Читать книгу Uncle Sam's Outdoor Magic - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 8

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Capt. Ellsworth Burton Craig, Army engineer, field geographer, revetment specialist, drainage and hydraulic expert, and a few other things, stepped briskly from the train at Milton and was immediately taken in hand by the officials of the water company and other important individuals who were waiting for him. Bobby stood in the background and eyed him curiously.

He was of a trim physique, about thirty-five years old, and wore a green khaki suit with pleated and belted jacket, which fitted him to perfection. Encircling his brown wrist was a leather wristlet, and he wore a Rough Rider hat with a lead-pencil stuck in its cord. Despite the earliness of the season, he was tanned almost to the hue of a mulatto, and he had a small mustache as black as ebony. He wore rimless glasses through which sparkled a pair of sharp brown eyes. Bobby had his instructions, and at the first opportunity he stepped forward with as much self-possession as he could muster.

“I came up from Bridgeboro, sir,” said he, “with a launch to take you down. I’m one of the Scouts helping Colonel Wade in rescue-work. He said for you not to hurry, and for me to bring you down as slowly as you want. I am to do any errands for you.”

“Thanks,” said the captain, tersely. “I’ll be with you shortly.”

Bobby did not dare to venture upon the ruined dam with the group that accompanied the visitor; but he stood at a little distance on the lawn of the Water-Works, with his eyes riveted upon Captain Craig, who looked over the situation quite casually, as it seemed to him. The man kicked one or two stones from the broken masonry, and as he talked he picked up pebbles and scaled them across what was left of the lake. Sometimes he seemed to be indicating something with his foot as he moved about. He was quick in his movements, with a way of continuing his informal inspection even while the gentlemen talked to him, and there was a certain informality about him which Bobby rather liked. After a while he came toward the boy. “Well, my boy,” he said, “suppose we go along down and take a pike at things and see what we see.”

Bobby smiled and looked rather curiously at this engineer, who said “take a pike” when he meant “inspect” or “survey,” and who looked like a spruced-up Rough Rider. He felt rather at home with the man, and yet there was something about the captain which rather disconcerted him. In spite of his offhand manner he had a quick, choppy way of speaking and of waiting for an answer as if he expected it to be prompt and definite. Bobby had a feeling that if he were going to say anything he had better think it all out beforehand and get it just right.

They were soon chugging down the stream.

“How many miles an hour can you squeeze out of her?” the captain asked.

“’Bout eight; she’s like a turtle; she’s built more for comfort than speed.”

“Any fish in the river?”

“They get perch.”

“Dam fell all over itself, didn’t it?”

“It sure did. It put our town out of business. My home’s gone, and my aunt and uncle, too. We lived right near the river.”

The captain drew up his lips and shook his head. “Too bad,” said he. “Let me know when we come to what they call the second bend.”

“Would you like to go slower? She throttles down fine. I can run close inshore if you like.”

“No, she’d never jump her track here,” said the captain, evidently alluding to the river. “We’ll squint around down at the bend. I didn’t suppose there was wild water enough around here to raise such a rumpus.”

“What’s wild water?” Bobby ventured.

“Oh, it’s water that flops around in the mountains without any regular path and has to be diverted.”

“That means made to go a certain way?”

“Yes.”

“I had an idea,” said Bobby, after a few minutes’ silence. “Our cellar was always getting flooded, and I always had to pump it out. I was pumping the day before the flood. My uncle was going to get a gas-engine to pump with, but when I was pumping that day I had an idea— Don’t you think you get ideas easier when you’re working?”

“Surest thing you know.”

“I had an idea that if I dug a ditch along the side of the house the water would go into it in high tides and flow away, maybe into the sewer. You wouldn’t call that diverting—like?”

“Sure.”

Bobby hesitated. “It wouldn’t be engineering—kind of—would it?”

“Yes, in a small way.”

“And my uncle he thought the gas-engine was the best way. What would you call that?”

“Why, I’d call that just sheer nonsense. Wouldn’t you?”

