THE RIVER
[Illustration]
THE RIVER
_By_
EDNAH AIKEN
ILLUSTRATED BY
SIDNEY H. RIESENBERG
[Illustration]
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1914
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
TO
CHARLES SEDGWICK AIKEN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I MARSHALL SENDS FOR RICKARD 1
II A BIT OF ORATORY 9
III THE BLESSING OF ARIDITY 20
IV THE DESERT HOTEL 38
V A GAME OF CHECKERS 50
VI RED TAPE 67
VII A GARDEN IN A DESERT 80
VIII UNDER THE VENEER 87
IX ON THE WISTARIA 95
X FEAR 103
XI THE RIVALS 111
XII A DESERT DINNER 117
XIII THE FIGHTING CHANCE 127
XIV HARDIN’S LUCK 137
XV THE WRONG MAN 141
XVI THE BEST LAID SCHEMES 150
XVII THE DRAGON TAKES A HAND 159
XVIII ON THE LEVEE 169
XIX THE WHITE REFUGE 178
XX OPPOSITION 189
XXI A MORNING RIDE 199
XXII THE PASSING OF THE WATERS 204
XXIII MORE ORATORY 214
XXIV A SOFT NOOK 234
XXV THE STOKERS 247
XXVI THE WHITE OLEANDER 256
XXVII A WHITE WOMAN AND A BROWN 264
XXVIII BETRAYAL 271
XXIX RICKARD MAKES A NEW ENEMY AND A NEW FRIEND 278
XXX SMUDGE 290
XXXI TIME THE UMPIRE 297
XXXII THE WALK HOME 307
XXXIII A DISCOVERY 319
XXXIV THE FACE IN THE WILLOWS 329
XXXV A GLIMPSE OF FREEDOM 337
XXXVI THE DRAGON SCORES 346
XXXVII A SUNDAY SPECTACLE 355
XXXVIII THE WHITE NIGHT 367
XXXIX THE BATTLE IN THE NIGHT 378
XL A DESERTION 396
XLI INCOMPLETENESS 405
XLII A CORNER OF HIS HEART 417
THE RIVER
THE RIVER
CHAPTER I
MARSHALL SENDS FOR RICKARD
THE large round clock was striking nine as “Casey” Rickard’s dancing
step carried him into the outer office of Tod Marshall. The ushering
clerk, coatless and vestless in expectation of the third, hot spring
day, made a critical appraisement of the engineer’s get-up before he
spoke. Then he stated that Mr. Marshall had not yet come.
For a London tie and a white silk shirt belted into white serge
trousers were smart for Tucson. The clerks in the employ of the
Overland Pacific and of the Sonora and Yaqui Railroads had stared at
Rickard as he entered; they followed his progress through the room.
He was a newcomer in Tucson. He had not yet acquired the apathetic
habits of its citizens. He wore belts, instead of suspenders. His white
trousers, duck or serge, carried a newly pressed crease each morning.
The office had not reached a verdict on the subject of K. C. Rickard.
The shirt-sleeved, collarless clerks would have been quick to dub him a
dandy were it not for a page of his history that was puzzling them. He
had held a chair of engineering in some eastern city. He had resigned,
the wind-tossed page said, to go on the road as a fireman. His rapid
promotion had been spectacular; the last move, a few weeks ago, to fill
an office position in Tucson. The summons had found him on the west
coast of Mexico, where the Overland Pacific was pushing its tracks.
“You can wait here,” suggested the clerk, looking covertly at the shoes
of the man who a few years before had been shoveling coal on a Wyoming
engine. “Mr. Marshall said to wait.”
“Ribbons, instead of shoe-laces!” carped the human machine that must
ever write letters which other men sign. “And a blue pin to match his
tie! I call that going some!”
It would never have occurred to Rickard, had he thought about it at
all that morning as he knotted his tie of dark, brilliant blue silk,
that the selection of his lapis pin was a choice; it was an inevitable
result, an instinctive discretion of his fingers. It warped, however,
the suspended judgment of Marshall’s men who had never seen him
shoveling coal, disfigured by a denim jumper. They did not know that
they themselves were slovens; ruined by the climate that dulls vanity
and wilts collars.
“Give him a year to change some of his fine habits!” wagered Smythe,
the stoop-shouldered clerk, as the door of the inner office closed.
