Stringer and the Deadly Flood (16 page)

Gus's information had caught Burke's attention at last. He pursed his lips and muttered, “Hmmm, one Mac does sound like another Mac when you study on it. Whoever he may be, I sure don't want him blabbing about me to any damned newspaper gal!”

With a wicked grin Gus asked, “You want me to gather Cactus Jack and some of the others now, Boss?”

Burke grimaced. “Don't be so crude. There's no way even Cactus Jack could pick a gunfight with a she-male the Yuma office knows it sent here. Come morning we'll show her around as sweet as anything and see if we can't put her aboard the first eastbound freight we can flag. She can't write mean things about us if she don't know anything, right?”

Gus agreed, then hesitated. “What about MacEwen, or whoever he is?”

Burke shrugged and replied, “Oh, we'd best do him in and plant him in the desert, no matter who the hell he may be.”

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

It was just getting light again when Kathy nudged Stringer awake, demanding in a disgusted voice, “Have you been making wee-wee in your sleep, for heaven's sake?”

He yawned, felt the damp quilting they lay naked atop, and replied, “I might ask you the same thing, little darling. But I suspect we're both innocent. It's too damned cold and, Jesus!” he added, sitting up, “there's too damned
much
of it!”

She had to agree, as they both sat there in the cold, gray dawn observing the wet mud all around them. Even as they watched it seemed to be getting wetter. Stringer swore and helped Kathy up to the cot where they'd fortunately piled his duds and her robe. As they proceeded to get dressed, he told her, “You'd better sneak out, slip into that duster at least, and load up your steamer. This is no place for a lady right now. The damned canal is overflowing. I don't know why either.”

He stomped on his boots, put on his hat and gun rig, and ducked out to see if he'd guessed right.

He had. A silvery sheet of inch-deep water now extended from the canal to the railroad bank as far as the eye could see, and everything that wasn't under water seemed to be running around in circles screaming in Spanish. Few of the Mex kids were dressed, and more than one full-grown Mexican, male and female, were out in the open calling on their saints, Christian or Indian, to save them from this Biblical deluge which was now almost two inches deep in spots.

But Stringer knew inches of water still added up to a lot when it was spread, and apparently still rising, across one hell of a heap of territory. He sloshed down to the far end of camp where he found Cactus Jack Donovan and a dozen Mexicans shoveling dirt in the ditch leading through the railroad culvert. As he watched questioningly, Blacky Burke suddenly splashed past him, yelling angrily, “Are you out
of
your mind, Jack? We've got all the water we need on this side of the tracks. Let it run on through, you damned fool cowboy!”

Cactus Jack protested, “We can't! There's folk downstream and I'm mighty fond of one of 'em! Afore we just stopped it, it was gushing through like a zillion fire hoses, overflowing the ditch on the far side entire!”

Burke snorted in disgust and roared at the Mexicans in fair Spanish. Some were already scooping muck the other way as Burke told Cactus Jack, “We have even more folk on
this
side of the tracks. We built that culvert to drain water to the north, and anyone can see it has no other place to go, you idiot!”

Stringer left them to work it out as he hopped up on the railroad embankment for a look-see on the other side. He whistled at the sight before him. Brown water, not much deeper than what he'd just climbed out of, was boiling ominously out the far side of the culvert as it dug a progressively deeper channel for itself along the original unstabilized irrigation ditch. Way off, across the brushwood tops, he could make out the roofing of a homespread, though he couldn't tell how far the sheet of water had spread among the stems of the slate-gray greasewood. He dropped back down to rejoin the men arguing by the inside entrance of the timber culvert. He was dismayed to find himself now ankle-deep in water as he called out, “You're both right. There's one heap of water on its way to Salton's Sink right now. As it digs in and speeds up it could add up to a hell of a mess. But trying to hold it all on this side could add up to even worse.”

He turned and told Cactus Jack, “Jack, you'd best ride hard and fast for your gal's place. If they have riding stock, have 'em mount up and ride west at right angles to the sheet flooding. If they don't have stock, make 'em run like hell. The grade's so gentle there's no way of telling just where it may go. But if it don't go down on this side fast, it just has to get worse!”

Cactus Jack lit out for the remuda. Stringer then turned to Burke and advised, “You'd best get every man and boy who can shovel dirt to cut through that spoil bank on the far side. It ought to drop the pressure building against this railroad bank some.”

Burke looked sick as he replied, “It won't work. The ground to the south slopes
up!”

But Stringer insisted, “It can't slope up that much. It's flat all the way to the damned ocean to the naked eye. Even if this water only spreads a few inches deep to
the
south, we're still talking lots of water. Where on earth could all of it have come from, as clear as the sky looks this morning?”

Burke swore under his breath. “They just called me about it from Yuma. The goddamned flood crest of the goddamned old Gila has risen higher than it's ever been recorded afore. Higher than this goddamned desert, in fact.” Then he yelled, “Where do you think you're going?” as Stringer splashed back the way he'd just come.

Without breaking stride, Stringer shouted back, “Donovan's right about there being folk on the far side of that railroad bank. Somebody has to warn them. The floodwater boiling through the culverts back down the line may not do more than water the fields sort of heavy. But if a section of the Southern Pacific goes with the flood crest behind it, I doubt there'll be time to build many arks!”

Stringer ran back to his tent to find Kathy Doyle sitting fully dressed and amazingly sedate behind the wheel of her Stanley steamer, now hubcap deep in ominously swirling water. He hastily gathered his own belongings, tossed them in the back seat, and climbed in beside her, soaked to the knees, tersely announcing, “Let's go, honey.”