This was the first time that an engineer had ever asked Bobby’s opinion, and he felt quite flattered.

The captain smiled slightly. “You can’t very well claim there are no wild beasts left in this old continent when wild water is dashing around in the mountains.”

“Well, you can’t shoot it,” said Bobby; “that’s one sure thing.”

“You can tame it,” said Captain Craig, “and make it come down and earn its board.”

Bobby stared at him, but said nothing. Then he laughed. He liked Captain Craig. “Gee! I never liked engineers,” he said. “I must say I never liked them, but—”

The captain began to laugh.

“I like adventures,” said Bobby. “I’d like to join the Army if I could be with Colonel Wade. The trouble with engineering is there isn’t any fighting in it. They just do figuring all the time.”

“So?” said the captain.

“Sure,” said Bobby; “but I don’t believe we’ll get into a war, anyway. Do you?”

“Don’t know,” said the captain. “I’m so busy scrapping I don’t have time to think about wars.”

Bobby looked at him and laughed again. “Oh, of course,” he conceded, “a civil engineer might get into a scrap the same as any one else. I’ve been in scraps. But I mean regular fighting. There’s nothing exciting about engineering.”

“No?”

“They’re always talking about strains and pressures and things like that.”

“Yes?” said the captain.

“’Bout the only place you can find adventures is in books,” Bobby continued; “unless you go into the Army.” He looked at the captain, who was half smiling. “Do—do you do regular engineering?” Bobby asked.

“I make a stab at it.”

“’Cause I was kind of wondering about your uniform.”

“That’s on account of the boss; he’s a queer old duffer and kind of likes it.”

Bobby hesitated, pondering his next question. “Who’s that?” he finally ventured.

“Uncle Sam.”

Bobby paused incredulously. “You work for the Government?”

“That’s what I do.”

“Gee! I didn’t know that.”

They ran inshore going around the second bend, and the captain scrutinized the banks closely, while Bobby scrutinized the captain. The engineer watched the curving shore carefully for a mile or more.

“She’s about two-thirds to ebb, isn’t she?” he asked once.

“’Bout an hour more and it’ll be ebb,” Bobby answered.

“You catch any muskrats?”

“The fishermen do.”

“They’ve got the whole place honeycombed, haven’t they?” the captain commented. “Channel runs on the long turn here, hey?”

Bobby wondered how he knew.

“Ought to be some trees planted along there to prevent erosion.”

“What’s erosion?”

“Loose earth—slides.”

“How would trees prevent it?”

“Same as straw in bricks—ties the earth together. Run across now and we’ll take a squint at that point. She’ll jump her traces there some day sure as you’re a foot high. Guess that used to be a bar, hey? Some swamp a mile or two back.”

Bobby knew there was, but he wondered again how the captain knew.

For a while Captain Craig was very much preoccupied, and Bobby did not dare to interrupt him. Then, of a sudden, he sat down and said, apparently to himself, “Well, it’s just a question of an appropriation.”

Bobby waited a little while, then gathered his courage and came out with the question he had been pondering. “Would you mind telling me about how you scrap—if you don’t mind my asking?”

The captain looked at him a moment, and a little humorous twist appeared in the corner of his mouth. Then, having found his range, he delivered a broadside which almost knocked Bobby Cullen off his seat.

“Well, then,” said he, crisply, “just suppose I tell you that while you were reading adventures in books and while Colonel Wade was sitting in Fort Something-or-other several years ago, this little old country of ours was attacked by a powerful enemy.”

Bobby stared.

“Sure as you live; it was really a triple alliance, and the main enemy’s two allies were a pretty tough proposition. Well, sir, they rushed over the land and left death and devastation in their path. There was no stopping them—it was a great drive.”

Bobby’s mouth and eyes opened wider, but he said nothing.

