RED TAPE
AT ten o’clock the next morning, Hardin, entering the office, again
the general manager’s, found there before him, George MacLean the new
director, and Percy Babcock, the treasurer, who had been put in by the
Overland Pacific when the old company was reorganized. They had just
come in from Los Angeles, the trip made in MacLean’s private car.
“Where’s Estrada?” inquired Hardin of Ogilvie, who was making a great
show of industry at the desk in the center of the room.
Before Ogilvie could open his deliberate lips, Hardin’s question was
answered by Babcock, a thin nervous man, strung on live wires. “Not
here yet.”
Hardin stood in his characteristic attitude, legs outstretched, his
hands in his pockets. “Rickard?”
“Coming back, Ogilvie says. He went out a few minutes ago.”
“Just like Marshall, that.” Hardin moved over to the leather lounge
where MacLean was sitting. Neither man answered him. It was Hardin’s
method of acknowledging the situation.
Rickard entered a few minutes later, Estrada behind him. Ogilvie
followed Rickard to his desk.
“Well?” inquired the new manager.
Ogilvie explained lengthily that he had the minutes of the last meeting.
“Leave them here.” Rickard waved him toward Estrada, who held out his
hand for the papers.
Ogilvie’s grasp did not relax. He stammered: “There is no secretary.
I’ve been taking the minutes--”
“Thank you. Mr. Estrada will read them. We do not need you, Mr.
Ogilvie.”
Ogilvie stood, turning his expressionless eyes from one director to
the other as if expecting that order to be countermanded. Babcock
and MacLean appeared to be looking at something outside through the
vine-framed windows. An ugly smile disfigured Hardin’s mouth.
Rickard spoke again. “Mr. Estrada! We won’t detain you any longer, Mr.
Ogilvie.”
Reluctantly, the accountant relinquished the papers. His retreating
coat tails looked ludicrously whipped, but no one laughed. Hardin’s
scowl deepened.
“Showing his power,” he thought. “He’s going to call for a new pack.”
Estrada pushed the minutes through with but a few unimportant
interruptions. He was sitting at the same desk with Rickard. Hardin,
sensitive and sullen, thought he saw the meeting managed between them.
“It’s all slated,” ran his angry blood. “The meeting’s a farce. It was
all fixed in Los Angeles, or in Marshall’s office.” He whipped himself
into rebellion. He was no baby. He knew about these matters better than
these strangers, this fancy dude! He’d show them!
It took their silent cooperation to hold him down. It became more
apparent to him that they were all pitted against him. He was being
pressed against the wall.
Several times he attempted to bring the tangled affairs of the water
companies before the directors. Rickard would not discuss the water
companies.
“Because he’s not posted! He’s beginning to see what he’s up against,”
ran Hardin’s stormy thoughts. He felt Rickard’s hand in this, although
it was Estrada, apparently, who shelved the mystifications of the
uneasy companies, their rights, their dissatisfactions and their
lawsuits. Babcock seconded the Mexican’s motion to discuss those issues
at the next meeting. “It is a put-up job,” sulked Tom Hardin.
He was on his feet the next minute with a motion to complete the Hardin
head-gate. Violently he declaimed to Babcock and MacLean his wrongs,
the injustice that had been done him. Marshall had let that fellow
Maitland convince him that the gate was not practicable; had it not
been for him, the gate would be in place now; all this time and money
saved. And the Maitland dam, built instead! Where was it? Where was the
money, the time, put in that little toy? Sickening! His face purpled
over the memory. Why was he allowed to begin again with the gate?
“Answer me that. Why was I allowed to begin again? It’s all child’s
play, that’s what it is. And when I am in it again, up to my neck, he
pulls me off.”
This was the real Hardin, the uncouth, overaged Lawrence student! The
new manner was just a veneer. Rickard had been expecting it to wear
thin.
“Why did we begin it, I ask you?” repeated Hardin, his face flushed and
eager. “To make laughing-stocks of ourselves down here? That’s a costly
game for the O. P. to play. What does Marshall know about conditions,
sitting in his office, and looking at maps, and reading letters and
reports from his spies? I’ll give you the answer: he wants the glory
himself. Why did he tell me that he thought my gate would go, and then
start another ten times as costly? He wants all the credit. He’d like
to see my gate a failure. Why does he push the concrete gate ahead, and
hold up mine every few days?”
