of silt. It had teeth of sand. In the thousands of centuries that nature bent to this slow and inscrutable travail it gouged a dark canyon down to the black archaic rock, and there on the very floor of the earth crust, harder than iron and as enduring as the firmament, the great river thundered and ground in vain. It must wait for another cataclysm of the elements.
In time strange living creatures appeared out of the north and wandered into the branch canyons of the great chasm. They were little men, dark-visaged and slant-eyed, and they perished almost without leaving trace of their struggle. The cliff dwellers followed, building tiny houses of stone and cement that withstood the weathering processes of time long after a stronger race out of the south drove them over the precipices. And this race gave way to the Indians.
The Spaniards found savage redskinned tribes all over this arid region. And they guided Coronado and his armored followers to the brink of the abyss from the depths of which floated up the sullen roar of a mighty river.
Coronado was the first white man to gaze down into that awful red rent in the earth. The solid ground appeared divided, and there was no way across to the other side of the world. The scene was of such sublimity that the Spanish explorers stood spellbound. Nothing had ever been known of such a terrible place. Coronado could not at first accept the evidence of his own eyes.
A ragged rim of yellow limestone ran north and south. Grotesque cedar trees, with gnarled and bleached tops, reached out with clutching hands of dead men. Down sheered the precipitous cliffs, to merge into a zone of red, where strange plateaus and slopes, and mountains of naked rock, led the fearful gaze down into the purple and obscure depths of chaos. It was a ghastly exposure of the naked ribs and bowels of the rock-bound earth. But it had an appalling beauty. A million facets of red and orange and brown caught the sunlight in brilliance too strong for the gaze of man. The unknown depths were mantled in dim mystic purple. The far slopes sheered up with vast and tremendous sweep to a golden band crowded by a wandering fringe of black. Coronado named the abyss Grande Cañon del Rio Colorado.
White men as daring as the armor-clad Spaniards in due time explored the bottom of that canyon. Powell, with his intrepid band, ran the mysterious river in boats, a voyage that entailed terrible risk and hardship and loss of life. The red river of silt was a succession of dangerous rapids for two hundred and seventeen miles. Powell named them, and the intersecting gorges, and the superb peaks and domes as well as the differing reaches of the canyon.
In our modern day men even more daring than Coronado and Powell stood upon the black rim of the lower canyon and conceived an idea as strange and wild as any vague dawning thought of the cliff dwellers, or of the dreaming redskinned savage, an idea born of the progress of the world, as heroic and colossal as the inventive genius of engineers could conjure, as staggering and vain as the hopes of the builders of the pyramids, an idea that mounted irresistibly despite the mockery of an unconquerable nature—and it was to dam this ravaging river, to block and conserve its floods, to harness its incalculable power, to make it a tool of man.
Chapter 1
It was early in the evening of a spring night in Las Vegas, Nevada, 1932. The town roared with thousands of workers in from Boulder Dam to buck the tiger and have themselves a good time.
No Western town during the gold rush or the later frontier days could have held a candle to this modern wide-open city, which owed its mushroom growth and boom business to the great government project of damming the Colorado River.
Throngs of men paraded up and down the pavements under the glare of brilliant neon lights that turned night into day along the wide main street. The scene resembled Broadway on New Year’s Eve, except for the horns and hilarity. This Boulder Dam crowd was noisy enough, but grim and hoarse, with the stride of men not easily brushed aside from the intent visible in gleaming eyes and on bronzed faces. A steady stream passed to and fro, congested and blocked every little way before the swinging doors of the gambling palaces.
Lynn Weston, young Californian, stood outside the Monte Palace, indulging in his peculiar penchant for watching the passers-by. This habit had grown in Lynn during his frequent visits in from Boulder Dam. He belonged to this heterogeneous throng, and for the endless year of his toil at the dam he had been actuated by their common weakness for excitement and oblivion, yet in his way he was a lone wolf. The ignominy of the catastrophe that had forced him into the ranks of these raw workers weighed upon him less and less as time went on, and unaccustomed hard labor had begun its mysterious alchemy of change in him. Disappointment at unrealized opportunity for his ambition and bitterness at the misfortune of not completing his engineering course at college both had somewhat lost their sting. College man, famous football player, scion of an old California family whom the depression had reduced to unfamiliar and insupportable straits, and lastly a jilted lover who had welcomed his dismissal but who chafed under the shame of it, Lynn Weston looked on the passing throngs with slowly clarifying eyes, an awakening mind, and a strange sense that the something evermore about to happen to him was due. This mood never troubled him through the strenuous hours of rough labor, nor when he looked upon red liquor and the bright face of the gamblers’ lure.
With a shrug of his broad shoulders Lynn went into the Palace. The glaring hall was full of a blue haze of smoke, the sound of men’s voices, the clink of silver coins and the rattle of roulette wheels. Men stood ten deep around the gambling games. As Lynn elbowed his way back toward the rear his keen sight met the same weathered visages of his fellow workers and the same pale-faced, hard-eyed, thin-lipped parasites he was used to seeing there. In the rear of this long hall he knew where and how to get the bottle that had become a habit and which he despised for the very thing he found in it. Here in the rear lounged men for whom Lynn had no name but whom he always wanted to beat down and throw into the dirt. They were the dregs of humanity, outcasts, criminals, hopheads, men of a type he had taken care not to meet in the dark.
At length Lynn found a vacant chair at one of the poker tables, but the players there were too slick for him, and after dropping ten dollars he quit. He lost at monte too, and the big roulette wheel reduced his month’s wages to a five-dollar bill. Lynn was gambler enough to grow cooler as luck held aloof. But he had another stiff drink.
At the faro table the fickle goddess of fortune smiled upon him. Lynn knew this dealer and that the game was crooked, but with the perversity of a gambler who was winning he kept backing his luck. And it stayed with him until he was far ahead. This was the time to quit. But Lynn was reluctant to turn his back upon a game that owed him much and which he wanted to beat, as much perhaps to get even with the crooked house as to square accounts. So he took another whirl at the game. This time Lynn’s sharp trained eye caught the dealer in a flagrant bit of cheating. Quick as a flash he snatched at the dexterous white hand and with a wrench turned up the cupped palm. The dealer let out a half-stifled cry of pain and anger.
“Caught with the goods, Hevron!” Lynn rasped out piercingly, and he held the trapped hand for players and spectators to see. “There, plain as your hawk nose! This is the second time. If I hadn’t beat your rotten game I’d take a sock at your ugly mug. . . . Here, cash these.”
With lowered face clouded and ashen, Hevron made the exchange with white hands less dexterous than nervous.
“Young fellow, you’re drunk. Better hold your tongue,” he declared threateningly.
“No, I’m not drunk,” returned Lynn. “You pulled a crooked trick. Some of these men saw it. You’re crooked. This joint is the crookedest in Las Vegas. Everybody knows it. I was a sucker to come in here. But I’m even now, and I never will come back.”
“You’ll never get in my game. Beat it now or I’ll have you thrown out.”
“Is that so?” Lynn queried coolly, and he flashed out a brown hand that fastened in the dealer’s
