But Carter was equal to the contradiction. "We was talking of
averages--"
"_Were_," the other interrupted.
Grimacing, Carter repeated: "_Were_ talking of averages. The exception
gets his fun climbing, and don't find out how much of a fool he is till
he looks down from the top."
"_Doesn't_," the other put in, and Carter resaid the word.
The corrections sprang from a compact that was now as old as their
acquaintance. A graduate in engineering, the young fellow was widely
read and cultured far beyond the needs of his profession, and as they
talked, smoking, in their office-tent of evenings, his allusions to and
illustrations from the realms of science, literature, art had given
Carter glimpses of Helen's world, a universe in which touch, taste,
smell, sight, and other things gave place to feeling, memory,
perception. And so he had been stimulated to conscious attempts at
improvement.
"I feel like a two-year-old!" he had exclaimed one evening early in
their acquaintance. "I 'd like to know more of that. D' you suppose I
could get that book in town? An' say, if you catch me straddling the
traces--manners, speech, an' so forth--I wish you'd lam me one. Of
course I'm pretty set, but if I could just tone down a bit on a few of
the big things, the little ones might slip by unnoticed."
In the nature of things a construction-camp is bound to suffer a chronic
drouth of news, and in default of other subjects Carter's marital
troubles had received exhaustive and analytical treatment at the hands
of the Silver Creek men and others. Filtering through many strata,
enough of the gossip had reached the surveyor to inform him of the
motive under this rough appeal, and he readily consented. So, in their
talks thereafter, he had trimmed out the wilder growths of Carter's
speech, giving rule and reason, for, as he laughingly assured him, his
big pupil had an uncanny appetite for underlying law.
"Now 'tain't reasonable to suppose that you have to learn all the
individual cases," he would say, when the surveyor tripped him on some
expression; "what's the law of it?" And he would offer humorous
opinions on the eccentricities of the tongue. "The darn language seems
to have grown from wild seed, an' though Lindley Murray--ain't that his
name?--lopped a bit here an' pruned a bit there, he couldn't straighten
the knarls and twists in the trunks. An' I don't know but that it's as
well that way Leave them grammarians alone, an' they'd clip an' trim the
language till it was tame as the cypress hedges that my old aunt uster
shape into crowing roosters, gillypots, an' pilaster pillars at home
back East." In saying which he touched a profound etymological truth
that is altogether ignored by the scientific inventors of universal
languages.
One who had not seen him for some months--Helen, for instance--could not
have failed, this evening, to notice how his faithful delving in that
wild orchard had begun to bring forth fruit in his speech. Evincing
fewer "aint's," it had more "ings," and even attained, on occasion, to
correct usage in "number" of verbs. Equally forcible, as full of curt
figures, its epigrammatic quality had gained rather than lost by better
expression.
The silence which had fallen between them endured till they came in
sight of the camp, a string of tents and log-cabins under the eaves of
the forest. Then the surveyor pointed out a girl who was watching the
tired stream from the door of the nearest tent.
"Why, there's Dorothy! She threatened to make the chief bring her down,
but I didn't think she'd make it. Come along and I'll introduce you."
As, however, he mended his pace, Carter fell behind, and the sadness
which had become habitual to his face deepened. He had heard the young
fellow speak of this girl, his _fiancee_; and though in color and
appearance she was the opposite of Helen, the swish of her skirts as she
came to meet them, suggestion of perfume, the hundred elusive delicacies
that make up a well-bred girl's personality, recalled his wife and
oppressed him with a vivid sense of loss.
Her voice, rich and low in its tones as Helen's, strengthened the
impression. "Dad said 'No,'" she laughed, after the introduction.
"But--"
"Wilful woman will have her way," a voice declared from the interior of
the tent; then the chief engineer, a hale man of fifty, appeared in the
doorway. "Mosquitoes, alkali water, nothing would scare her." He was
going on with inquiries of the health of a bridge that had developed
rheumatic tendencies in its feet, when she laughingly interrupted:
"Come, dad, no business till after supper. I have already scraped
acquaintance with the cook, and he says we are to come at once. So run
along, little boys, and get ready."
"Wash our dirty faces, to put it plainly," the surveyor echoed her happy
laugh. "Be it known unto you, fair lady, that ablutions are held to be
effeminate, unnecessary, if not immoral, in construction work. However,
in view of your hypersensitiveness, we will do violence to our
inclinations. Come on, Carter--we for the tub."
But from a dozen yards she called him back. "This is the man you wrote
me of? I knew him at once. What a splendid fellow!"
"Gorgeous!" he returned her whisper. "His wife must be a queer sort."
"Not necessarily." She added, with thoughtful intuition: "The
possibilities are so many. Your friend is handsome and has a good face,
but we girls are more complex than our mothers. While they were
satisfied with good temper and good provision, we demand sympathy of
taste and habit; that we touch without friction at a hundred points of
contact. Tall as Mr. Carter is, he may fall short of such a standard."
Bending, her lover gazed admiringly into her earnest eyes. "Such a
little wisehead! And did I pass in this difficult examination?"
Carter's back was turned, the cook-house door had just closed on the
last teamster, her father had gone back to his calculations, so her
answer was sweet as satisfactory.
When, half an hour later, the four entered the cook-house, two cookees
were laying the table under one eagle eye of the cook, the other being
on a roast that he was liberally basting. "Hain't you got no nose?" he
answered Carter's question; but he smiled as, sniffing its rich odor,
Dorothy said: "It's venison! And I'm so hungry!"
"Sure!" he corroborated. "Cree hunter brought in a quarter of moose
this afternoon."
Pleased with her discernment, he seated her at the head of a table which
he himself had scoured with sand to a snowy whiteness while the cookees
were grinding a summer's tarnish from iron knives and spoons. Her tin
plate reflected a smile that he would willingly have paid for in turkey
and truffles, but lacking these, he served baked potatoes with the
venison, hot biscuit, cake a hand's-breadth thick, and with a flourish
set the crowning delicacy of camp life, a can of condensed cream, beside
her tin coffee-cup. Then he packed the cookees outside to peel the
morrow's potatoes that her appetite might not suffer from their admiring
glances, an act which they classified as tyranny and ascribed to evil
motives.
"She's a right smart gal," he added, after imparting a few privacies
anent their birth and breeding from the door-step. "None a' your
picking sort. Knows good cooking when she sees it, she does." Then he
left them to digest a last piece of information that the evolution of
their ancestors had been arrested in a low and bestial stage.
That supper figured as an epoch in Carter's life, because it marked a
definite conscious change in his feeling towards his wife. With all men
thought is more or less chaotic. Filtering slowly from feeling under
pressure of experience, it remains fluid, turgid, until some specific
act--it may be of a very ordinary nature--clears and precipitates it
into the moulds of fixed opinion. So, though material of a sounder,
more reasonable judgment of Helen had been gathering in his mind these
months, injured pride had held it in abeyance--in suspension, as it
were--until now that recent disappointment had left him peculiarly
susceptible to impression, a resolvent was added; that occurred which
precipitated his thought.
