thickly sown. On many sections the work was light; no more than the
throwing up of an embankment in the park-like intervales, with now and
then a rock-or earth-cutting through some jutting spur of the inclosing
mountains. Here the men were bunched on the rock work and the fills,
though the camp sites were commonly in the park-like interspaces where
wood and water, the two sole commodities for which the contractors could
make no deductions on the pay-roll, lay conveniently at the doors of the
rude sleeping shacks.
Since he was not required to talk, Kenneth had time to be curiously
observant of many things in passing. Each camp was the fellow of its
neighbor; a chaotic collection of hastily built bunk shanties, a mess
tent for those who, shunning the pay-devouring Scylla of the
contractors' "commissary," fell into the Charybdis of the common table,
and always, Kenneth remarked, the camp groggery, with its slab-built
bar, its array of ready-filled pocket bottles, and its sad-faced,
slouch-hatted, pistol-carrying keeper.
"What is that Bible-saying about the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty
land?" said Kenneth, as they were passing one of the wilderness
bar-rooms buttressing a huge boulder by the trail side. "I should think
you'd rule those fellows emphatically and peremptorily out of the game,
Ford. They must make a lot of trouble for you, first and last."
"They do," was the sober response. "But how would you go about it to
rule them out?"
The lawyer laughed. "My writs don't run this far. But I thought yours
did. Why don't you fire 'em bodily; tell 'em their number is
23--skiddoo! Aren't you the Sublime Porte--the court of last resort--the
big boss--over here?"
Ford pulled his horse down to a walk.
"Kenneth, let me tell you: behind those barkeepers are the contractors;
behind the contractors is Mr. North; behind Mr. North, the president. My
little lever isn't long enough to turn the world over."
"Pshaw!" said Kenneth. "Mr. Colbrith wouldn't stand for anything like
that! Why, he's a perfect fanatic on the whisky question."
"That's all right," said Ford acidly. "It doesn't go as far as Mr.
Colbrith in the matter of the debauching particulars. It stops in
Denver; and Mr. Colbrith approves Denver in the lump--signs the vouchers
without looking at them, as Evans would say. I tell you what I
believe--what I am compelled to believe. These individual saloon-keepers
are supposed to be in here on their own hook, on sufferance. They are
not; they are merely the employees of a close corporation. Among the
profit sharers you'll find the MacMorroghs at the top, and Mr. North's
little ring of Denver officials close seconds."
"Do you honestly believe that, Ford?"
"I do. I can't prove it, of course. If I could, I'd go to New York and
fight it out. And the whisky isn't all of it, or even the worst: there
are women in some of these camps, and there would be more if Leckhard
didn't stand guard at Saint's Rest and turn them back."
"Heavens--what a cesspool!" said the attorney. "Does a laboring man ever
get out of here with any of his earnings?"
"Not if the MacMorroghs can help it. And you can figure for yourself
what the moral atmosphere must be. We are less than two months old on
the work, but already the Western Extension is a streak of crime; crime
unpunished, and at times tacitly encouraged. You may say that my
department isn't responsible--that this is the contractors' day and
game. If that is true now--which it isn't--it will no longer be true
when we come in with our own employees, the track-layers."
But now Kenneth was shaking his head.
"I can't believe it, Ford. You're blue because Mr. Colbrith has thrown
Mr. North into your boat as ballast. I don't blame you: but you mustn't
let it make you color-blind."
Ford said nothing. The day was yet young, and the long journey was still
younger. It was at the noon halt, made at a subcontractor's camp near a
great earth-cutting and a huge fill, that Kenneth had his object lesson.
They were standing at the door of the timekeeper's shanty--they had been
the timekeeper's guests for the noon meal--and the big gang of Italians,
with its inevitable Irish foreman, was already at work. Out at the head
of the great fill a dozen men were dumping the carts as they came in an
endless stream from the cutting. Suddenly there was a casting down of
shovels, a shrill altercation, a clinch, a flash of steel in the August
sunlight, and one of the disputants was down, his heels drumming on the
soft earth in the death agony.
"Good God!" said Kenneth. "It's a murder!" and he would have rushed in
if Ford and the timekeeper had not held him back.
