Free Stringer and the Deadly Flood by Lou Cameron

parts of otherwise useless Mexican desert. Nobody else was allowed to plot anything all that important down Mexico way these days. Lockwood’s hasty warning made no sense. So why had the subcontractors he’d been working for fired him and then had him killed once they’d found out he’d made off with these very charts?
    Stringer and Juanita resumed their journey, across what appeared to be dead-level desert. But when they stopped just before sunset to make camp before snake time Stringer was not surprised to discover Lockwood’s barometer now said they were a few feet lower. Or else it was going to rain like hell in a little while, despite the cloudless cobalt blue bowl above them.
    â€œI can see why old Herb had some trouble convincing others,” Stringer told Juanita. “It takes scientific instruments to make out any slope at all out here, and it could still just mean some rain at this time of the year. The winter months are the only time it ever rains, and even then it never rains much.”
    She put the coffee on the coals and huddled closer to him. “Herberto said they had their own ways of measuring such things. Pero, they chose not to... how you say, check, when he warned them they were running the new canal too far to the north of what he called a divide. Does that make any sense to you?”
    Stringer grimaced. “It sure does! I’m no hydraulic engineer. But I’ve slopped over a bathtub or two in my time, and no matter how flat the tile floor ever looked the water always wound up in one corner or another. It hardly takes a college education to see you wouldn’t want more than a fraction of the Colorado River draining inland rather than the other way. I wish I had a map of the Southern Pacific’s land grants with some bench marks giving the altitudes.”
    Although she asked why, in a sleepy voice, he knew she had to be less interested than he was. Still, he answered. “It’s been my experience that big shots only act dumb as hell when there’s money to be made out of sheer stupidity. If they fired Lockwood for stating the simple truth, they must not have wanted to hear the truth. I’ll likely never be an empire-builder. I guess I was stuck at birth with the considerable handicap of a conscience. But if I was a money hungry son of a never-mind and I had a whole mess of land to sell that couldn’t be irrigated as simply as I was offering to do so, I might just ignore things like the laws of nature and go on and peddle gold bricks and promises as long as I could.”
    She yawned again and apologized. “Forgive me, I am too sleepy for to make fresh tortillas tonight. Would you mind very much if we just had cold beans and coffee, Stuarto?”
    He said he was sleepy too and agreed beans would be more than enough. He opened the can for her while she rustled up some tin cups and saucers. As they lazed by the dying fire after their modest repast, enjoying the cool breezes that sprang up after dark, he began to wonder whether coffee had been such a grand notion after all. It was early evening for him, but sleeping seemed to be the only entertainment the desert had to offer after sundown. Juanita must have felt some effects from her own two cups of strong black coffee, for again she asked him, “Perhaps you would like to know about Herberto and me, no?”
    He grimaced and said, “No. I said it was no business of mine and I meant it.”
    She nodded. “I thought that was what made you feel so hesitant. Is it not the usual custom for a princess to reward the gallant caballero who saves her from the dragon with at least one little kiss?”
    He laughed at the picture despite himself and said, “He wasn’t much of a dragon. But what did old Herb save you from, Juanita?”
    She shrugged. “It was I who saved him. He had been simpatico to my brother before my brother was killed. When the same cruel ones who murdered