It took form in Michigan Red, who entered with another teamster and sat
down at the opposite table. The task that delayed them had sharpened
appetite, and their attack on the food the cook set before them was
positively wolfish. Using fingers as much or more than forks, they
shovelled greasy beans into their mouths with knives, as stokers feed a
furnace; and as they bolted masses of pork, washed whole biscuits down
with gulps of coffee, Carter's glance wandered between them and the
delicate girl at his side. Here, indeed, was one of the "points of
contact" of her intuitive wisdom. Once before he had seen, realized it.
But whereas he had thrust the thought away the night that he watched
Michigan Red eat in the lumber-camp, he now gave it free admittance,
mentally writhed as he realized how this and other gaucheries must have
ground on Helen's sensitive mental surfaces. Fascinated by their
gluttony, he watched until dulled eyes and heavy, stertorous breathing
signalled repletion and the close of their meal.
On her part, Dorothy was quietly observing him. Given such knowledge as
the Silver Creek teamsters had sown through the camp, it would have been
easy for her to guess the rest--if his conduct had borne out her
surmise. But he had learned so much and so quickly under the stings of
injured pride that observation failed to reveal any wide departures from
the conventional. She had to give it up--for the present.
"What a strange man!"
Her whisper dissipated his painful reflections, and, looking up, he saw
that, after lighting his pipe with a coal from the stove, Michigan Red
was surveying them with cool effrontery through the tobacco smoke. His
fiery beard split in a sneer as Carter asked if he had finished supper.
But he did not take the hint nor move when ordered to call Bender.
"_Mister_ Bender"--he spat at the title--"is down at the grading-camp."
"I said for you to call him." Carter's tone, in its very gentleness,
caused the girl to look quickly so she caught his queer expression.
Compounded of curiosity, interest, expectation, his glance seemed to
flicker above, below, around the red teamster, to enfold, wrap him with
its subtle questioning. Impressed more than she could have been by
threat or command, she waited--she knew not for what--oppressed by the
loom of imminent danger.
But it was not in the teamster's book to disobey--just then. Lingering
to pick another coal, he sauntered down the room under flow of that
curious, flickering glance, and closed the door behind him with a bang.
Sharp as the crack of a gun, Dorothy half expected to see smoke curling
up to the massive roof-logs. But though her father and lover looked
their surprise, Carter resumed his eating, and there was no comment
until he excused himself a few minutes later.
Tugging his gray beard, the chief engineer then turned to the surveyor.
"Why doesn't he fire that fellow?"
Shrugging, the young fellow passed the question up to the cook. "You've
known them longest."
Thus tapped, the cook turned on a flow of information, appending his own
theory of Carter's patience to a short and unflattering history of
Michigan Red. "You see, Red thought he was the better man from the
beginning, an' it was just up to the boss to give him fair chance to
prove it. As for him, he likes the excitement. You've seen a cat play
with a mouse? Well--an' when the cat does jump--"
"Good-bye mouse," the surveyor finished.
The cook's significant nod filled Dorothy with astonishment. From the
social heights upon which the accident of birth had placed her, she had
looked down upon the laboring-classes, deeming them rude, simple,
unsophisticated. Yet here she found complex moods, a vendetta conducted
with Machiavellian subtlety, a drastic code that compelled a man to
cherish his enemy till he had had opportunity to strike.
The knowledge helped her to a conclusion which she stated as they walked
back to her father's tent. "Such pride! I understand now why he left
_her_. Just fancy his keeping on that man?"
"Damned nonsense, I call it," her father growled. "That fellow will make
trouble for him yet."
The prediction amounted to prophecy in view of a conversation then
proceeding in the bunk-house. As Michigan's table-mate had fully
reported the scene at supper, the teamsters were ready with a fire of
chaff when he stumbled over the dark threshold after delivering Carter's
message.
"Been dinin' in fash'n'ble sassiety, Red?" a man questioned.
"Nope!" another laughed. "Voylent colors ain't considered tasty any
more, so the boss fired him out 'cause his hair turned the chief's gal
sick."
Hoarse chuckling accompanied the teamster's answering profanity, but
when, after roundly cursing themselves, Carter, the surveyor, chief
engineer, he began on Dorothy, laughter ceased and Big Hans called a
stop.
"That's right." A voice seconded Hans's objection. "We ain't stuck on
the boss any more'n you are, Red; but this gal isn't no kin of his'n.
Leave her alone."
"Sure!" the first man chimed in. "An' if he's feeling his oats jes'
now, he'll be hit the harder when we spring our deadfall. Did you sound
the graders to-day? Will they--"
"Shet up!" Michigan hissed. "That big mouth o' yourn spits clean across
the camp to the office." And thereafter the conversation continued in
sinister whispers that soon merged in heavy snoring. Silence and
darkness wrapped the camp.
Awaking while it was still dark, the camp rubbed sleepy eyes and looked
out, shivering, on smouldering smudges. Outside, the air whined of
mosquitoes. At the long hay-racks horses snorted and pawed frantically
under the winged torture; patient oxen uttered mained lowings. Growling
and grumbling, the camp distributed itself--teamsters to feed and
rebuild smudges, choppers and sawyers to the grindstone and
filing-benches. It was a cold, dank world. Pessimism prevailed to the
extent that a man needed to walk straitly, minding his own business, if
he would avoid quarrel. But optimism came with dawn--teamsters hissed
cheerfully over their currying, saw-filers and grinders indulged in
snatches of song--reaching a climax with the breakfast-call. When, half
an hour later, Dorothy appeared in the cook-house doorway, the camp had
spilled its freight of men and teams into the forest.
Warned by the shadow, the cook looked up and saw her in Stetson hat,
short skirt, high-laced shoes, a sunlit vision with the freshness of the
morning upon its cheeks. "God bless you! Come right in," he exclaimed.
"Your daddy an' Mr. Hart hev' gone down line. Devil's Muskeg got hungry
las' night an' swallered ten thousand yards of gradin'."
As yet she knew nothing of those treacherous sinks that gulp grades,
trestles, and the reputations of their builders as a frog swallows
flies, and he went on, answering her puzzled look: "Morass, you know,
swamp with quicksand foundation that goes clean down to China. Nope,
'tain't Mr. Carter's loss. He ain't such a fool as to go an' load a
muskeg down with clay and rock. An Easterner had it on a sub-contract,
an' though Mr. Carter warned him, he reckoned he could make it bear a
grade on brush hurdles. Crowed like a Shanghai rooster because it
carried trains for a week.
"Oh, I don't know," he commented upon her pity for the luckless
contractor. "You kain't do nothin' with them Easterners. He was
warned. Besides," he vengefully added, "he shedn't ha' come crowing
over us. More coffee, miss?"
