At last Weir moved his cylinders forward towards this edge. Afterwards he straightened up and standing hands on hips, smoking his cigar, the tiny crimson glow of which rose and fell, he watched the party nearing the foot of the white gleaming wall, fifty feet below him. For Janet the sight was too much. His indifference to risk froze her; he appeared to be courting death; and she strove to open her lips to send down to him an imploring cry to draw back, but succeeded in uttering only a tremulous wail. "They'll shoot him," Mary was saying, "oh, they'll kill him!" A surge of terror swept Janet. Next thing she knew she was out of the car and running down the hillside among the stones and the stalks of sagebrush, frantic to reach him, to pull him out of view of the men beneath. Only a single one of them had to cast a glance upward and to raise his gun and fire, then he would die. He should not die! She should fling herself as a protection before him rather than that he should be slain! On a sudden a hand reached up from a rock and seized her arm, stopping her with a jerk. Then she was roughly pulled down beside it. The man was Madden, the sheriff. "What in hell are you doing?" he demanded harshly. "Have you gone crazy?" His grip was not relinquished. "But see him! Aren't you men going to help him? Are you going to let him be killed?" Madden forced her to her knees, so that she was sheltered by the outcrop of stone. "Any man who can smoke a cigar like that at such a time as this knows just what he's doing," was the answer. "Keep quiet and watch." "Oh, I don't want to see," she said. But she continued to look with fascinated eyes at the lone, calm figure on the dam. Presently Madden pushed his gun forward over the rock. "They've caught sight of him," he stated. CHAPTER XXVI THE THUNDERBOLT The greater part of the number of bandits had stopped in a group a few yards from the base of the white dam core, though a few stragglers were some way behind. Among these Steele Weir made out the figure of one whom he recognized as a white man; he whom the guard from the spring had mentioned as directing the company; and when at a number of exclamations from Mexicans who perceived the engineer the man lifted his face, Weir saw he was Burkhardt. No more than this was needed to show whose the hand behind this treacherous conspiracy. Clear, too, it was that Burkhardt, determined that no mistake or abandonment of the operation should occur, had come to see it through in person. Weir could ask nothing better; he had one of the plotters caught in the act. Apparently orders had been to carry through the first part of the diabolical plan of destruction in silence, that of gaining control of the dam, for when two or three Mexicans flung up rifles to shoot at Weir a sharp word from another Mexican, seemingly their leader, had checked the volley and shouted to Burkhardt.