Only a close examination would reveal the substitution. And who would take the trouble of scrutinizing a harmless rain barrel?
“They can even dip washwater out without noticin’ anything wrong!” Buttons chuckled as they bore the other barrel away.
“Will we let ‘er go soon as the bronze guy comes back here?” Jud wanted to know.
Buttons considered this deeply.
“It’d be better if we could get his 5 pals with ‘im. We’ll try to do that!”
The sky suddenly roared with Thunder!
Looking up, Jud chuckled. “There’s sure gonna be a cloudburst!”
“That makes it swell for us, huh?” Buttons laughed.
But Jud was not so certain.
“The thing ain’t gonna be easy to do!”
“Blazes! All we gotta do is sit out here until we see Savage go into the shack along with his men, then…”
“I don’t mean that!” Jud snapped. “I’m talkin’ about the business at the dam. Savage is gonna be on the job. Somebody may get caught!”
“Well it won’t be us!” Buttons grunted callously. “We ain’t handlin’ that end.”
Jud seemed to struggle with his supply of brain matter, forcing it to wrestle with a mystery. The lightning flashes showed his inch-wide brow ditched with wrinkles. He gave it up.
“I don’t savvy it,” he grumbled.
“Savvy what?”
“Why the Boss don’t go ahead an’ blow up the dam. That would put the Company out of business. Why’s he doin’ this other thing?”
“The Boss is after somethin’!” Buttons explained patiently. “Can’t you get that through your head? It’s somethin’ that nobody but him knows about. He knows what he’s doin’!”
The two ceased their somewhat vague conversation. They settled themselves to wait. Their job was here. They were the human triggers of a death trap.
At the dam, another sinister plot was proceeding. A plot, it seemed, which did not have to do with destruction of the dam.
XVIII — Mysterious Motives
Doc Savage created a stir of interest when he appeared on the dam scene.
Somebody had dug up the magazine section of a Sunday newspaper published some weeks previously. This contained a story by a feature writer who had an imagination and a big supply of glowing adjectives. The story had to do with Doc Savage — Man of Mystery, Wizard of Science, muscular superman.
Among other things, the feature story speculated about the Bronze Man’s source of fabulous wealth. At irregular intervals said the tale, mysterious shipments of gold came to Doc. These shipments were stupendous of sum. As much as 5 million dollars!
The yarn would have sounded a bit fantastic had it carried the truth about Doc’s golden trove. At Noon on a prescribed day of each week, Doc had but to broadcast — over powerful radio stations — a few words in a mysterious tongue. Some days later, the gold would arrive.
The wealth came from a hidden valley in Central America — a lost retreat presided over by descendents of the ancient Mayan race — and was supplied Doc solely for the purpose of furthering his cause of right. Few people knew this, however.
The newspaper feature had given Doc a reputation among the dam workmen. Many were the curious stares which followed him about.
Salvos of Thunder romped across the heavens, the echoes filling the great canyon with a steady clamor. Lightning was coming so often now that the sky seemed an inverted bloody bowl.
Doc found Renny directing the placing of tarpaulins over the newly poured concrete.
“It don’t rain in this country, they tell me,” Renny said. “The sky just falls on you!”
Workmen were moving up out of the canyon. Squads staked covers over electrical equipment and made lumber fast. They had had experience with Western cloudbursts.
The strings of electric bulbs (they were mounted in rough-and-ready reflectors made of common tin dishpans) seemed to become paler-and-paler as the blaze of lightning increased. It became so that men could perform their allotted tasks independent of the electric lights.
The Earth seemed to tremble in terror of the heavenly theatrics!
The sky seemed to press down. Clouds boiled like black, tortured foam.
Suddenly the rain came! Not drops, not sheets but in a roaring mass!
The chasm walls turned into vertical torrents. Shovels, chipping hammers, clay diggers, picks — all sorts of loose tools were dashed down the sheer stone walls. Sacked concrete and boulders as large as tubs rolled over-and-over in the flood.
Then came 2 jarring explosions! Real blasts, these! Man-made!
“Holy cow!” Renny groaned. “They have blown up the diversion tunnels!”
Doc did not answer. The moaning inferno of the cloudburst was no place to carry on a conversation.
The storm moved in an upstream direction out over the ancient lake bed which was to be flooded by the Red Skull dam.
They were strange things, these Western cloudbursts. They emptied prodigious quantities of water. And Doc Savage had never experienced a more violent one than this.
Moving along the dam, he located the cableway which led down to the powerhouses. The flood had put the power lines out-of-commission, however, and the car would not operate.
He tried the phone. Different parts of the job were connected by telephone. These still functioned. He put a call down to the powerhouses.
“How much water is coming through the diversion tunnels?” he asked.
“None!” was the report. “Explosions seem to have closed ‘em up above the dam!”
Doc hung up. He stood in the little phone shed, listening to water flood against the corrugated iron. A thoughtful expression gripped his features.
An explosion could have destroyed the dam as readily as the diversion tunnels had been closed. The stoppage of the diversion tunnels meant the dam would have to hold water. These tunnels merely carried the stream around the structure. Their closure was a minor calamity IF the dam held. And it should… providing the water didn’t get too high which was highly unlikely.
Why seek to get water in the dam? That was the puzzle Doc considered.
And he apparently found a satisfactory answer for there came from his lips the low, mellow, trilling sound — the small, unconscious thing which he did when something of marked importance had occurred. Melodious yet devoid of tune, the weird note mingled defiantly with the deafening bellow of the cloudburst.
The rainfall began to slacken. It became a normal downpour, then a hard rain. This seemed but a dew compared to that which had gone before. But out on the lakebed, the cloudburst continued.
From Skullduggery, the 3 owners of the construction company came running. They were excited. If one of them felt something besides concern over the safety of the dam, he failed to show it.
Water — uneasy and foam-flecked — had already climbed many feet up the cement-and-steel barrier.
“If it just don’t give way!” Nate Raff wailed. “If it just don’t! The concrete is awful green!”
“It’s lucky you used a quick-set concrete!” Renny told him. “That may save it. But you can bet there’s going to be a lot of water in there before mornin’!”
Renny was an excellent prophet.
The cloudburst hung roaring and flashing over the lakebed, then crept on into the waste of mesas and canyons which drained into the lake. The water level kept climbing… inches-to-the-minute at first… then more slowly.
“The dam is going to hold” was Doc’s final verdict.
The hour was well past Midnight. For all his tremendous muscular development, Renny was dog tired. Monk and Ham were too played out to do more than give each other uncivil looks.
Long Tom and Johnny were not so exhausted. Long Tom because he had done no hard work. And Johnny because it was next to impossible to wear him out. Little more than a framework of tendon-armored bones, Johnny had been known to travel for days without sleep and with only a little water to drink.