Leaving the cook-house, a shadow fell between her and the sun, and
Carter gave her good-morning. "Breaks the poor devil," he supplemented
the cook's information, "and bothers us. Cuts off our communications.
We shall have to move the outfits back to prairie grading till they are
re-established. I'm going down there--now, if you'd like a hand-car
ride?"
Would she? In five minutes she was speeding along under urge of ten
strong arms, over high trestles which gave her sudden livid gleams of
water far below, through yellow cuts, across hollow-sounding bridges,
always between serried ranks of sombre spruce. Sometimes the car rolled
in between long lines of men who were tamping gravel under the ties.
Rough fellows at the best, they had herded for months in straw and dirt,
seeing nothing daintier than their unlovely selves, and as they were not
the kind that mortifies the flesh, the girl was much embarrassed by the
fire of eyes. Apart from that, she hugely enjoyed the ride. With feet
almost touching the road-bed, she got all there was of the motion,
besides most of the wind that blew her hair into a dark cloud and set
wild roses blooming in her cheeks.
She gained, too, a new view-point of Carter, who chatted gayly,
pointing, explaining, as though they were merely out for pleasure and
another had not been just added to the heavy cares that burdened his
broad shoulders. She learned more of the life, its hardship, comedy,
tragedy, in half an hour's conversation, than she could have obtained
for herself in a year's experience.
These different elements sometimes mixed--as when he indicated a
blackened excavation. "See that? A man was sitting on the stump that
was blasted out there. Reckon he got sort of tired of the world," he
replied to her horrified question, "and wanted a good start for the
next." Then, easily philosophical, quietly discursive, he wandered
along, touching the suicide's motives. There had been different
theories--drink, religion, a girl--but he himself inclined to aggravated
unsociability. The sombre forest, with its immensity of sad, environing
space, had translated mere moroseness into confirmed hypochondria. He
had so bored the stumping outfit, to which he belonged, with pessimistic
remarks on things in general that, in self-defence, they threw something
at him whenever he opened his mouth; and so, bottled up, his gloom
accumulated until, in an unusually dismal moment, he placed a full box
of dynamite under a stump and sat down to await results.
"Why didn't some one pull him off?" she cried.
His answer was pregnant. "Short fuse. Anyway, the boys didn't feel any
call to mix in his experiments--especially as he swore a blue streak at
them till the stump lifted."
"Horrible!" she breathed.
"Just what they said." He solemnly misunderstood her. "They never
heard such language. 'Twas dreadfully out of place at a funeral."
"Oh--I didn't mean that!" Then, considering his serious gravity,
"Was--was there--"
"Pretty clean." He relieved her of the remainder of the question.
"Mostly translated."
Incredulous, she glanced from him to his men and received grisly
confirmation, for one thrust out a grimy finger to show a horseshoe
ring. "I picked it up on the track, miss, forty rod from
the--obseq'ses. Didn't allow he'd want it again."
Shuddering, she turned back to Carter, but before she could make further
comment the car rolled from a cut out on the edge of the Devil's Muskeg.
She thought him cold-blooded until, that evening, she learned from her
friend, the cook, that he had been caught on the edge of the blast as he
rushed to save the man and had been thrown a hundred feet. A little
disappointed by his apparent callousness, she joined her father and
lover, who, with the contractor, stood looking out over the muskeg.
Sterile, flat, white with alkali save where black slime oozed from the
sunken grade, it stretched a long mile on either side of the right of
way. Around its edges skeleton trees thrust blanched limbs upward
through the mud, and beyond this charnel forest loomed the omnipresent
spruce. In spring-time its quaking depths would have opened under a
fox's light padding, but the summer's sun had dried the surface until it
carried a team--which fact had lured the contractor to his financial
doom. A fat, gross man, he stood mopping his brow and wildly
gesticulating towards the half-mile of rails that, with their ties, lay
like the backbone of some primeval lizard along the mud, calling heaven
and the chief engineer to witness that this calamity was beyond the
prevision of man.
"'Jedgment of God,' it's termed in government contrac's," he exclaimed
to the chief, who, however, shrugged at such blackening of Providence.
"Well, Mr. Buckle," he answered, as Carter came up, "the judgment was
delivered against you, not us."
"Yes, yes!" the man grovellingly assented. "I know--mine's the loss.
But you gentlemen orter give me a chance to make it up building round
this cursed mud-hole?"
"Round what?"
He turned scowlingly upon Carter. "This mud-hole, I said." With a
greasy sneer, he added: "But mebbe you kin build across it?"
"I can."
"What?" he screamed his angry surprise. "Why, hell! Wasn't it you that
tol' me it wouldn't carry a grade?"
"I said it wouldn't carry yours."
His quiet assurance gave the contractor pause, while engineer and
surveyor looked their surprise. "Going to drive piles down to China?"
The contractor grew hysterically sarcastic. "You'll need a permit from
Li Hung Chang. What do you know about grades, anyway? I was building
this railroad while you was wearing long clothes."
"Likely." Carter's easy drawl set the others a-grin and caused Dorothy
to hide her smile in her handkerchief. "But you ain't out of yours yet.
A yearling baby wouldn't try to stack rock on top of mud. But that
isn't the question. D' you allow to finish the contract?"
"Think I'm a fool?" the man rasped.
"'Tain't always polite to state one's thoughts. But--do you?" And when
the other tendered a surly negative, he turned to the engineer. "You
hear, sir? And now I file my bid."
The chief, however, looked his doubt. As yet engineering science
offered no solution for the muskeg problem, and this was not the first
grade he had seen sacrificed to a theory. "Are you serious?"
"As a Methodist sermon," Carter answered his grave question. Then,
drawing him aside, he pulled a paper from his pocket--an estimate for
the work. It was dated two weeks back, prevision that caused the chief
to grimly remark: "Pretty much like measuring a living man for his
coffin, wasn't it? But look here, Carter! I'd hate to see you go broke
on this hole. I doubt--and your figure is far too low. What's your
plan?"
"I'm going to make a sawdust fill with waste from the Portage Mills."
Whistling, the chief looked his admiration, then grinned, the idea was
so ludicrous in its simplicity. For, all said, the problem resolved
itself into terms of specific gravity--iron sinks and wood floats in
water; and the muskeg which swallowed clay would easily carry a sawdust
bank. Moreover, the idea was thoroughly practicable. Situated five
miles from Winnipeg, the Portage Mills were the largest in the province
and their owners would willingly part with the refuse that cumbered
their yards.
"You've got it!" he cried, slapping his thigh.
"That's not all. If old Brass Bowels--" Noticing that the contractor
was looking their way, he finished in a whisper, the significance of
which caused the chief's grizzled brows to rise till lost in the roots
of his hair.
"You'll break camp--?" he questioned.
"To-morrow. Build a spur into the mills, then start prairie grading at
the American line and run north. Ought to make a junction about the time
the sink is filled."
