Stringer and the Deadly Flood (17 page)

She had enough spunk to try to work her way out from under the dead animal. Still, it still took them over a dozen tries, working together, and in the end she lost her left boot. By this time she'd figured out what, if not who, Stringer was. So, as he hauled her to her feet in the now shin-deep current, she cried out in pretty good English, “Forget the boot. Where... oh where is the nearest dry ground?”

“Too far for you to make it half barefoot,” he said as he scooped her up in his arms.

The girl worried, “Oh, I am getting you all muddy!” But Stringer brushed aside her protests as he started wading with her back to Kathy and the steamer.

By the time they reached the car, they had established who he was and that she was Maria Herrerra, who vaguely recalled a Juan Donovan, but hadn't seen him recently and who was a lot more worried about her parents and the others who'd lit out from her spread on horseback when the dooryard suddenly turned into a frog pond in the middle of the desert. Her own pony had bolted with her when it found its hooves coming down in fetlock-deep goo. Then it had fallen with her, as Stringer already knew, and managed to drown itself in just a few inches of water and a heap of blind panic. She didn't know where the others were and prayed they had made it.

He assured her they were heading for the only high ground for miles and that anyone else with a lick of sense ought to wind up atop the railroad bank sooner or later.

When Kathy Doyle saw them coming she quickly hauled out a wool blanket to wrap around the sopping wet little gal. When Maria protested she didn't want to ruin La Señora's blanket, Kathy told her to shut up and asked Stringer to put her in the
back,
which he did, tucking the blanket securely around the wet and unhappy girl. Then they were off and running for the railroad once more. As the Stanley fought its way up the slope a few minutes later it failed to put as much muscle into the effort as before. And when the front wheels got to the first rail, the Stanley gasped its last.

“Well,” Kathy announced, “that's that. We'll have to walk the rest of the way and bring back fresh boiler water from the camp.”

Then, as she stood up to step down, Kathy got her first clear look at what had been the desert south of the tracks. “Good heavens,” she exclaimed, “we've just discovered a whole new ocean!”

Stringer got out on his side and strode across the tracks to stop and stare incredulously at what seemed to be a greasewood-studded sea, though maybe swamp would better describe it, all the way to the southern horizon. It seemed no more than a foot or so deep in any one spot, but that still added up to a fantastic amount of water.

He rejoined the girls to inform them, “The culverts under this railbed can't drain all that water north as fast it seems to keep coming. Don't ask me where it's coming from. This has to be the flood of the century, new as this century may be!”

He was right, although neither he nor anyone else could see the whole picture at that point. Days later they would learn how most of the time, even in flood, the muddy Colorado picked up the lesser currents of the Gila to keep trending seaward between low muddy banks. Failing that, the Colorado spread out across empty miles of its lower delta. But this hadn't been most of the time. The Colorado had made its way sedately enough to just above Yuma, only slightly swollen by early snow melt and thus still within its banks. But the recent late winter rains had fallen unusually hard on the upper watersheds of the Gila and its tributaries, turning that normally placid river into a snarling wolverine of brawling brown foam that played hell with its banks as it tore west across the Arizona desert at express train speed.

Hitting the already high Colorado, all that water had no place to go but up over the west banks and across the flatter desert in that direction, searching for a channel, any channel, to do what water did naturally, namely run downhill. The wide wall of water found a weak spot at a temporary floodgate, designed to control one hell of a lot less water, and smashed through to flood the incomplete southern diversion. And then, the pent-up water found its way to its old bed along the fossil Alamo channel to Salton's Sink and piled against the railroad bank blocking its downhill course to below
sea
level. Even as Stringer watched, although he couldn't see it yet, the wide sheet of floodwater had reached Salton's Sink to do two awesome things at once.

Salton's Sink was already filling with water, forming a vast inland lake, or salt lagoon. Meanwhile, the somewhat softer silt of the long-gone Alamo River was being cleaned out by the swift currents choosing it as the main course. It would take some time for anyone but lizards to notice, but as the old river bed was being scoured out, a twenty-foot waterfall was moving back up the reborn river about as fast as a human walked. The result was more than just a terribly destructive flash flood. The mighty Colorado was changing its course. Unless someone did something about it fast, the combined waters of the Colorado and all its many tributaries would run down into the Imperial Valley and just keep running until, in years to come, the desert as far north as Indio would be a huge and useless sea, far saltier than any ocean.

But as Stringer and the girls watched in wonder, only grasping a small part of the bigger picture, the vast shallow sea of floodwater that was still impounded by the railroad embankment kept getting even deeper until, as if tired of screwing around with all those puny gushing culverts, the reborn desert river simply balled up a big wet fist and punched its way through in a house-high wall of swirling wet wreckage.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

“Good God!” gasped Kathy Doyle as the ground began to tremble under their feet. “I think we're having an earthquake!”

But as Stringer heard the thunder rolling their way, he declared, “I sure wish it was just an earthquake. It sounds more like this railroad's gone out of business to the east and... Jumping Jesus, there she blows!”

As the three of them stared in stunned dismay they could see tiny human figures down the tracks, heading their way as if the hounds of hell were chasing them. Hell it certainly was, in the form of churning brown water that swept away its pitiful human victims in a meat grinder of churning mud, railroad ballast rocks, and cross-ties flipping end over end as the water burst through the gap in the railroad bank to tear northward into Salton's Sink at forty to sixty miles an hour. The water and all the wreckage in its muddy embrace ran fastest where the current was already braiding deeper channels across the hitherto flat desert floor. The silt of the big valley, water-deposited to begin with, cut like brown sugar exposed to the slanting stream of a gigantic fire hose. Behind Stringer and Kathy the blanket-wrapped Maria made the sign of the cross and sobbed, “Oh, my poor little casa!”

