous change it has made in him!" exclaimed Genevieve.

"Sometimes I hardly can believe it really is Lafayette. He is so serious and manly."

"Good thing he has changed," replied Blake. "If Miss Chuckie hadn't told us he had made a clean breast of that bridge, I should begin to feel worried about--Do you know, Sweetheart, it's the strangest thing in the world the way I feel towards that girl. It's not because she is so lovely. Of course I enjoy her beauty, but that's not it. If Tommy were a girl and grown up--that's how I feel."

"She is a very dear, sweet girl."

"So are several of your friends--our friends," said Blake. "This is different. The very first day we met her, there was something about her voice and face--seemed as though I already knew her."

"She knew you, through what she had read of you. She warned me, in that frank, charming way of hers, that you were a hero to her and I must not mind if she wors.h.i.+ped you openly."

Blake laughed pleasedly. "Isn't she the greatest! And the way she chums with me! Wonder if that is what makes Ashton so sore at me? The idiot! Can't he see the difference?"

"Lovers always are blind," said Genevieve.

"I'm not," he rejoined, his eyes, as he gazed down into hers, as blue and tender as Isobel's.

The young wife blushed deliciously and rewarded him with a kiss.

"But about Chuckie?" she returned to the previous question. "You were going to tell me--"

"I am going to tell you something you will think is very fanciful--and it is! Do you know why I am so taken with that girl? It's because she reminds me of my sisters--what they might have grown to be!...

G.o.d!--" he bent over with his face in his shaking hands--"G.o.d! If only they had gone any other way than--the way they did!"

"My poor dear boy!" soothed his wife, her hand on his downbent head.

"Let us trust that they are in a happier world, a world where sorrow and pain--"

"If only I could believe that!" he groaned.

Genevieve waited a few moments and with quiet tactfulness sought to divert him from his grief: "If Chuckie reminds you of them, Dear--"

"She might be either--only Mary, the older one, had dark brown eyes.

But Belle's were blue like Chuckie's."

"What a pure blue her eyes are--the sweet true girl! Why can't you regard her as your sister, and--and give over further thought of this irrigation project?"

Blake looked up, completely diverted. "You little schemer! So that's what you've been working around to?"

"But why not?" she insisted.