Dow raised his empty hand to the sky.
“Show your hand!”
They drew beads on him. He kept walking. The range was still long for pistols.
Isaac Bell fired his Browning and hit Dow in the shoulder.
So concentrated was Dow’s mind on getting close to the detectives, he barely felt the light-caliber, underpowered slug. He did not stop, but turned that shoulder toward them and swung the explosives behind him, straightening his arm to catapult the bomb high and far. One of the detectives sprinted ahead of the others, raising a large, shiny revolver. It was big enough to stop him. If a running man could possibly hit a target at that distance.
“Get back, Dash!” Bell shouted. “He’s got something.”
Dow wound up to hurl the gelignite. The man Bell called Dash stopped dead and thrust his gun forward. He took deliberate aim. Then he made a fist with his empty hand and crossed his chest, which shielded his heart and lungs and steadied his weapon. Dow braced for the bullet. Dash was a man who knew how to shoot.
The heavy slug hit Dow squarely, staggering him before he could hurl the bomb. Everything within Dow’s range of vision stood still. The only sound was the roar of the water cascading over the dam. He remembered that he hadn’t yet lit the fuse to the charge that would blow the dam. The only fuse he’d lit was the one burning toward the gelignite in his hand. How could he call it quits if he didn’t finish the job?
His legs and arms felt like wood. But he summoned all his strength to turn his back to the guns and shamble toward the dam.
“Dash! Get out of the way!”
They saw immediately what Dow was doing. All three opened fire. He took a slug in his shoulder and another in his back. One in the back of his leg, and he started to go down. But those that hit him propelled him forward. He fell against the dam. He was hunched over the gelignite, pressing it with his chest to the wet logs, when he saw the flame jump from the fuse to the detonator. With a microsecond left to live, he knew he had finished the job and taken a squad of Van Dorn rats with him.
56
ISAAC BELL SEIZED JAMES DASHWOOD BY THE SCRUFF OF HIS neck and threw him to Archie Abbott, who caught him on the run and whirled him farther up the riverbank like a lateral pass. He was reaching for Bell’s hand when the bomb exploded. Twenty paces, less than a hundred feet, separated them from the blast. The shock wave crossed that distance in an instant, and the two friends saw a kaleidoscope of spinning trees as it slammed them off their feet and threw them after Dashwood. Ears ringing, they scrambled higher up the slope in an attempt as desperate as it was hopeless to escape the wall of water that they knew would burst through the exploded dam.
WHEN THE WRECKER HEARD the explosion, he knew that something had gone wrong. It was not loud enough. Not all the gelignite had detonated. He paused in his flight at a spot in the road where he could see the river down below in the canyon and watched anxiously for the moving wall of water the fallen dam would release. The river was rising, the water was definitely higher, but it was not what he expected, and he feared the worst. The partial explosion had only damaged the dam, not destroyed it.
Hoping it had at least killed many detectives, he started back down the road, confident that eventually the dam would collapse and send a flood smashing into the bridge, whether it took minutes or hours. Suddenly, he heard the sound of a motorcar-his Thomas Flyer-coming up the road.
His face lit darkly with a pleased smile. The Van Dorns must have repaired the flat tire. Kind of them. Pistol in one hand, knife in the other, he quickly chose a spot where particularly deep ruts would force the car to slow.
“IT’S A MIRACLE,” said Abbott.
“A brief miracle,” Bell answered.
A torrent of water as big around as an ox was blasting through the hole the assassin’s bomb had blown in the log-and-boulder dam. But the bomb Philip Dow had tried to kill them with hadn’t detonated the rest of the charge, and the dam had held. At least for the moment.
Bell surveyed the damage, trying to calculate how long the dam would last. A cataract was pouring over the top, and jets of water were blasting like fire hoses through cracks in the face.
Abbott said, “Dash, how’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“My mother wouldn’t let me join the Van Dorns until she taught me.”
“Your mother-”
“She rode with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show when she was young.”
Bell said, “You can tell your mother you saved our bacon. And maybe the bridge. Hopefully, that coal train will hold it … What’s the matter, Archie?”
Abbott looked suddenly alarmed. “But that was Kincaid’s idea.”
“What idea?”
“To stabilize the bridge with down pressure. Kincaid said they did it once in Turkey. Seemed to work.”
“Kincaid has never done a thing in his life without purpose,” said Bell.
“But Mowery and the other engineers wouldn’t have allowed it if the weight of the train wouldn’t help. I’d guess he knew the jig was up when he saw me ride up here. So he acted helpful to throw off suspicion.”
“I’ve got to get down there right now.”
“The horses scattered,” said Abbott. “But there are mules in the stables.”
Bell looked around for a better way. Mules trained to pull lumber carts would never ride them to the bridge in time to undo whatever the Wrecker had set in motion with the coal train.
His eye fell on a dugout canoe on the riverbank. The water had already risen to it and was tugging at the front end. “We’ll take the Hell’s Bottom Flyer!”
“What?”
“The dugout canoe. We’ll ride it to the bridge.”
They manhandled the heavy, hollowed-out log on its side to spill out the rainwater.
“On the jump! Grab those paddles!”
They pushed the canoe into the river and held it alongside the bank. Bell climbed in front, ahead of the crosspiece the lumberjacks had stiffened it with, and readied his paddle. “Get in!”
“Hold your horses, Isaac,” Abbott cautioned. “This is insane. We’ll drown.”
“Amorous lumberjacks have survived the run for years. Get in.”
“When that dam lets loose, it’ll sweep a tidal wave down the river that will wash over this canoe like a matchstick.”
Bell looked back at the dam. The torrent that gushed from the hole that Dow had blown in the bottom was tearing at the edges.
“That hole’s getting larger,” said Abbott. “See the logs above it sagging?”
“He’s right,” said Dash. “It could collapse any minute.”
“You’re both right,” Bell said. “I can’t risk your lives. Catch up when you can.”
“Isaac!”
Bell shoved off from the bank. Abbott lunged to grab the back of the canoe. The current jerked it into the middle of the narrow torrent.
“I’ll meet you down there!” Bell called, paddling furiously to keep the current from smashing him into a rock. “Enjoy the mules.”
The speed took him by surprise. The raging current drove the canoe faster than any horse and most automobiles. Hurtling along at this rate, he would be under the Cascade Canyon Bridge in twenty minutes.
If he didn’t drown.
The banks were steep, the river narrow and studded with boulders. Fallen trees jutted into it. He overtook whole cut trunks floating along almost entirely submerged. The little canoe rode up on one of them, and he started to overturn in a flash. He threw his weight the other way to right it. Then a tree that had been ripped from the bank by the flood rolled ponderously beside him, splaying the air with giant roots that reached for the canoe like tentacles. He fended them off with the paddle, then dug deep in the water, trying to outrun the flailing monster. A root whipped him in the face and nearly threw him out of the canoe.