e swung about and breaking into a run made for a small
building half-buried in the hillside and apart from the camp. There he
stooped and picked up under each arm what looked like a cylinder of
some size and went down towards the dam. For a time they could see
him, but all at once he slipped behind an outcrop of rock and they saw
him no more.

Janet turned to eye her companion. Once more her face was pale.

"Well?" she inquired of Mary.

"I reckon we'd better do as he says. He'd be awful mad if we didn't.
Did you see his eyes when he talked to us?"

"But if he--he and others are wounded?"

Uneasily Mary gazed at the older girl and then down at the canyon. On
the hillside the men led by her father were no longer in sight,
somewhere concealed among the stones that dotted the earth. But down
by the stream and now scarcely fifty yards from the white stretch of
concrete barring the river bed through a tunnel in which the water
foamed and escaped, the Mexicans were clearly visible, their hats
bobbing about, their guns flinging upward an occasional gleam.

"It doesn't seem as if anything was going to happen," Mary went on in
awed tones. "Things are so quiet and peaceful."

Still Janet delayed starting the car, divided in feelings between a
wish to respect Steele Weir's insistent command and a growing fear for
his safety. She could see nothing of him. Into the shadow of a rock he
had disappeared and thither she gazed with straining eyes, hoping to
see again his straight strong figure.

"Why, look down there at the dam," Mary said, whose eyes had been
wandering from, point to point of the scene. "Isn't that him?"

Janet's heart gave a quicker beat, then seemed to sink in her breast
as staring downward she recognized the engineer. He had come out all
at once from the shade cast by a wooden framework. He had with him the
burdens he had lifted from the ground before the little detached stone
house at the edge of the camp, and these, the cylinders, he placed on
the surface of the concrete core at the spot where he stood. Then he
knelt down, struck a match, lighted a cigar--as if any man in his
senses would stop to smoke in such a situation!--and busied himself at
some task over the cylinders.

Only for an instant had he stood erect on the flat top of the dam.
Apparently he had been unseen by the attackers, engaged in picking
their footing: and now in his crouching position, retired from the
upper edge of the dam's front