“Our losses were pretty heavy, all told. We lost more people than were lost in the Spanish War—where Colonel Wade was cavorting around. You’d hardly believe it if I told you that the enemy pulled off a night march of sixty miles in an hour and forty minutes—”

“They couldn’t—”

“But they did, though; they threw their flanks over a hundred miles or so of good United States territory, right here under the nose of old Uncle Sam, and laid waste about a dozen towns.”

Bobby shook his head incredulously. “I—I don’t see how that could happen without our hearing about it.”

“Oh, you were all too busy reading adventures.”

“You—were you in the fight?”

“Yes, in the thick of it.”

There was a pause.

“Jiminy crinkums!” said Bobby.

“So I don’t feel that I can let you get away with that notion of yours of engineers not fighting.”

“Who was the enemy?” Bobby asked.

“The Mississippi River.”

For a moment Bobby felt inclined to resent being made fun of in this manner.

“The allies were the Ohio and the Missouri,” the captain went on.

Slowly a light began to dawn upon Bobby. “Was it floods—and things like that, you mean?”

“Mm-hm!”

“What was the cause of it all?”

“Unpreparedness. So Uncle Sam had to get around back of the enemy’s lines, intercept his communications, and prevent future campaigns. We had to go way out to Montana to cut off his base of supplies.”

“The Mississippi River starts in Illinois,” said Bobby, incredulously. “We learned that in the fourth grade.”

“Just the same it keeps one of its munition plants in Montana.”

“How did you cut off its base of supplies?”

“Same as you would have deflected the water outside the cellar. You’re an engineer; you ought to know.”

“Gee!”

“Then we built a big national prison for a good deal of the wild water, and there it is now, under guard.”

“What kind of guard?”

“Concrete dam—’bout twenty times as big as this one.”

Bobby was beginning to understand.

“We keep the water in a big valley twenty miles long above the dam—except when we make it come down and work. Then it has to march in line and behave itself and irrigate the land—earn its board.”

Bobby pursed up his mouth and shook his head. “I bet that’s the biggest dam in the world,” said he.

“We’ve got a bigger one under way—’bout three hundred feet high—not counting the flag-pole. What would you say to that?”

“Has it got a name?”

“Sure. Roosevelt Dam.”

“Gee!” said Bobby. “You remind me of Roosevelt—I thought of that—”

“Oh, I’m just an engineer, you know,” the captain reminded him.

“Well, a fellow can be mistaken, can’t he?” said Bobby. “I—I—of course, I didn’t know everything about engineering.”

The captain laughed outright.

“I bet there’ll be a lot of wild water behind that dam.”

“Oh, a few teaspoonfuls,” said the captain.

“’Bout how much?”

“Pretty near thirty miles of it.”

“Is it near here? I’d like to see it.”

“It’s out in Arizona,” said the captain; then, with a quizzical glance at Bobby. “Still, you might see it.”

“Oh, I know about Arizona,” Bobby shouted. “It has a hot, dry climate—rains— I always wanted to go to Arizona. It’s worth while having a vacation out there—that’s one sure thing. Oh, crinkums! I would like to go to Arizona!”

“So?” said the captain. “Well, stranger things than that have happened.”

“And then you make the water come down and irrigate the land instead of overflowing the rivers?”

“That’s the idea exactly. And as it passes out little by little alongside the dam it turns wheels and furnishes electricity to light distant cities. Uncle Sam makes his war-prisoners work, you can bet.”

Bobby paused again. “Gee! it seems funny, doesn’t it?”

“Not nearly as funny as fighting floods with gas-engines.”

Bobby was on his guard at once. “My uncle was trying to find the best way,” he said. “I got to be loyal. He was killed and I got to be loyal to him.”

The captain looked at him sharply—just as he had scrutinized the banks of the river.

“Believe in loyalty, do you?”

“Sure, just the same as a fellow has to be loyal to his boss—same as you have to be loyal to—to Uncle Sam—like—”

“I see.”

“Mr. Bronson told me that, and he’s president of a bank, so he ought to know.”

“Think you could be loyal to Uncle Sam, do you?”

“Jiminy! he seems like a real person when you talk about him.”