And this he did. The few miles of spur-track being quickly built, a
yellow tide of sawdust was soon flowing out to the Devil's Muskeg, where
Bender's wood gang directed its flow. At first there was great argument
about this new material, some holding that one might as well try to
build a road-bed with feathers. But it proved itself. Tamping hard as
clay, it had greater resilience, and soon the twisted track rose like a
mained serpent from the slimy clutch of the devil. Yes, miles of
flat-cars, boarded up till they loomed big as houses, moved between mill
and slough through that summer, and no one dreamed of their slow
procession having other significance up to the moment that Helen heard
newsboys crying a special in the hot streets--
"Monopoly refuses new line a crossing. Section gangs tear up Carter's
diamond."
*XXVI*
*WINNIPEG*
By that time Helen had shaken down to a life that was new as
strange--though not without travail; shaking is always uncomfortable.
Coming in to the city, a natural nervousness--that indefinite
apprehension which assails the stoutest under the frown of new
adventures--had been accentuated by heart-sickness from her late
experiences, and was justified by some to come. She viewed its distant
spires very much as an outlaw might contemplate far-off hostile towers.
Entering from the west, as she did, one sees taller buildings poke, one
by one, from under the flat horizon. For the city sits by the Red
River--smoothest, most treacherous of streams--in the midst of vast
alluvial plains, its back to the "Ragged Lands," facing the setting sun.
North, south, east, and west of it they stretch, these great flat
plains. Vividly emerald in spring-time, June shoots their velvet with
chameleon florescences that glow and blaze with the seasons, fix in
universal gold, then fade to purest white. Dark, dirty, the city stands
out on the soft snow-curtain like a sable blot on an ermine mantle.
Withal it is a clean city, for if the black muck of its unpaved streets
cakes laboring wagons and Red River carts to the hubs after spring
thaws, the dirt is all underfoot. No manufactures foul the winds that
sweep in from boreal seas with the garnered essences of an empire of
flowers.
Purely agricultural, then, in its functions, the bulk of its burgesses
were, as might be expected, store-keepers, implement men, bankers,
lawyers, land agents, all who serve or prey upon the farmer; for there,
also, lurked the usurers, the twenty-per-cent. Shylocks, fat spiders
whose strangling webs enmeshed every township from the Rockies to the
Red. Spring, fall, or winter, grist failed not in their dark mills,
which ground finer and faster than those of the gods. Scattering their
evil seed on the dark days, it was their habit to reap in the sunshine,
competing for the last straw with their fellows, the business men, in
their single season of profit--Harvest. For in summer the city drowsed
amid green wheat seas that curved with the degrees over the western
world; it slept, nodding, till the wheat, its life-blood, came in huge
arterial gushes to gorge its deflated veins.
Thus Helen found it--asleep under the midsummer sun. Walking to her
destination, she met few people; after the hotel 'buses rattled by, the
streets were deserted save for an occasional buck-board or slow ox-team
chewing the peaceful cud at the wooden sidewalk. When, later, she
walked those hot streets on that most wearisome of occupations, the
search for an occupation, she became familiar with the city's more
intimate topography--the huge concrete foundations, vacant, gaping as
though at the folly which planned them and their superstructures, the
aerial castles that blew up with the boom; the occasional brick blocks
that raised hot red heads proudly above surrounding buildings, the
river, with its treacherous peace; old Fort Garry, which she repeopled
with governors, commissioners, factors, and trappers of the Hudson Bay
Company.
Also she grew sensitive to its varied life, easily distinguishing
between emigrants, who were injected by daily spurts into the streets,
the city's veins, from the old-timers--remittance-men, in yellow cords
and putties; trappers from Keewatin, Athabasca, the Great Slave Lake, in
fringed moose-skins; plethoric English farmers, or gaunt Canadian
settlers from the rich valley round-about; Indians of many tribes--Cree,
Sioux, Ojibway; the heterogeneous mixture that yet lacked a drop of the
Yankee or continental blood which would flow, ten years later, in a
broad river over the American border. But this was after she had fallen
into her place in the household of Glaves's big sister among a
scattering of teachers, up for the Normal course, a brace of lawyers,
three store-keepers, and a Scotch surgeon.
Just what or where that place was would be hard to say, seeing that it
varied with the view-point of each lodger, nor remained the same in the
opinion of any specific one. Thus did she shine, for one whole week,
the particular star in the heaven of an English teacher, a mercurial lad
of twenty; then having rejected his heart with a pecuniary attachment of
thirty-five dollars per mensem, she fell like a shooting-star and became
a mere receptacle for his succeeding passions, which averaged three a
month. His fellow-teachers swung on an opposite arc. Canadians, and
mostly recruited from the country, the soil still clung to their heavy
boots. The profession, its aims and objects, formed their staple of
conversation. Deeply imbued with the sense of the central importance of
pedagogy in the scheme of things, they wore an air of owlish wisdom that
was incompatible with the contemplation of such sublunary things as
girls. Having wives, it was not to be expected that the store-keepers
could notice a young person whose attractions so far exceeded her known
acquaintance, and though the surgeon, a young man prodigiously bony as
to the leg and neck, really worshipped her from behind the far folds of
his breakfast newspaper, thought transference still lay in the womb of
future humbuggery and she catalogued him as injuriously cold.
From this conglomerate of humanity she gained one friend, the young wife
of a lawyer who had lately come West. Prettily dark as Helen was
delicately fair, each made a foil for the other, which necessary base
for feminine friendships being established, their relations were further
cemented by an equal loneliness, and made more interesting by the
expectation of an event. As it was not yet fashionable to shoo the
stork away from the roof-tree, behold the pair fussing and sewing
certain small garments with much tucking, trimming, insertioning,
regulating said processes by the needs of some future mystery dight
"shortening"--all of which brought Helen mixed feelings. The young
husband's part in said operations was particularly trying. Supposedly
immersed in his paper of evenings, he would watch them over the tip with
a delighted sagacity akin to the knowing look which a bull-dog bestows
on a crawling kitten. At times, too, he would descend upon the work and
lay wee undervests out on his big palm, tie ridiculously small caps over
his shut fist, ask absurd questions, and generally display the manly
ignorance so sweet to the wifely soul; while Helen sat, a silent
spectator of their happiness. It is a question which the acquaintance
brought her most, pain or pleasure.
The tale of the boarders would not be complete without mention of Jean
Glaves, a buxom woman, fair of hair, whose strong, broad face seemed to
incarnate the very spirit of motherhood. With her Helen's place was
never in doubt. Opening her big heart, she took the lonely girl right
in, and proved a veritable fount of energy in her disheartening search
for work.
In this her first experience conformed to that usual with a
working-girl--she shivered under icy stares, shrank from the rude
rebuffs of busy men, and blushed under smiles of idle ones; sustained
the inevitable insult at the hands of a rascally commission broker at
the end of one day's employment. His quick, appraising glance,
following a first refusal, would have warned a sophisticated business
woman, but the innocence which betrayed Helen later proved her best
protection. The horror in her eyes, childlike look of hurt surprise,
set the dull reds of shame in the fellow's cheeks, but she was out in
the street with hat and jacket while he was still muttering his apology.