“To change his habits less!” amended the office wit. And then they
fell to speculating what Marshall was going to do with him. What
pawn was he in the game that every one in Tucson followed with eager
self-interested concern? Marshall’s was the controlling hand in Arizona
politics; the maker of governors, the arbiter of big corporations;
president of a half-dozen railroads. Not a move of his on the board
that escaped notice.
On the other side of the door, Rickard was echoing the office question.
This play job, where did it lead to? He had liked his work, under
Stratton. There had been some pretty problems to meet--what did
Marshall mean to do with him?
The note had set the appointment for nine. Rickard glanced at his
watch, and took out his _Engineering Review_. It would be ten before
that door opened on Tod Marshall!
He knew that, on the road, Marshall’s work began at dawn. “A man won’t
break from overwork, or rust from underwork, if he follows the example
of the sun,” Rickard had often heard him expound his favorite theory.
“It is only the players, the sybarites, who can afford to pervert the
arrangement nature intended for us.” But in Tucson, controlled by
the wifely solicitude of his Claudia, he was coerced into a regular
perversion. His office never saw him until the morning was half gone.
A half-hour later, Rickard finished reading a report on the diversion
of a great western river. The name of Thomas Hardin had sent him off
on a tangent of memory. The Thomas Hardin whose efforts to bring water
to the desert of the Colorado had been so spectacularly unsuccessful
_was_ the Tom Hardin he had known! The sister had told him so, the girl
with the odd bronze eyes; opal matrix they were, with glints of gold,
or was it green? She herself was as unlike the raw boor of his memory
as a mountain lily is like the coarse rock of its background. Even
a half-sister to Hardin, as Marshall, their host at dinner the week
before, had explained it,--no, even that did not explain it. That any
of the Hardin blood should be shared by the veins of that girl, why
it was incredible! The name “Hardin” suggested crudity, loud-mouthed
bragging; conceit. He could understand the failure of the river project
since the sister had assured him that it was the same Tom Hardin who
had gone to college at Lawrence; had married Gerty Holmes. Queer
business, life, that he should cross, even so remotely, their orbits
again. That was a chapter he liked to skip.
He walked over to the windows, shielded by bright awnings, and looked
down on the city where the next few years of his life might be caught.
Comforting to reflect that an engineer is like a soldier, never can
be certain about to-morrow. Time enough to know that to-morrow meant
Tucson! What was that threadbare proverb in the Overland Pacific that
Tod Marshall always keeps his men until they lose their teeth? That
defined the men who made themselves necessary!
His eyes were resting on the banalities of the modern city that had
robbed “old town” of its flavor. Were it not for the beauty of the
distant hills, the jar and rumble of the trains whose roar called
to near-by pleasure cities, twinkling lights and crowded theaters,
stretches of parks and recreation grounds, he, who loved the thrill
and confinement of an engine, who had found enticement in a desert,
a chapter of adventure in the barrancas of Mexico, would stifle in
Tucson! American progress was as yet too thin a veneer on Mexican
indifference to make the place endurable; as a city. Were it a village
of ten thousand people, then he’d not be scolding at his hotel, The
Rosales. He could find the limitations picturesque, even. The census
it was that accused those dusty unswept floors, the stained cuspidors,
the careless linen, and The Rosales the best place in town! One has a
right to expect comforts in a city.
“I’m good for a lifetime here, if I want it,” his thoughts would
work back to the starting place. “If I knuckle down to it, let him
grow to depend on me, it’s as good as settled that I am buried in
Tucson!” Hadn’t he heard Marshall himself say that he “didn’t keep a
kindergarten--that his office wasn’t a training-school for men!” He
wanted his men to stay! That, one of the reasons of the great man’s
power; detail rested on the shoulders of his employees. It kept his own
brain clear, receptive to big achievements.
“Perhaps as the work unrolls, as I see more of what he wants of me,
why he wants me, I may like it, I may get to shout for Tucson!” It was
improbable enough to smile over! Child’s work, compared to Mexico. He
was never tired--that was his grievance; he had it, now; he was never
tired.
The distinction of serving Marshall well certainly had its drawbacks.
He wanted to sweep on. Whether he had a definite terminal, a concrete
goal, had he ever stopped to think? Specialization had always a
fascination for him. It was that which had thrown him out of his
instructorship into the fire-box of a western engine. It had governed
his course at college--to know one thing well, and then to prove that
he knew it well! Contented in the Mexican barrancas, here he was
chafing, restive, after a few weeks of Tucson. For what was he getting
here? Adding what scrap of experience to the rounding of his profession?
