Page:Sunset Magazine vol. 31.pdf/264



"The Electric Motor Can Do the World's Work More Efficiently Than Any Other Form of Power. The Time is Coming When the Degree of Civilization Will Be Measured by the Consumption of Kilowatt-Hours." This is the Story of the Men Who Are Making Life in the West Brighter, Broader, Easier by Carrying the Energy of the Snowflake Melting in the High Sierra to the Cities and Farms of the Wide Valleys

T last bed-rock was dry. The river was conquered. Twenty feet above its old bed it hugged the wall of the gorge in a flume. In the dry spot deserted by the brawling river five-score men worked feverishly. The pounding of the pneumatic drills boring into hard rock, the clatter of hoists and clanking of chains, the scrape of shovels and steel buckets filled with a never-ceasing din the narrow chasm in which the river had been squeezed high to one side in order to make room for the gigantic dam that was to rise three hundred feet above the granite base.

Except for a bank of black clouds peering over the Sierra's crest behind distant Signal Peak, all was well on the Big Job. Duncanson, the superintendent, climbed out of the noisy gorge to join the Chief on a rocky point. The exultation of victory glowed in Duncanson's steel-blue eyes. He and his men had been racing against the coming of the first snow, with the odds in favor of the storm. A note of triumph was in the superintendent's matter-of-fact report.

"We'll be ready to pour concrete in the morning, Mr. Baum" he said. "Four of

the big pot-holes are cleaned out. We'll have the entire foundation cleared in short order. If the snow holds off another ten days—"

Without a word the chief engineer swung around, pointed toward the Sierra's crest. Duncanson, stopping in the middle of the sentence, cast a glance at the ominous black bank rising over the roof of the continent. He understood. Turning abruptly on his heel he slid down the perpendicular rocks to the bottom of the canyon, passed rapidly from group to group. And as he passed, the speed of the perspiring men increased. They, too, understood.

It was imperative that the foundation of the titanic dam be finished by fall, before winter with its twenty feet of snow swooped out of the sky. Unless the base of the structure with its concrete spillways was installed, the big floods of spring would fill the narrow canyon from wall to wall. No work would be possible until they subsided in July. It would take two years and a half instead of eighteen months to finish the installation. And a year's delay meant the loss of interest on the capital outlay, meant that the company would have to buy thirty thousand horse-power in the market for another year. In his mind's eye, the chief engineer saw the figure of a short wiry man with gold-rimmed spectacles in a city office nearly two hundred miles away, the man who had signed the executive order which had set the Big Job in motion. Millions were at stake in this race with the snows of the Sierra. It was November. Often the first great storms came in October. They had held off miraculously. Bed-rock at last was dry, the river safely tucked into the flume, out of the way. Tomorrow the first concrete would be poured if

The Chief peered again at the cloud-bank.

It was rising imperceptibly.

By nine that evening it was raining. When morning dawned gray on the dripping camp in the pines, three inches had fallen.