The object lesson was sufficiently shocking, but its sequel was still
more revolting. Without one to kneel beside the dying man; indeed,
without waiting until the drumming heels were still; the men callously
put their shovels under the body, slid it over the lip of the dump and
left it to be covered by the tumbling cataract of earth pouring from the
tip-carts whose orderly procession had scarcely been interrupted by the
tragedy.
Kenneth was silent for many minutes after they had left the camp of the
Italians. He was a Western man only by adoption; of Anglo-Saxon blood,
and so unable to condone the Latin's disregard for the sacredness of
human life.
"That was simply terrible, Ford," he said finally, and his voice was
still in sympathy with the shaking hand that held the bridle-reins.
"Will nothing be done?"
"Nothing; unless the murdered man chances to have relatives or clansmen
in one of the near-by camps--in which case there'll be another killing."
"But the law," said Kenneth.
"There is no law here higher than the caprice of Brian MacMorrogh.
Besides, it's too common--a mere episode; one of those which you said
you couldn't believe, a little while back."
"But can't you make the MacMorroghs do a little police work, for common
decency's sake?"
Ford shook his head. "They are quite on the other side of the fence, as
I told you in the beginning. By winking at lawlessness of all kinds,
their own particular brands of lawlessness, by which they and their
backers make money, go unquestioned. So far from helping, they'd make it
exceedingly difficult for any sheriff who should have the temerity to
come in here in the discharge of his duty."
"You foresaw all this before the contract was awarded?"
"Not all--though I had been told that the MacMorroghs ran 'open camps'
where the work was far enough from civilization to take the curse off.
What you've seen, and what I've been telling you, is bad enough, God
knows; but it will be worse before it is better. After we've had a few
pay-days, and the men begin to realize that they are here to toil and to
be robbed ... Kenneth, it will be hell on earth; and the company will
pay for it--the company always pays in the end."
"I've got a notion," said the attorney, after another plodding mile of
reflection; but what it was he did not say.
Ford and his companion reached Copah in the afternoon of the third day
out from Saint's Rest, and, singularly enough, the mine owners who were
disputing the extension right-of-way were found amenable to reason. What
Kenneth did to secure the P. S-W. right-of-way across the mining claims,
Ford did not know, or seek to know; though a word or two let fall by the
attorney led him to believe that the Transcontinental encouragement was
not quite specific enough in dollars and cents to warrant the
obstructors in holding out.
Ford was for starting back the next morning: he had missed Brissac and
both of the Bensons on the way over. But Kenneth confessed to being
saddle-sore, and begged for another day's respite. Ford agreed without
giving the matter a second thought. Upon such unconsidered trifles--an
indifferent "yes" or "no"--turn the poised scales of life. For one other
day the two Southwestern representatives put up at the Grand Union,
Copah's tar-paper-covered simulacrum of a hotel; and during that day
Ford contrived to sell his birthright for what he, himself, valued at
the moment as a mess of pottage.
It was in this wise. At this period of its existence Copah, the future
great, was merely a promise; a camp of magnificent prospects. Isolated
by one hundred and fifty miles of wagon-road and pack-trail from one
railroad base, and by forty miles of mountains from the other, its
future turned upon the hope of cheaper transportation. As a gold camp it
was an anomaly. With a single exception its ores were low grade, and the
wagon-road and pack-trail freightage made them practically profitless to
the miners.
The single exception was the "Little Alicia," and it was the coincidence
of the name, rather than the eloquence of its impoverished owner, that
first attracted Ford. From first to last he did not know the exact
location of the mine. It was somewhere in the hills back of Copah, and
Grigsby, the prospector who had discovered and opened it, had an office
in the camp.
It was in Grigsby's town office that Ford saw the ore specimens and the
certified assays, and listened not too credulously to Grigsby's
enthusiastic description of the Little Alicia. To be a half-owner in
this mine of mines was to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice--when the
railroad should come: if one might take Grigsby's word for it.
It is a curious fever, that which seizes upon the new-comer in an
unexploited mining field. Ford was far from being money-mad; but there
were times when he could not help contrasting a railroad salary with
Miss Adair's millions. True, he had once said to her, in the fulness of
confident belief, that the money of the woman he loved would make no
difference--to her or to him. But the point of view, wise or foolish, is
not always the same. There were moments when the Adair millions loomed
large, and the salary of an assistant to the president--who was in fact
little more than a glorified chief of construction--shrank in
proportion. He was free of obligation and foot-loose. His twenty
thousand dollars invested in P. S-W. stock at twenty-nine and a half had
grown with the rising market to sixty-odd. What did it matter to any one
if he chose to put ten thousand of the sixty-odd on a turn of the
Little Alicia card?