Yet his grossness fell short of the vile circumspection of her next
employer. A smug pillar of society and something in a church, caution
would not permit him to stake reputation against possible pleasure on a
single throw, yet she labored under no illusions as to the motive behind
her second discharge.
"Oh, I can't bear it! I just can't try again!" she cried that night to
Jean Glaves.
"You won't have to, dearie," the big woman comforted, and having tucked
her comfortably upon her own lounge with a wet cloth upon her aching
head, she went straight to the Scotch surgeon's room.
Her choice of confidant may have been due either to intuition or
knowledge of what was going on behind the ramparts of the young man's
breakfast paper. The event proved it wise, for his giraffe neck
lengthened under his angry gulps, his bony hands and nodding head
emphasized and attested Jean's scathing deliverence upon men in general.
"The scoundrel!" he exclaimed, when she paused for lack of breath. "The
scoundrel! I'd flog him mysel' but for the scandal. But see you he'll
no' go unpunished. He's a bid in for the hospital supplies, and I'll be
having a word with the head doctor." And thus, later, was the smug
villain hit to the tune of some hundreds in his tenderest place, the
pocket.
Not content with future revenge, the Scotchman's sympathy expressed
itself in practical suggestion. "If ye'd think, Mistress Glaves"--he
always accorded Jean the quaint title, and it fell gracefully from his
stiff lips--"now if ye'd suppose the young leddy would like to try her
hand at nursing, there's a vacancy in the hospital."
While he hesitated, Jean literally grabbed opportunity by the collar.
"You come along with me."
Introduced a few seconds thereafter to man and subject, Helen exclaimed
that she would love the work; nor were her thanks less sincere for being
couched in stereotyped form. How _could_ she thank him? Being sincere
to the point of pain, after the fashion of his nation, the young man had
almost answered that the obligation lay with him in that his studies
behind the newspaper would be furthered and facilitated. He replied,
instead, that the pay would be small, the work hard.
Not to be discouraged, she was thus launched upon what, in her
condition, was the best of possible careers. For the mental suffering
which, lacking an outlet, burns inwardly till naught is left of feeling
but slag and cinders, becomes the strongest of motor forces when
expended in service for others. Throwing herself body and soul into the
new work, she forgot the suspicion, scandal that had lately embittered
her days, and had such surcease of loneliness that in one month the
lines of pain disappeared from around her eyes, her drooping mouth drew
again into the old firm tenderness.
Besides content, the month brought her other satisfactions. Owing to
lack of accommodation at the hospital, she still slept at the
boarding-house, and dropping into Jean Glaves's room for a chat one
evening, she found her conversing with a girl of her own age. She would
have retired but that Jean called her back. "Don't go! We were talking
of you. This is Miss Dorothy Chester, who used to board with me. Miss
Chester--Mrs. Morrill."
There was, of course, nothing in the names to convey the significance of
the introduction to either. After that period of secret study which is
covered by the feminine amenities, each decided that she liked the
other. Helen gladly accepted Dorothy's invitation to call, and in this
ordinary fashion began a momentous acquaintance that soon developed
through natural affinity into one of those rare and softly beautiful
friendships which are occasionally seen between women. And as
friendship means association in a city that has no theatre and few
amusements, it soon happened that any evening might see Dorothy in
Helen's room, or Helen on the way to her friend's hotel. Naturally
Helen quickly learned that her friend's father and lover were head
engineers on Carter's road, and that she had visited them in camp; and
as Dorothy was as willing to talk of her novel experience as Helen to
listen, imagine the pair in the former's cosey bedroom, one snugged up
on a lounge, the other coiled in some mysterious feminine fashion on
pillows at her side, fair girl hanging on dark girl's lips as she
prattled of Carter, or joining in speculations as to what kind of a
woman his wife might be.
She positively jumped when Dorothy declared one evening: "I'm sure he
still loves her. Ernest says that he scoured the city for her; only
gave up when he felt sure that she had gone East to her friends. When
the road is finished, he is going back to look for her."
_He had searched for her_! _Still loved her_! It rhymed with her deft
fingers rolling bandages; tuned her feet as she bore medicine-trays from
ward to ward; ousted the dry anatomical terms of the daily lecture from
their proper place in her mind. The thought illumined her face so that
maimed men twisted on their cots to watch her down the ward. Meeting
her on the main stairs, one day, Carruthers, the Scotch surgeon, almost
mistook her for the Virgin Mother in the stained window above the
landing. _He searched for me! is going back East to look for me_! The
days spun by to that magical refrain.
Why, in view of all this, did she not confide in Dorothy? Though its
roots grip deep down in woman nature, the strange, contradictory,
inconsequential, yet wise woman nature, the reason lies close to the
surface. Physically akin to the impulse which urges a shy doe to fly
from its forest mate, her feeling flowed, mentally, from injured
wifehood. For all her natural sweetness and joy over the thought of
reunion, she was not ready to purchase happiness with unconditional
surrender; to make overtures directly, or through Dorothy, that might be
construed as a bid for executive clemency. As he had deserted her, so
he must return; and that prideful resolution was strengthened and
justified by the suffering which had immeasurably exceeded her fault.
Yes, first he must return, then--would she instantly forgive him? Any
lover can answer the question; if not, let him consult his sweetheart.
"I'd make him suffer!" she will cry, gritting pretty teeth. So Helen.
_Very_ unchristian, wicked, but natural.
No, she did not confide in Dorothy, went quietly about her business,
hugging her sweet secret to her own soul, until-- But this summary of
her thought and feeling would not be complete without mention of a last,
perhaps greatest, satisfaction--her joy in reading newspaper accounts of
Carter's progress. Editorials, politics, reports, she read all, day by
day, glowing over red-hot denunciations of the monopoly while she
thought what good men the editors must be, and how intelligent to so
clearly discern her husband's merits. She was mightily troubled by the
insatiate appetite of the Devil's Muskeg, studying its rapacious dietary
as though it were a diabetes patient. She triumphed when Carter
successfully treated its ineffable hunger with vegetarian diet of
sawdust; shivered when he was refused a crossing of the trunk line;
thrilled over the battle when Bender and the woodmen beat back the
monopoly's levies while the trackmen laid the "diamond," and grew sick
with fear, as before mentioned, when she heard the newsboys crying out
Carter's final repulse as she was walking home to her room about eight
o'clock one evening.
