The Sagebrusher, Emerson Hough [best love novels of all time txt] 📗

mean? That's foolishness. That man's a nut! I bet he gets alone up in here and smokes hop, that's what he does, all by himself. No one but a dope fiend would pull stuff like that.

"But still," she added, a finger at chin, "what bothers me is, how does Charlie know Waldhorn? Unless——"

"Unless what?" asked Sim Gage, his brows suddenly contracting.

"Unless they're both in on this deal! What do you suppose the Doc thinks? What makes him keep this Waldhorn close as he does? Is he a prisoner?"

"No, I reckon not. We all just got orders to shoot him if he tries to get away. I think Doc's holding him until he gets word in from outside. Things seems to me to move mighty slow."

"Well, this letter's addressed to Charlie Dorenwald, and anything that's got Charlie Dorenwald's name on it is crooked, and you can gamble on that. Can't you find the Doc?"

As it happened, Doctor Barnes had not yet left his quarters for his nightly trip to the lower canyon. He had been trying to sleep. He rose now, full-clad and all awake, when he caught sight of Sim Gage's face at his door.

"What's up?" he said.

"This here," said Sim, "is a letter that Annie brung me out of the house where them two is living. She says she found it in there. We can't make nothing out of it. Seems like this Waldhorn here had something to say to Charlie Dorenwald. Annie says it's the same Dorenwald that was up above, at the ranch, the one Wid didn't get. Well, how come him and Waldhorn to know each other, that's what I want to know. So does Annie."

"What I want to know, too!" said Doctor Barnes, reaching out his hand.

"Annie says it's plumb nutty, the stuff in it," commented Sim. The other looked at him quizzically.

"She read it then?"

He read it now, himself, and stood stiff and straight at reading. "This is a cypher—code stuff! They know what it means, and we don't. 'Two-nineteen sharp'—I wonder what that means! This is the nineteenth day of the month, isn't it? 'Signal general satisfaction'—Lord! I'd give anything for a good night's sleep. Gage, go on over and tell all the men to keep full dressed, and with equipment handy all night long. I don't have any clear guess what this is all about, but we can't take any chances."

"Wid, he thinks them fellers ain't coming down here a-tall," said Sim confidentially.

"He doesn't know anything more about it than I do or you do," said Doctor Barnes somewhat testily. "You go and tell Annie to shut that desk up, and see that she keeps it shut. I'm coming over to seal it up."

Annie Squires meantime had hastened back to discuss these matters with her patient in the hospital room. It only added more to the nervous strain that already tormented Mary Gage.

"Annie, I'm scared!" she whispered. "Oh! if I could only take care of myself. Tell me, Annie—I'll get well, won't I?"

"Sure thing, Kid—it's a cinch."

"Where is he?" Mary demanded after some hesitation.

"Who? Him?" Annie employed her usual fashion of indicating the identity of Sim Gage.

"No, I mean Doctor Barnes."

"He'll be going down below pretty soon. He don't know anything more than I do about what that fool stuff in the letter means."

"But say," she added after a time, "I been kind of looking around in desks and places, you know—I have to red things up—and I run across another thing, some more writing."

"You mustn't do these things, Annie! It may be private."

"Oh, no, it ain't. It's only some writing copied from a magazine, like enough. It was on one of the desks in this house—just in there."

"Copied?—What is it?"

"I don't know. Poetry stuff—sounds mushy. I didn't know men would do things like copying out poetry from magazines. Never heard of Mr. Symonds—did you?"

"How can I tell, Annie?"

"I'll read it for you if you'll let me. It's dark, in here—I'll just go outside the door and read it through the crack at you, so's the light won't hurt you anyways."

And so, faintly, as from a detached intelligence, there came into Mary Gage's darkened room, her darkened life, some words well-written, ill-read, which it seemed to her she might have dreamed:

"As a perfume doth remain
In the folds where it hath lain,
So the thought of you, remaining
Deeply folded in my brain,
Will not leave me; all things leave me:
You remain.

"Other thoughts may come and go,
Other moments I may know
That shall waft me, in their going,
As a breath blown to and fro.
Fragrant memories; fragrant memories
Come and go.

"Only thoughts of you remain
In my heart where they have lain,
Perfumed thoughts of you, remaining,
A hid sweetness, in my brain.
Others leave me; all things leave me:
You remain."

"Read them over again!" said Mary Gage, sitting upon her couch. "Read them again, Annie! I want to learn it all by heart."

And Annie, patient as ever, read the words over to her. The keen senses of Mary Gage recorded them.

"I can say them now!" said she, as much to herself as to her friend. And she did say them, over and over again.

"Annie," she cried, as she sat up suddenly. "I can't stand it any more! I can see! I can see!"

She was tearing at the bandages about her head when Annie entered and put down her hands, terrified at this disobedience of orders.