While it was gambling, pure and simple, he did not bet with his eyes
shut. Inquiry at the Bank of Copah established Grigsby's reputation for
truth-telling. The specimens and the assay certificates were beyond
doubt genuine. More than this, Grigsby had made a number of ore
shipments by freighters' wagon and jack train over the range, and the
returns had enabled him to keep a small force of men at work in the
mine.
Ford made his bet through the bank. The cashier was willing to take a
P. S-W. official's note of hand, to be canceled when Ford could deposit
to the bank's credit in Denver, and to give Grigsby an open account for
his immediate needs. Grigsby accepted joyfully, and the thing was done.
Ford's mess of pottage was a deed of half-ownership in the Little
Alicia, executed and recorded in the afternoon of the day of stop-overs,
and he was far enough from suspecting that he had exchanged for it all
that a man of honor holds dearest. But, as a matter of fact, the
birthright had not yet been handed over: that came later.
XIV
THE DRAW-BAR PULL
Attorney Kenneth had many more object-lessons in the study of "open
camps" on the three-day return ride to Saint's Rest. The day of
stop-over in Copah chanced to be the MacMorrogh Brothers' monthly
pay-day, and until the men's money was spent pandemonium reigned along
the line of the extension.
Some of it they dodged, riding wide to pass the larger camps, and
hearing from afar the noise of carousal, the fierce drinking songs of
the Magyars, the fusillades of pistol-shots. So far as they could see,
all work appeared to be suspended; and Major Benson, whose camp of
engineers they picked up in one of the detours around a gulch head,
confirmed that conclusion.
"It was the same way last month," raged the major, twisting his fierce
white mustaches and looking as if he would like to blot the name of
MacMorrogh from the roster of humanity. "It'll take a full week to get
them into the swing again, and MacMorrogh will be up with his estimates
just the same as if he had been working full time. I'll cut 'em; by the
gods, I'll cut 'em! And you must stand by me, Mr. Ford."
There was the same story to be listened to at Brissac's tie camp; and
again at young Benson's headquarters, which were on the mountain
section. This last was on the third day, however, when the madness was
dying down. Some of the rock men were back on the job, but many of the
gangs were still grievously short-handed. Ford said little to Kenneth.
The pandemonium spoke for itself. But on the third night, when the long
ride was ended, and Pietro, Ford's cook and man-of-all-work, was serving
supper in the caboose office-on-wheels, some of the bitterness in Ford's
heart slipped into speech.
"Can you see now how it takes the very marrow out of a man's bones,
Kenneth? You may think of an engineer as a man of purely bull-headed
purposes, merely trying, in a crass, materialistic way, to get a
material thing done. I want to do a big thing, and I'd like to do it in
a big way. It _is_ a big thing--the building of this extension. If it
doesn't add another star to the flag, it will at least make one state
twice as populous, twice as prosperous. It will add its quota to the
habitable surfaces; and it's a good quota--a land that some future
generation will love, and swear by, and fight for, if need be. And to
think that for one man's narrow-mindedness and another's greed we've got
to christen it in blood and muck and filth and dishonesty--it makes me
sore, Kenneth; sore and disheartened."
"I don't blame you," said the lawyer, reveling, though he would never
have admitted it, in the comfort of the caboose headquarters journey's
end. "But you'll pull through; you'll build your railroad, and the
mistakes that are made won't be your mistakes. It's a horrible state of
affairs, that in the MacMorrogh camps; a blot on our boasted
civilization. But you can't help it. Or rather you will help it if, and
when, you can."
Ford was shaking his head dejectedly.
"I don't know, Kenneth. It's getting next to me, even at this early
stage of the game. Have you ever stood on the front car platform of a
train nearest to the engine and watched the jiggling draw-bar? It is
apparently loose; its hold on the engine seems to be no more than that
of the touch of clasped hands in a gipsy dance. Yet it never lets go,
and the drag of it is always there. By and by, when the coal is all
burned, and the fire is out, and the water is drained from the tank,
those gentle little multiplied jerks will pull the big engine down--kill
it--make it a mere mass of inert metal blocking the way of progress."