Kathy shook her head. “Not just yet. It takes a few minutes for the steam pressure to build up. That's the only disadvantage to steamers, next to an electric or gas buggy. Where are we supposed to drive, once we can, by the way? There seems to be more water down the tracks, as far as I can see and... oh, look at what that steam shovel seems to be doing up ahead!”

There was no seems-to about it as the big black pile of machinery slowly tilted backward toward the ditch it had been digging. Its front tracks undermined by swirling water, it picked up more speed and then suddenly belly-flopped into the wide but now invisible canal with a mighty splash, sending a wave of muddy water surging over the railroad embankment.

Stringer shouted to Kathy, “Pressure or no pressure you'd better get cracking before this water rises to your kerosene burners.”

She said she'd try it on three-quarters pressure and threw open the throttle. The rear wheels spun madly in the mud and shot up twin rooster tails of muddy foam before they were on their way.

As the passenger seat tried to snap his spine, Stringer gasped, “I hope you're at least aiming this cannon ball. If you are, see if you can get us up and over the railroad
bank.”

She could. It was scary as hell, to a man more used to cow ponies, to tear up and over with all four wheels in the air a spine-jolting part of the time. As the more blasé Miss Doyle drove calmly south, flattening greasewood bushes with her bumper at a respectable speed of fifty miles an hour, she asked again where they were headed now, adding, “I don't see anything out ahead of us but more of the same, dear.”

Stringer didn't either, but he had reached a decision. “All right,” he said, “let's see if we can cut across the front of that spreading water. Make it ten miles north and then swing east.”

She said she'd try. He knew distances were hard to judge on the open desert, so he was surprised when she suddenly swung her steamer to the right. “We're ten miles from those tracks if my odometer still works,” she explained. Then she asked almost plaintively, “Why are we doing this, dear?”

He answered tersely, “We may be able to warn folk to get to... son of a bitch, there's not any high ground to get to for miles! But at least we can make sure everyone's up and dressed and ready to climb ladders in a hurry.”

Then, as they went on crashing through greasewood and getting sprayed with muddy water, Kathy gasped, “Whee! I just turned into a speedboat! But no fooling, Stringer, ten miles out here, already?”

He replied, “It's moving shallow, but it's moving fast. Even faster than I figured, judging the grade by eye alone. Slow down. The water's moving fast enough to dig channels and carry a more serious amount of water. This'd be one hell of a time to find out if this thing floats.”

“It doesn't,” she said, as she slowed them to a crawl. Thanks to the almost silent steam cylinders driving the rear axle, they could hear running water all around them now above the less violent snapping of the brush they were busting through. He peered over the side. He didn't like the looks of the brown sheet whipping under the running board or through the wheel spokes.

“We're not going to make it much farther,” he told her. “If we don't turn back now, we might not make it at all.”

As she turned around, the water now almost hubcap deep again and moving fast enough to argue with her steering wheel, Stringer reached in the back for his Winchester, aimed it up at the blue sky and began to fire bursts of three until he'd
emptied
the magazine. Kathy waited until her ears stopped ringing before she challenged, “I give up. I know what Jack London thinks of the Yellow Peril. But I didn't think the Japanese Empire had a war fleet of flying machines yet.”

He explained. “Hearing distress signals from the distance might inspire folk to take a look outside before they find themselves floating to Salton's Sink, house and all. It was the least I could do. I reckon it's everyone for themselves now, and... Jesus H. Christ, where is all this water coming from!”

Kathy opened her throttle wider. They lit out to the west, hopefully out of the path of the flood, and made it at last. As they reached dry ground she swung back toward the railroad line, saying, “That was fun. Now we have to go back to that work camp and pick up some more boiler water. We started out on less than we should and...”

“Water?” he cried, waving back the way they'd just come.

Kathy explained, “It has to be distilled water, or at least clean enough to drink, dear. Otherwise my itsty-bitsy steam valves get too sticky-icky to do whatever steam valves are supposed to do.”

Stringer made a wry face. “Cut the baby talk and drive due south. That ought to take us as close to that construction camp as we want to get until we find out if it's still there.”

So she cranked her big stiff steering wheel in a show of muscle which might surprise anyone who'd never made love to her and proceeded to raise dust and flatten brush in that direction.

Had not the steam drive been so silent, Stringer's sharp ears never would have picked up the faint cries off to their left. At first he dismissed it as a bird call. But then he realized he'd never heard a bird call out for help in Spanish, so he told Kathy to halt. Once she'd stopped splintering greasewood, she could hear it too.

“Wait here,” Stringer said. “This is no time to bog down, and you're sure to if you stop over there where the water's running.”

Without waiting for an answer he rolled out his side and passed around the hood to make for the source of the odd wails. He couldn't see anything ahead but mile after mile of greasewood, swaying like hell now as the water tore through the lower stems. The brush had hidden the water from sight when they were in the car, but now Stringer discovered it was already ankle-deep and warm as spit after spreading over so
much
sun-baked desert soil.

He called out,
“A ‘onde esta, señorita?''
as the water got deeper with every step. A weaker voice called back,
“Aqui! Precipitar por favor!”
Then he got his bearings and hurried toward her as she'd pleaded with him to hurry.

The Mexican girl, if she was a Mexican girl under all that muck, lay on her side in six inches of muddy water, propped up on one elbow with her left leg pinned under her fallen pony. The pony hadn't made out so well. Its muzzle was under the swirling brown water and, like its rider, it was caked all over with slimy mud. Stringer grabbed the horn of her saddle, planted both boot heels in the muck, took a deep breath and grunted,
“Ahora!”
as he lifted the pony as much as he could.