Though very tired, she immediately turned in her agitation, and,
undeterred by the continent of blue-print uniform that spread below her
brown ulster, she hurried to Dorothy's hotel, an old caravansary that
had survived two rebellions and the bursting of the boom. Once chief of
the city's hostelries, the old house still attracted people who
preferred its solid comfort to the gilt, lacquer, garish splendors of
more modern rivals. The parlor in which she waited while her name was
taken up to Dorothy, was panelled with sombre woods; her feet literally
sank in a pile carpet, thick, green, and dark as forest moss. Walls
were upholstered in hammered leather; chairs, heavy table, massive
furnishings, all were of black oak. The portraits of governors, high
commissioners, and chief factors of the Hudson Bay Company, soldiers and
traders or both, seemed ready to step down from their frames to engage
in wise council and issue fiats that would set a hundred tribes in
motion. Time stood still in that solid atmosphere. Heavy odors of
leather and wood, the pervading feeling of peaceful age combined to
soothe her fretted nerves, and she had just relaxed her tired body
within the embrace of a mighty chair when passing footsteps and a voice
brought her up, tense and rigid.
Returning just then, the bell-boy repeated her question: "Gentlemen who
just passed, Miss? Mr. Greer and Mr. Smythe, people that are financing
the new line, and Mr. Carter, their head contractor. They are dining
here with the general manager of the trunk line. If you'd like to see
them," he added, interpreting her interest as curiosity, "just step this
way. They've all gone in, and you can peep through the glass doors.
It's that dark in the passage no one will see you."
As she tiptoed after him down the dark hallway he whispered
further--"Reminds me of them old Romans, the general manager; them
fellows that used to invite a man to a poisoned dinner. He's got those
chaps shooed up into a corner, and now he's going to kill their
financial goose over the cigars and wine. Sure, Miss, everybody knows
that Greer's on his last legs. Bit off more than he could chew when he
went to railroading; but old Brass Bowels will treat his indigestion.
That's him, stout gent with his back this way. Greer and Smythe's
either side of him. That's Mr. Carter opposite. T'other gentleman, Mr.
Sparks, is general superintendent of the western division."
Slipping by the others her glance glued--the term is eschewed by
purists, who ironically inquire if the adhesive used was of the
carpenter variety, but it exactly describes her steadfast gaze--her
glance glued to Carter's face. From above an arc lamp streamed white
light down upon him, darkening the hollows under his eyes, raising his
strong features in bold relief. This, be it remembered, was the first
she had seen of him since he broke in upon the Ravell dinner-party,
black, sooty, smelling evilly of sweat and smoke. And now he sat with a
waiter behind his chair, at meat with the greatest man in the north, at
a table that was spread with plate, cut-glass, linen, all of a costly
elegance that transcended her own experience. The champagne bucket, at
his elbow, of solid silver, with gold-crusted bottles thrusting sloping
shoulders out of cracked ice, the last accessory of luxurious living,
took on wonderful significance in that it accentuated to the last degree
their changed positions. For surely the gods had turned the tables by
bringing her in print hospital uniform and shabby ulster to witness this
crowning of his development.
Be sure she felt the contrast. How could she do otherwise? Yet her
feeling lacked the slightest touch of humiliation. Above such
snobbishness, she was filled by joy and pride in his achievement, joined
with tremulous fear, for the bell-boy's remarks had quickened her
apprehension. That distinguished company, costly appointments, perfect
service, impressed her as little as it did Carter, which is saying a
good deal, for the pomp of civilization counts more with women than men,
and he was bearing himself with the easiness of one who has conquered
social circumstance. He chose the right fork for his salad, knife for
his butter; broke his bread delicately, trifled with green olives as if
born to the taste--though this edible presented itself as a new and
bitter experience--small things and foolish if made an end in
themselves, yet important in that, with improper usage, they become as
barbed thorns in the side of self-respect. Significant things in
Carter's case because they showed that he had applied to his social
relations the same shrewdness, common-sense, keen sight that was making
him successful in large undertakings.
Of course she noted his improvement? That he no longer used knife for
spoon, squared elbows over his head, sopped bread in gravy? On the
contrary, she saw only his face, dark and stern save when a smile
brought the old humor back to his mouth. Her hungry eyes traced its
every line, marking the minutest changes wrought by thought, care,
sorrow, time's graving tools. Hands pressing her breast, she struggled
for his voice with thick oak and heavy plate-glass, and so stood,
wrapped up in him and their past, till the bell-boy spoke.
"Miss Chester said you was to go right up, Miss."
She jumped, and her tremulous fear took form in words. "You are sure
the general manager will--"
"--Do things to 'em?" he finished, as he led her upstairs. "They're
dead ones, Miss."
*XXVII*
*THE NATURE OF THE CINCH*
The bell-boy was not alone in his opinion. Through that summer twenty
thousand settler farmers had kept suspicious tab on the monopoly, and
now that it felt the clutch reclosing on its throat, the entire province
had flamed up in wrath and fear. Press, legislature, and pulpit
denounced the refusal of a crossing that was without shadow of a claim
in equity, and was plainly intended to kill competition by tedious and
costly litigation. In town, village, on trail, at meeting, wherever two
settlers were gathered together, the general manager's action was damned
in no uncertain terms. Indignation flowed like a tidal-wave over the
plains. Skimming low with the north wind, an aeronaut would have heard
the hum of speech rise from the face of the land, angry and continuous
as the buzz of swarming bees. It had pealed out in clarion triumph,
that huge _vox humana_, when the "diamond" was laid after desperate
fighting; it swelled in furious discordance when, the previous day,
Carter's men were forced back by sheer weight of the levies that the
general manager had gathered and brought in from the sections along
three thousand miles of track.
It was one of those situations which require only a touch of demagoguery
to wreak great harm. Insurrection hung thick in the air. Secession and
coalescence with the United States were openly advocated by men who
later read with astonishment their own words in the papers of that
stormy time. Thousands of armed settlers waited only for the word to
fall upon the monopoly's levies, but in face of united public opinion,
backed by an inflamed press, Carter and his people remained
quiescent--supinely quiescent, according to certain editorials.
A morning paper recalled its prediction of months ago: "We warned Mr.
Carter not to be deceived by the monopoly's complaisance in bringing his
construction outfit and supplies out from the East over its tracks. The
concession was merely bait for the trap, analogous to the handing of a
rope to a fool wherewith to hang himself. We are loath to quote the old
proverb against Mr. Carter, yet were it not for the fact that the
monopoly snaps its fingers in the face of this province through him, we
should be tempted to show satisfaction at the plight to which his
fatuous self-confidence has brought him."
The article closed with a vivid word picture of the general manager
chuckling _a la_ Mephistopheles in the privacy of his luxurious office;
which, perhaps, approximated the reality more closely than that in the
minds of the laity. For a composite of the popular impression would
have shown the entire railroad pantheon, general manager, department
heads, with their clerks, sub-heads, assistants, and deputy assistants,
all very lofty of brow and solemn of face, in session over the crisis.