“I think,” interjected Rickard, “that we all agree with Mr. Marshall,
Mr. Hardin, that a wooden head-gate on silt foundation could never be
more than a makeshift. I understood that the first day he visited the
river with you he had the idea to put the ultimate gate, the gate which
would control the water supply of the valley, up at the Crossing on
rock foundation. Mr. Marshall does not expect to finish that in time
to be of first use. He hopes the wooden gate will solve the immediate
problem. It was a case of any port in a storm. He has asked me to
report my opinion.”
“Why doesn’t he give me a chance to go ahead then?” growled the deposed
manager. “Instead of letting the intake widen until it will be an
impossibility to confine the river there at all?”
“So you do think that it will be an impossibility to complete the gate
as planned?”
Hardin had run too fast. “I didn’t mean that,” he stammered. “I mean it
will be difficult if we are delayed much longer.”
“You are in charge of the construction of that gate?”
Hardin said he was. If it had not been for the floods--
“Have you the force to re-begin work at once?” demanded Rickard.
“I had it,” evaded Hardin. “I had everything ready to go on--men,
material--when we stopped the last time.”
“And you haven’t it now?”
Hardin hated to the soul of him to have to acknowledge that he had not;
he shrank from uncovering a single obstacle that stood between his
gate and completion. He tried to hedge. MacLean, a big man whose iron
wheels moved slowly, was weighing the caliber of the two opposing men.
Babcock, wiry, alert, embarrassed Hardin with his challenging stare.
“Answer my question, please.”
“I should have to assemble them again,” admitted Hardin sulkily.
Rickard consulted his note-book. “I think we’ve covered everything.
Now, I want to propose the laying of a spur-track from Hamlin’s
Junction to the Heading.” His manner cleared the stage of
supernumeraries; this was the climax. Hardin looked ready to spring.
“And in connection with that, the development of a quarry in the
granite hills back of Hamlin’s,” continued Rickard, not looking at
Hardin.
Instantly Hardin was on his feet. His fist thundered on the table. “I
shall oppose that,” he flared. “It is absolutely unnecessary. We can’t
afford it. Do you know what that will cost, gentlemen?”
“One hundred thousand dollars!” Rickard interrupted him. “I want an
appropriation this morning for that amount. It is, in my opinion,
absolutely necessary if we are to save the valley. We can not afford
not to do it, Mr. Hardin!”
Hardin glared at the other men for support; he found MacLean’s face a
blank wall; Estrada looked uncomfortable. Babcock had pricked up his
ears at the sound of the desired appropriation; his head on one side,
he looked like an inquisitive terrier.
Hardin spread out his hands in helpless desperation. “You’ll ruin us,”
he said. “It’s your money, the O. P.’s, but you’re lending it, not
giving it to us. You are going to swamp the Desert Reclamation Company.
We can’t throw funds away like that.” One hundred thousand dollars!
Why, he could have stopped the river any time if he had had that sum;
once a paltry thousand would have saved them--“I didn’t ask the O. P.
to come in and ruin us, but to stop the river; not to throw money away
in hog-wild fashion.” He was stammering inarticulately. “There’s no
need of a spur-track if you rush my gate through.”
“_If_,” Rickard nodded. “Granted. If we can rush it through. But
suppose it fails? Marshall said the railroad would stand for no
contingencies. The interests at stake are too vital--”
“Interests!” cried Tom Hardin. “What do you know of the interest at
stake? You or your railroad? Coming in at the eleventh hour, what can
you know? Did you promise safety to thousands of families if they made
their homes in this valley? Are you responsible? Did you get up this
company, induce your friends to put their money in it, promise to see
them through? What do you know of the interests at stake? You want to
put one hundred thousand dollars into a frill. God, do you know what
that means to _my_ company? It means ruin--” Estrada pulled him down in
his seat.
Rickard explained to the directors the necessity in his opinion of the
spur-track and the quarry. Rock in great quantities would be needed;
cars must be rushed in to the break. He urged the importance of
clenching the issue. “If it’s not won this time, it’s a lost cause,”
he maintained. “If it cuts a deeper gorge, the Imperial Valley is a
chimera; so is Laguna Dam.”
The other men were drawn into the argument. Babcock leaned toward
Hardin’s conservatism. MacLean was judicial. Estrada upheld Rickard.