Retrospectively, engineering could hardly be said to be the work
of his choice. Rather had it appeared to choose him. From boyhood
engineers had always been, to him, the soldiers of modern civilization.
To conquer and subdue mountains, to shackle wild rivers, to suspend
trestles over dizzy heights, to throw the tracks of an advancing
civilization along a newly blazed trail, there would always be a thrill
in it for him. It had changed the best quarter-back of his high school
into the primmest of students at college. Only for a short time had he
let his vanity side-track him, when the honor of teaching what he had
learned stopped his own progress. A rut--! He remembered the day when
it had burst on him, the realization of the rut he was in. He could see
his Lawrence schoolroom, could see yet the face under the red-haired
mop belonging to Jerry Matson--queer he remembered the name after all
those years! He could picture the look of consternation when he threw
down his book, and announced his desertion.
“Casey was off his feed,” he had heard one of the students say as he
passed a buzzing group in the hall. “He looks peaked.”
He had handed in his resignation the next day. A month later, and he
was shoveling coal on the steep grades of Wyoming.
“Marshall keeps his men with him!” The engineer’s glance traveled
around the fleckless office. A stranger to Marshall would get a wrong
idea of the man who worked in it! Those precise files, the desk,
orderly and polished, the gleaming linoleum--and then the man who
made the negro janitor’s life a proud burden! His clothes always
crumpled--spots, too, unless his Claudia had had a chance at them!
Black string tie askew, all the outward visible signs of the southern
gentleman of assured ancestry. Not even a valet would ever keep Tod
Marshall up to the standard of that office. What did he have servants
for, he had demanded of Rickard, if it were not to jump after him,
picking up the loose ends he dropped?
Curious thing, magnetism. That man’s step on the stair, and every
man-jack of them would jump to attention, from Ben, the colored
janitor, who would not swap his post for a sinecure so long as
Tod Marshall’s one lung kept him in Arizona, to Smythe, the
stoop-shouldered clerk, who had followed Marshall’s cough from San
Francisco. Poor Smythe! as inextricably entangled in the meshes of red
tape as was the hapless Lady of Shalott in the web of her own snarled
loom. It was said in Arizona--he himself had met the statement in
Tucson--that any man who had ever worked for Tod Marshall would rather
be warmed by the reflection of his greatness than be given posts of
personal distinction.
Rickard found his office the only attractive place in the desert city.
Shining and airy, even in the hottest days, its gaily screened windows
were far enough above the street to give a charitable perspective.
Restive as he was under the inaction of the last few weeks, he could
acknowledge a quaintness of foreign suggestion in the mixture of Indian
and Mexican influence, hampered, rather than helped, by American
aggressiveness. Over the heads of a group of low buildings he could
see the roof of the old mission church, now the lounging place for
roisterers and sponges. There, the fiery mescal, the terrible tequila,
were sending many a white lad to destruction.
Those office buildings across the street, gay with canvas, suggested
American enterprise. In the distance were the substantial structures
of the lusty western university. Down by the track the new home of the
Overland Pacific was nearing completion. In the street below, young
girls with their crisp duck skirts and colored waists gave the touch of
blossoming. Mexican women wrapped in the inevitable black shawl were
jostling one another’s baskets. The scene was full of color and charm,
but to the watcher who was eager to be on and doing, it cried teasingly
of inertia.
Was it office routine Marshall intended him for? He admired without
stint Tod Marshall, but he preferred to work by the side of the other
kind, the strong men, without physical handicap, the men who take
risks, the men who live the life of soldiers. That was the life he
wanted. He would wait long enough to get Marshall’s intention, and
then, if it meant--this! he would break loose. He would go back to the
front where he belonged; back to the firing-line.
As the hands of the round clock in the outer office were pointing to
ten, the door opened and Marshall entered. His clothes, of indefinite
blackish hue, would have disgraced an eastern man. His string tie had a
starboard list, and his hat was ready for a rummage sale. But few would
have looked at his clothes. The latent energy of the dynamic spirit
that would frequently turn that quiet office into a maelstrom gleamed
in those Indian-black eyes. Beneath the shabby cloth, one suspected the
daily polished skin; under the old slouch hat was the mouth of purpose,
the lips that no woman, even his Claudia, had kissed without the thrill
of fear.
Marshall glanced back at the clock, and then toward his visitor.
“On time!” he observed.
Rickard, smiling, put his book in his pocket.