"Well?" said the attorney.
"It's an allegory. I'm beginning to feel the draw-bar pull. Sooner or
later, North and his clique will drag me down. I can't fight as the
under dog--I never learned how; and they've fixed it so that I can't
fight any other way."
Kenneth had lighted his cigar and was lying back against the cushion of
the car-seat. After a little, he said: "Just after we saw the Italian
killed last week I told you I had a notion, Ford. I've got it yet, and
I've been turning it over in my mind and wondering if I'd better explode
it on you. On the whole, I think I'd better not. It's a case of surgery.
If the patient lives, you'll know about it. If the patient dies, you'll
be no worse off than you are now. Shall we let it rest at that?"
Ford acquiesced. He was too utterly disheartened to be curious. But if
he could have foreseen the results of Kenneth's notion it is conceivable
that he would have been aroused to some effort of protest, as even in
deep waters one prays sometimes to be delivered from his friends.
It was a week after this farewell supper in the caboose hotel at Saint's
Rest when Ford went down to Denver to borrow, on his P. S-W. stock, the
ten thousand dollars to be deposited to the credit of the Bank of Copah.
Following him, and only one train behind, came Frisbie, new from a
confirmatory survey of the extension beyond the Copah district.
On his return from the Green Butte end of the proposed line, the little
man with the diabolical fashion of beard trimming had spent a week in
and around Copah, picking up yard rights-of-way, surveying approaches,
and setting grade stakes for the outlying MacMorrogh gangs. During that
week he had made a discovery, and since he believed it to be all his
own, he journeyed eastward to share it quickly with his chief.
Ford was dining alone at the Brown Palace when Frisbie, coming straight
from the Plug Mountain train, found him. There was an entire western
desert to be talked over during the courses, and Frisbie held his
discovery in reserve until they had gone to smoke in a quiet corner of
the great rotunda. Even then he approached it indirectly.
"In taking up the line down the Pannikin we have followed the old S. L &
W. survey pretty closely all the way from start to finish. What were
your reasons, Stuart?" he asked.
"There didn't seem to be any good reason for not following it. Brandreth
made the S. L & W. preliminary, and there isn't a better locating
engineer in this country."
"I know," said Frisbie. "But the best of us make mistakes, now and then.
Brandreth made a pretty sizable one, I think."
"How is that?"
"You know where the big rock-cutting is to be made in the lower canyon,
about ten miles this side of the point where we begin to swing south for
the run to Copah--a mile and a half of heavy work that will cost away
up into the pictures?"
"Yes; I've estimated that rock work at not a cent less than two hundred
thousand dollars."
"You're shy, rather than over, at that. And two hundred thousand would
build a number of miles of ordinary railroad, wouldn't it? But that
isn't all. The cliffs along that canyon are shale-topped and
shale-undermined, the shale alternating with loose rock about fifty feet
above our line of grade in quarter-mile stretches all along. That means
incessant track-walking day and night through the mile and a half of
cutting, and afterward--for all time afterward--a construction train
kept handy under steam to clear away débris that will never quit sliding
down on the embankment."
"I'm afraid you are right," said Ford. "It's the worst bit on the entire
extension; the most costly to build, as it will be the most expensive to
maintain. But I guess Brandreth knew what he was about when he surveyed
it."
"Brandreth is a short-line man. He wouldn't lengthen his line ten miles
to dodge an earthquake. Ford, we can save a hundred thousand dollars on
that piece of track in first cost--to say nothing of the future."
"How? I'm always open to conviction."
"By leaving the S. L & W. survey at Horse Creek, following up to the low
divide at Emory's Mine, and crossing to enter Copah from the southeast
instead of from the northeast. I came out that way from Copah five days
ago. It's perfectly feasible; straight-away, easy earth work for the
greater part, and the only objection is that it adds about twelve
running miles to the length of the extension. It's for you to say
whether or not the added distance will be warranted by the lessened cost
and the assurance of safety in operating. If we cut through that lower
canyon cliff it will be only a question of time until we bury somebody,
no matter how closely it is watched."