The reality was much more prosaic. Indifferent to the newsboys, who
were crying his crimes on the streets, the general manager sat in the
office of the division superintendent that morning, chair tilted back,
feet on the table, thumbs comfortably bestowed in the arm-holes of his
vest. It has remained for a practical business age to clothe itself in
the quintessence of ugliness. Imagine Julius Caesar in a tuxedo, Hamlet
wearing a stove-pipe hat! His black coat, check trousers would have
pleased a grocer's fancy in Sunday wear, and it were difficult to
realize that their commonplace ugliness clothed a power greater than
Caesar's--the ability to create and people provinces, to annihilate and
build up towns, to move cities like checkers over the map; harder still
to listen to his curt speech, issuing from blue tobacco smoke, and
believe that an empire larger than ancient Rome paid him tribute, that
the blood and sweat of a generation had gone to grease his juggernautal
wheels. Yet the speech itself certified to the power.
"We made a mistake, Sparks; but who could foresee this fellow Carter?
Here's the N.P. lusting for a chance to cut in over the border. Give
them that crossing and old Jim Ball will place their bonds for any
amount in exchange for reciprocal running arrangements. So we've got to
make a quick killing. Buy 'em out, lock, stock, and barrel, while the
fear of God's in their hearts. They must sell--look at this Bradstreet
report on old Greer's assets. Just about at the end of his string. So
I want you to write and invite them to dinner to-night--Greer, Smythe,
and Carter--though the order ought to be reversed; he's the brains of
the business. Draw it mild--conference with a view to amicable
arrangement of points at issue, and so forth. But when we once get them
there--" His nod was brutal in its significance.
Equally wide of popular conception was the scene in the banking office
of Greer & Smythe when the invitation was delivered. Carter, who swung
an easy leg from his favorite perch on the table, seemed to have thrived
on defeat; the most elastic imagination would have failed to invest him
with the weight of a people's cares. Indeed, he laughed when the senior
partner handed him the general manager's note.
"Hum! 'Will you walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly!' What
do I make of it? That's easy. Has us going--or thinks he has--and is
aching to deliver the knock-out. A million to a minute he wants to buy
us out."
"Well, he never will!" Red and plethoric, the senior partner sprang up.
An elderly man, his clear eyes, honest face, framed in white
side-whiskers of the Dundreary style, all stamped him as belonging to
the old-fashioned school of finance which aimed always to advance the
civic interest while turning an honest penny. "No, sir!" he reiterated.
"We'll break first; and goodness knows that is not so far away.
Yesterday I approached Murray, of the North American Bank, but he
answered me in his broad Scotch: 'Hoots, mon! get your crossing first.
Get your crossing an' we'll talk.' And so with Butler, Smith, and
others who promised support."
"Cold feet, eh?" Carter commented. "They'll warm them presently chasing
themselves for a chance to come in."
The old gentleman ran on in his indignation. "Yes, we are about at the
end of our financial string, but we would rather dangle there than yield
to these pirates. Am I right, sir?"
Smythe, a younger man, lean, laconic, and dark as the other was stout,
florid, nodded, and his vigorous answer was untainted by a suspicion of
compromise. "Surely, sir! But if Mr. Carter's plan fails--" His shrug
supplied the hiatus.
Carter answered the shrug. "It won't fail." He held up the invitation.
"But, say! Fancy--to-day, of all days?"
"Of course we won't go," Smythe frowned.
"Of course we* will*," Carter grinned. "Think what it means? Besides
blinding them to the trap, we shall be there when it springs, and I
wouldn't miss Brass Bowels' face for a thousand, cash. Let me see; the
bid is for eight-thirty. Western flyer is due at Portage station
nine-fifteen. He'll hardly broach business before the coffee, and with
any kind of luck we ought to serve him up a beautiful case of
indigestion."
"With luck?" the senior partner echoed.
"With or without. Everything is planned beyond possibility of failure.
Mr. Chester goes with Mr. Hart on the construction-train, while Bender
keeps things humming at the crossing. By-the-way, he's in the outer
office now, with Hart, waiting for last orders, and if you don't mind
I'll have them in. I wouldn't take a chance even on your clerks."
In view of just such a contingency, Bender had invested his bulk with
store clothes of that indescribable pattern and cut which fulfils
lumberman ideals. From his mighty shoulders a quarter-acre of black
coat fell half-way down worsted pantaloons that were displaying an
unconquerable desire to use the wrinkles of high boots as a step-ladder
to his knees. As collars did not come in sizes for his red throat, he
had compromised on a kerchief of gorgeous silk, and a soft hat, flat and
black, completed a costume that was at once his pride and penance. In
the luxurious office, with its rich fittings in mahogany and leather, he
loomed larger than ever; was foreign as a bear in a lady's boudoir.
Uncomfortably aware of the fact, he took the chair which the senior
partner offered with a sigh of relief, and was fairly comfortable till
the position discovered its own disadvantages--while his coat announced
every movement with miniature _feux de joie_ from bursting seams, his
trousers ascended his boots as a fireman goes up a hotel escape. To
which sources of discomfort was added the knowledge that his face mapped
in fair characters the fluctuations of the recent combat. But he forgot
all--scars, raiment, unconventional bulk--as soon as he began to talk.
"All ready," he replied to Carter's question. "Buckle has been round
the camp some lately. Only this morning I caught him talking to
Michigan Red. It's a cinch that he was spotting for the railroad, but
as I knew you'd as lief he'd tip us off as not, I didn't bust his head.
Jes' allowed I didn't see him."
"Yes, let him talk," Carter replied, relative to the broken contractor.
"But"--he addressed the surveyor--"there's no whispering in your
outfit?"
"Couldn't be," the young fellow laughed. "Mr. Chester only told _me_ an
hour ago. The men know nothing--will _know_ nothing up to the moment we
pull into Prairie."
"Good. Now, you are to leave at dusk, and don't forget to grab the
operator before he can rattle a key. But turn him loose as soon as you
are through and let him wire in the news. And you, Bender, start in at
eight, keep 'em busy as long as you can, then load what's left of you in
a flat-car and steam round for Mr. Hart."
"What's left of me?" Bender growled, as he walked with the surveyor
down-street a few minutes later. "Hum! Give me the Cougar and an even
hundred of old-style Michigan men, and I'd drive the last of Brass
Bowels' tarriers into the Red and beat you out laying the diamond. But,
Lordy, what's the use o' talking! The old stock petering out an' the
new's jes' rotten with education. They'd sooner work than fight, an'
loaf than either, for they ain't exactly what you'd call perticler hell
on labor. What's left of me? Well, there'll be some fragments, I
guess. While I was hanging round I picked up an odd score of Oregon
choppers that blew in here las' week. Brass Bowels' agent tried for
'em, but they'd lumbered with me in British Columbia. Come out an' see
'em. They're beauties."