"Annie, I know I can see! It was light—at the door there! I can see. I can see!" She began to weep, trembling.

"Hush!" said Annie, frightened. "It ain't possible! It can't be true! What did you see?"

"Nothing!" said Mary Gage, half sobbing. "Just the light. Don't tell him. Put back the bandage. But, oh, Annie, Annie, I can see!"

"You're talking foolish, Sis," said Annie, pinning the bandages all the tighter about the piled brown hair of Mary Gage's head.

"But say now," she added after that was done, "if I was a girl and a fellow felt that way about me—couldn't remember nobody but me that way—why, me for him! Mushy—but times comes when a girl falls strong for the mushy, huh?

"Now you lay down again and cover up your eyes and rest, or you'll never be seeing things again, sure enough. I ain't going to read no more of that strong-arm writing at all."

Mary Gage heard the door close, heard the footsteps of her friend passing down the little hall. She was alone again. Her heart was throbbing high.

What she first had seen was the soul of a man; a man's confession; his recessional as well. Now she knew that he was indeed going away from her life forever. Which had been more cruel, blindness or vision?

CHAPTER XXXII THE ENEMY

The night wore on slowly. Midnight struck, and the cold of the mountain night had reached its maximum chill. To the ears of the weary patrols there came no sound save the continuous complaint of the waters, a note rising and falling, increasing and decreasing in volume, after the strange fashion of waters carried by the chance vagaries of the air. At times the sound of the river rose to great volume, again it died down to a low murmur, the voice of a beaten giant protesting against his shackles. Came two o'clock in the morning, and the guards walked their beats with the weariness of men who have fought off sleep for hours. Sim Gage, sleepless so long, was very weary, but he kept about his work.

At intervals of half an hour he crunched down the gravel-faced slope of the bank which ran from the bench level to the foot of the dam. Here he walked along the level of the great eddy, along the rocky shore, examining the face of the vast concrete wall itself, gazing also as he always did, with no special purpose, at the face of the wide and long apron where the waters foamed over, a few inches deep, white as milk, day and night.

Any attempt at the use of dynamite by any enemy naturally would be made on this lower side of the dam. There were different places which might naturally be used by a criminal who had opportunity. One of these, concealed from the chance glance of any officer, was back under the apron, behind the half-completed side columns of the spill gate, where a great buttress came out to flank the apron. A charge exploded here would get at the very heart of the dam, for it would open the turbine wells and the spillway passage which had been provided for the controlled outlet.

Ragged heaps of native rock lay along the foot of the dam, flanking the edge of the great eddy eastward of the apron. Here often the laborers stood and cast their lines for the leaping trout, which, wearied by their fruitless fight at the apron, that carried them only up to the insurmountable obstacle which reached a hundred feet above them, sometimes were swept back to seek relief in the gentler waters of the deep eddy, that swung inshore from the lower end of the apron.

Sim Gage saw all these scenes, so familiar by this time, as they lay half revealed under the blaze of the great searchlight. It all seemed safe now, as it always had before.

But when at length he turned back to ascend to the upper level, he saw something which caused him to stop for just an instant, and then to spring into action.

The power plant proper of the dam was not yet wholly installed, only the dam and turbine-ways being completed. In the power house itself, a sturdy building of rock which caught hold of the immemorial mountain foot beneath it, only a single unit of the dynamos had been installed. This unit had been hooked on, as the engineers phrased it, in order to furnish electric light to the camp itself, for the telephone service of the valley and for the minor machinery which was operated by this or that machine shop along the side of the mountain. A cable from the power house ran up to another house known as the lighting plant, which stood in the angle between the street level and the dam itself. Here was installed a giant searchlight which could be played at will along the face of the dam, to make its examination the more easy and exact by night. The steady stream of this light was a fixed factor, being held at such a position as would cover the greatest amount of the dam face.

Now, as Sim Gage topped the grade, gravel crunching under his feet, a trifle out of breath with his climb, since the incline itself was a thing of magnificent distances, he saw the searchlight of the power dam begin a performance altogether new in his own experience.

The great shaft of light rose up abruptly to a position vertical, a beam of light reaching up into the sky. An instant, and it began to swing from side to side. It swung sharply clear against the bald face of the mountain at the farther end of the dam. It swept down the canyon itself, or to its first great bend. It rose again and swept across the dark-fringed summit of the mountains on the hither side of the stream. Not once, but twice, this was done.

It was a splendid and magnificent thing itself, this giant eye, illuminating and revealing, fit factor in a wild and imposing panorama of the night. But why? No one ever had known the searchlight to be used in this way. What orders had been given? What did these zig-zag beams up and down the surface of the sky indicate? Was it a signal, or was some one playing with the property of the Company, there in the cupola of the light station?

Sim Gage reached the side of the plant just as the light came down to its original duty of watching the face of the dam. At first there was not