Ford took time to consider the proposal. There were objections, and he
named one of them.
"The MacMorroghs have based their bid on the present survey: they will
not want to let that piece of rock work drop out of sight."
"They'll have to, if you say so. And you can afford to be pretty liberal
with them on the substituted twelve miles."
"I'll have to think about it over night," was Ford's final answer.
"Arrange to give me an hour to-morrow morning and we'll go over the maps
and your notes together."
Frisbie slept soundly on the gained inch, hoping to make it the coveted
ell in the morning. He knew the chief objection, which was that Ford,
too, was a "short-line" engineer; a man who would lay down his railroad
as the Czar of Russia did the St. Petersburg-Moscow line--by placing a
ruler on the map and drawing a straight mark beside it between the two
cities--if that were an American possibility. But he knew, too, that the
safety clause would weigh heavily with Ford, and there was no minimizing
the danger to future traffic if the canyon route should be retained.
It turned out finally as the first assistant had hoped and believed it
would. Ford spent a thoughtful hour at his office in the Guaranty
Building before Frisbie came down--the little man being trail-weary
enough to sleep late in the comfortable room at the Brown Palace. The
slight change of route was hardly a matter to be carried up to the
executive committee, and Ford's decision turned upon quite another
pivot--the addition of twelve miles of distance. As against this, safety
and economy won the day; and when Frisbie came in the talk was merely of
ways and means.
"Fix up the change with the MacMorroghs the best way you can," was
Ford's concluding instruction to his lieutenant. "They will kick, of
course; merely to be kicking at anything I suggest. But you can bring
them to terms, I guess."
"By my lonesome?" said Frisbie. "Aren't you going over to see the new
route with your own eyes?"
"No. I'm perfectly willing to trust your judgment, Dick. Besides, I've
got other fish to fry. I'm going east to-night to have one more tussle
with the steel mills. We must have quicker deliveries and more of them.
When I get back, we'll organize the track-layers and begin to make us a
railroad."
"Good," said Frisbie, gathering up his maps and sketches of the detour
country; and so, in the wording of a brief sentence or two it came to
pass that Ford delivered himself bound and unarmed into the hands of his
enemies.
A little light was thrown upon this dark passage that night in the
office of the general manager, after Ford's train had gone eastward, and
Frisbie was on his way back to the MacMorrogh headquarters on the lower
Pannikin. North was waiting when Eckstein came in, flushed as from a
rapid walk.
"It's all settled?" asked the general manager, with a slow lift of the
eyebrow to betray his anxiety.
"To the queen's taste, I should say," was the secretary's not too
deferential reply. "Ford's out of the way, to be gone ten days or a
fortnight, and Frisbie has gone back to dicker with MacMorrogh, and to
survey the new route up Horse Creek. Ford doesn't know; I doubt if he
will ever know until we spring the trap on him. The one thing I was most
afraid of was that he would insist upon going over the new line himself.
Then, of course, he would have found out--he couldn't help finding out."
The general manager squared his huge shoulders against the back of the
chair.
"You think he would call it off if he knew?" he queried. "You give him
credit for too much virtue, Eckstein. But I think we have him now. By
the time he returns it will be too late for him to hedge. MacMorrogh
will see to that."
Eckstein nodded. "I made a point of that with Brian," he said. "The
minute the word is given he is to throw a little army of graders upon
the new roundabout. But Ford won't find out. He'll be too busy on this
end of the line with the track-layers. I'm a little nervous about
Merriam, though."
"He's the man who talked Frisbie into championing the new route?"
"Yes. He did it pretty skilfully: made Frisbie think he was finding it
out himself, and never let the little man out of his sight while they
were in Copah. But I am afraid Merriam himself knows too much."
"Get him out of the country--before Ford gets back," was the crisp
order. "If he isn't here when the gun goes off, he can't tell anybody
how it was loaded."
"An appointment--" Eckstein began.
"That is what I mean," said the general manager, turning back to his
desk. "We need a traffic agency up in the Oregon country. See
Merriam--to-night. Find out if he'd like to have the general agency at,
say, twenty-five hundred a year; and if he agrees, get out the circular
appointing him."
"He'll agree, fast enough," laughed the secretary. "But I'll nail
him--to-night."