Perhaps they were, for standards of beauty, morality, of any old thing,
are merely relative and depend so much on local color. To Hart, who
reviewed the "beauties" in Bender's camp, they seemed the most
unmitigated ruffians in his railroad experience; but as they strut on
this small section of the world-stage for "Positively one appearance
only," let them be judged by their record in the rough work of that
night; by the way in which they bore themselves in the roar, surge, and
tumble of a losing fight, the echoes of which alarmed the dark city and
came with the soup to the general manager's dinner; and let him deliver
their valedictory to his guests at table.
Throwing a telegram--which a waiter brought in just after Helen went
up-stairs--across to Carter, the magnate remarked: "That big foreman of
yours has been at it again. He has put two of our heaviest engines into
the ditch and ten men into hospital. Not bad, but--he didn't lay the
diamond."
"Oh, well," Carter shrugged, "better luck next time."
"Ah, yes--the next time?" Repeating the phrase with dubious inflection,
he went on with his dinner, and for an hour thereafter no one heard the
rattle of the skeleton behind the feast. He acted the perfect host,
easily courteous, pleasant, anxious for the preference of his guests.
As he ran on, drawing from the sources of a wide and unusual experience
for his dinner chat, it was curious to note the shadings in his manner.
Addressing the partners, he seemed to exhale rather than evidence a
superiority which, on their part, they countenanced by an equally subtle
homage. Integrity and deprecation of his policy and methods were
dominated by the orthodox business sense which forced subconscious
recognition of his title as king of their business world. With Carter,
however, he was frankly free, as though they two had been section-men
eating their bite together on a pile of ties, and doubtless the
difference in his manner sprang from some such feeling. For whereas the
partners were born to their station, he recognized Carter as a
product--unfinished, but still a product--of the forces which had
produced himself and a dozen other kings and great contractors of the
constructive railroad era. Without invidious distinction or neglect of
the others, he yet made him the focus of attention.
"We heard all about your sawdust grades," he complimented, with real
cordiality. "A mighty clever idea, sir; pity you couldn't patent
it--though we are glad you cannot, for we intend to apply it on all our
Rainy River muskegs."
Approaching business at the close of the meal, he was equally suave.
"You are to be complimented upon your achievement, gentlemen," he said,
addressing the partners. "We feel that while supplying a real need of
the province, you have convicted us of remissness. But now that we do
see our duty, it would be equally criminal for us to leave you the
burden of this heavy responsibility. We know how it has taxed your
resources"--his gray eye stabbed the senior partner--"and we are fully
prepared to relieve you." Pausing, he lit a cigar, puffed a moment, and
finished, "We will take the enterprise off your hands, bag and baggage,
on terms that will yield you a handsome profit."
A pause followed. No man turns from an easy road to a rocky climb
without lingering backward glances, and the partners looked at one
another while the general manager leaned back and smoked with the air of
one who had faithfully performed a magnanimous duty. Greer spoke first.
"Very kind offer, I am sure."
"Most handsome," Smythe, the laconic, added. "But--" He glanced at
Carter, who finished, "We are not on the market."
The manager raised his brows. Expecting a first refusal, he was
slightly staggered and irritated by its bluntness, yet masked both
emotions. "Not on your own terms?"
"On no terms," Greer emphatically answered; then, flushing, he added:
"Our chief motive in going into this enterprise, sir, was to bring
sorely needed railroad competition into this province. It would not be
subserved by our selling to you."
The manager flicked the ash from his cigar. Then, while smoking, he
regarded the old gentleman from under bulging lids very much as a
curious collector might note the wriggles of an impaled beetle. "Very
laudable intention; does you credit, sir. But you must pardon me if I
doubt that you will carry it to the length of financial hari-kari. You
have heard of that Japanese custom? A man commits suicide, empties
himself upon a cold and unsympathetic world for the benefit of his
enemy, who is compelled by custom to go and do likewise. In your case
the sacrifice would be foolish because we shouldn't follow suit. Now
when I spoke of your resources"--during an ugly pause his glance
flickered between the partners--"I did not state our exact knowledge of
their extent. You are--practically--broke. In addition, we have bought
up all of your paper that we could find floating on the market, and
three months from now--we shall be in a position to demand a receiver in
bankruptcy. Stop!" Frowning down Greer's attempted interruption, he
dropped his suave mask and stood out, the financial king, brutal,
imperious, predatory. "I know what you would say. Three months is a
long time. But no one will make you a better offer--any offer--till you
can cross our line. You can force a crossing? Yes, but we'll law you,
badger you, carry the case from court to court up to the privy
council--two years won't make an end. In the meantime--" He had thrown
himself at them, bearing down upon them with all the force of his
powerful will, of the furiously strong personality that had crushed
financial opposition to plans and projects beside which their enterprise
was as a grain of sand to the ocean. Now, in a flash, he became again
the polished host. "Take your time, gentlemen. _We_ are in no hurry.
Several days, if you choose. But--be advised."
But big, strong, and masterful as the manager was, every Goliath has his
David, and the first stone in the forehead came from the sling of
Smythe--Smythe, who had hardly opened his mouth through the meal save
for the admittance of food or drink. Banging the table so that the
glass rang and a champagne bowl flew from its thin stem, he sprang up,
his dark face flushed and defiant. "We'll take neither your advice nor
your time! God knows that we are hard shoved, but damn a man who sells
his country! And since you have been so outspoken, let me tell you that
we'll run trains across your line, and that inside--"
"This hour." In its quiet assurance, Carter's interpolation came with
all the force of an accomplished fact. The manager started, and the
division superintendent upset his wine. As their backs were to the
door, neither saw a waiter take a telegram from a messenger-boy, and
sign for its delivery after a glance at the clock, which indicated
half-past nine. Nor could either fact have the significance for them
that their combination had for Carter.
The manager recovered his poise even as the waiter handed the telegram
to his colleague, and, though puzzled, hid the feeling behind a show of
confident contempt. "I hardly gather your meaning, but presume you
mean--war?"
Missing the superintendent's sudden consternation, he was going on.
"Very well. I _had_ hoped--" when the former pulled his sleeve.
"What's this?"
He stared blankly at the words: "Construction-train, with men and
Gatling-guns, across our tracks at Prairie. Number ten, Western Mail,
held up with three hundred passengers."
During an astonished silence, the partners watched the manager, who
looked at Carter, who lightly drummed on the table. "Your train?" he
went on, slowly, with words that evidenced his flashing insight into the
situation. "Hum! Sawdust, eh? Came down the spur you laid to the
Portage Mills at Prairie; grabbed our operator; then extended the
mill-switch across our tracks. Know how to kill two birds with one
stone, don't you?"
During a second silence he fenced glances, nervously fingering the
telegram, then suddenly asked: "What's the use? You can't hold it?"
"With two Gatlings and five hundred men--five thousand, if I need them?"
"The law's against you."
"As it is against you at the crossing. Possession is said to be nine of
its points, anyway, so we have you just nine-tenths to the bad."
Slightly smiling, he quoted: "'We'll law you, badger you, carry the case
from court to court up to the privy council--two years won't make an
end.'"