Neither of her American rescuers could make out where, amid all that spreading devastation one particular roof top might have been. As a tiny human figure was whipped atop a spreading wave and flipped twice, limply, in the air beyond, Kathy gasped, “Oh, no, that looked like a child!”

Stringer didn't answer. Then a bigger body, in a torn dress, made the same grotesque dolphin jump to vanish just as quickly under the muddy surface again, and Kathy made the sign of the cross as well.

She
screamed, “We can't just stand here! We have to do something!”

Stringer tried to calm her. “Let's not panic,” he declared, as he searched about for a place to start running for. The desert floor was still dry to the north, and on the far side, to the south, the wide shallow sea they'd just noticed seemed to be turning into a big muddy swamp as the Colorado receded, or at least cut itself a new channel. Farther east, along the track, he saw the survivors were no longer running.

“The gap doesn't seem to be spreading any wider,” he told the girls. “I guess the river thinks it's wide enough.”

“I hope so. What do we do now?” Kathy asked him.

“For openers you'd best break out a water can and carry it down to that swamp.” Stringer took off both his hat and sateen bandana and handed them to her. “If you can use my hat to bail water and screen it through this close-meshed sateen, you ought to wind up with boiler water that'll just have to do. Any fresh water those others still have right now are for human gizzards alone.”

She protested, “Where will you be while I do all the work?”

He pointed down the track and explained grimly. “Yonder. I know we can't carry the whole blamed camp to El Centro in your steamer, but somebody could be more hurt than the others.”

Kathy started to ask a dumb question. Then she nodded and said, “Well, anyone can see we can't stay
here.”

Stringer didn't answer. He was already legging it east in his squishy boots. It only took him a few minutes to make the half mile or so. When he got there he found Blacky Burke, Gus, and about two dozen Mexicans staring in awe at the broad brown river pouring through the gap in the railroad bank. When he asked who the others on the far side might be, Burke shrugged and answered, “Your guess is as good as mine. Me and Gus are the only white men who made it out in time this way.”

Stringer nodded and called out in Spanish, asking if anyone was hurt. There were over a half dozen customers for Kathy's Stanley steamer, and a couple of badly gashed kids looked as if they'd barely make it. Their mothers, some of them banged up as well, had managed to dress the more serious wounds with torn strips of muddy skirting.

Stringer counted noses and impatiently shushed the babble.
“Bueno.
If the able-bodied will help me get the injured to that white horseless carriage you can see up
the
tracks to the west, the gringa who owns it may have just enough room to get at least the more badly hurt to the doctors in El Centro. Now, vamanos!”

Burke and Gus were the only men there who didn't offer help as Stringer led the pitiful group toward Kathy's Stanley, carrying a baby in his arms and leading a little girl with a gashed forehead. As they all got close enough to make out details Stringer saw that Maria had brushed off most of the mud which had dried by now and had thrown the blanket aside as the desert sun got warmer. She was a lot prettier than he'd imagined, even with her hair still a mess and her riding skirt torn up one side to expose some mighty shapely thigh.

Both girls moved to meet them. Maria took the baby from Stringer, cooing at it like a desert dove, while Kathy picked up the little girl, calling her a poor dear and setting her in the back seat atop their gear. As she fussed over the child, she told Stringer, “I filled the boiler. Don't ask me with what. It smells just awful.”

He told her it ought to get them at least as far as El Centro and added, “You can't miss it if you just follow the tracks to the southwest. On the dry side, of course.”

As Maria helped a fat Mexican woman with one arm in a sling into the back beside the little girl, Kathy anxiously asked Stringer why he needed to give her directions. “Aren't you coming with us, for heaven's sake?” she cried, as he shook his head and started to explain.

Then someone gasped,
“Mira!”
and they all turned to see Cactus Jack Donovan or his mud-caked ghost floundering up the bank from the south, gasping, cussing, and sort of sobbing to himself. As one of the Mexicans helped him up to the flatter surface Cactus Jack spotted Stringer in the crowd and blurted, “I lost my pony out yonder. Lord knows how I ever made it. I didn't know I could swim. The folks I rode out to warn had already cleared out by the time I got there. The water was over their doorsill by then. But as I was headed back I saw more water coming at me than I ever want to see again. It come in one big wave, saddle-horn high and studded with tore-up sticker bush. We tried to outrun it, but it caught up with us and the next I knew me and my poor pony was going ass over tea kettle for a million wet years. I don't know where my pony wound up. All I know is I come to be hung up to dry in a greasewood clump along the shallows of that infernal deluge. Do you reckon my Maria and her folk made it?”

Stringer was about to give him the good news when Blacky Burke bulled
through
the crowd to join them. “You got back just in time, you love-sick cuss. We were just fixing to light out for town in this here horseless carriage.”

Stringer shook his head. “Not hardly. There's barely room for the injured. Us able-bodied men have to stay put here until help from the outside world arrives.”

Burke snapped, “The hell you say. The trackside wires are torn out for at least a mile, and trains don't run when the wires are down. We can't just stay out here with no food and water. And even if we could, I don't aim to. I'm still in charge of this outfit.”

“That's right,” growled the nearby Gus, making a meaningful adjustment to his gunbelt, as Stringer weighed the odds. He didn't like them, but he didn't fool with his own gunbelt. He'd been raised to leave his gun alone unless he meant to draw it. He took a deep breath, let half of it out to keep his voice firm, and said, “We got plenty of water out here now, thanks to you boys, and I fail to see any outfit anymores for anyone to be in charge of it. You screwed things up by the numbers, Blacky. It's about time to start doing things sensible for a change, and anyone can see these folk you've banged up and damn near drowned need doctoring more than you or me.”