The spur-track, in his opinion, was essential to success. Hardin could
see the meeting managed between the newcomer and the Mexican, and
his anger impotently raged. His temper made him incoherent. He could
see Rickard, cool and impersonal, adding to his points, and MacLean
slowly won to the stronger side. Hardin, on his feet again, was
sputtering helplessly at Babcock, when Rickard called for a vote. The
appropriation was carried. Hardin’s face was swollen with rage.
Rickard then called for a report on the clam-shell dredge being rushed
at Yuma. Where was the machinery? Was it not to have been finished in
February?
Hardin said that the machinery was ready, waiting in San Francisco.
The hull of the dredge could not be finished for a couple of months at
least.
“Why not get the machinery here? What’s the use of taking chances?”
demanded Rickard.
Hardin felt the personal implication. He was on his feet in a second.
“There are no chances.” He looked at MacLean. “The machinery’s done.
It’s no use getting it here until we’re ready.”
“There are always chances,” interrupted his opponent coolly. “We are
going to take none. I want Mr. Hardin, gentlemen, appointed a committee
of one to see that the machinery is delivered at once, and the dredge
rushed. What’s the date?”
“April eleventh,” clicked the nickel-in-the-slot-machine-Babcock
again. Had any one asked the time, his answer as swift without
consultation would have been as exact. He lived with his watch under
his eye. Every few minutes he assured himself as to his gain on
eternity.
“Get it in before the heavy summer traffic begins,” instructed Rickard.
The working force was informally discussed. Hardin said they could
depend on hobo labor. His enthusiasm took fire; he saw the work begun
on his gate. “That class of men flock like bees to such work as this.
There’s no trouble getting them; they just drop in. Curious, isn’t it,
how such fellows keep track of the world’s work? You build a levee, you
begin a bridge, and there’s your hobo on the spot. It’s good labor,
too, though it’s fickle.” It was the other Hardin, the chiseled man of
affairs and experience. Rickard agreed that they would find such help,
but it would not do to rely on it. The big sewer system of New Orleans
was about completed; he had planned to write there, stating the need.
And there was a man in Zacatecas, named Porter--
“Frank Porter?” sneered Hardin, “that--murderer?”
“His brother,” Rickard answered pleasantly. “Jim furnishes the men for
the big mines in Sonora and Sinaloa. He’ll send us all the labor we
want, the best for our purpose. When it gets red-hot, there’s no one
like a peon or an Indian.”
“You’ll be infringing on the international contract law,” suggested
MacLean.
“No. The camp is on the Mexican side,” laughed Casey. “I’d thought of
that. We’ll have them shipped to the nearest Mexican point, and then
brought to the border. Mr. Estrada will help us.”
The meeting had already adjourned. They were standing around the
flat-top desk. Estrada invited them all to lunch with him, in the car
on the siding. MacLean said that he had to get back to Los Angeles. Mr.
Babcock was going to take him out to Grant’s Heading in the machine. He
had never been there. They had breakfasted late. He looked very much
the colonel to Rickard, his full broad chest and stiff carriage made
more military by his trim uniform of khaki-colored cloth.
“May I speak to you about your boy, Mr. MacLean?”
Hardin caught a slight that was not intended. He pushed past the group
at the door without civility or ceremony.
The steady grave eyes of the big frame looked at Rickard inquiringly.
“He wants to stay out another year. I hope you will let him. It’s not
disinterested. I shall have to take a stenographer to the Heading this
summer. There is a girl here; I couldn’t take her, and then, too, I’m
old-fashioned; I don’t like women in offices. My position promises to
be a peculiar one. I’d like to have your son to rely on for emergencies
a stenographer could not cover.”
MacLean’s grave features relaxed as he looked down on the engineer, who
was no small man himself, and suggested that his son was not very well
up in stenography.
“That’s the least of it.”
“I hope that he will make a good stenographer! Good morning, gentlemen.”
At table, neither Estrada nor his guest uncovered their active thought
which revolved around Hardin and his hurt. Instead, Rickard had
questions to ask his host on river history. As they talked, it came to
him that something was amiss--Estrada was accurate; he had all his
facts. Was it enthusiasm, sympathy, he lacked? Presently he challenged
him with it.
Estrada’s eyes dreamed out of the window, followed the gorge of the New
River, as though out there, somewhere, the answer hovered.
“Do you mean, do you _doubt_ it?” exclaimed Rickard, watching the
melancholy in the beautiful eyes.
Estrada shook his head, but without decision. “Nothing you’d not laugh
at. I can laugh at it myself, sometimes.”
Rickard waited, not sure that anything more was coming. The Mexican’s
dark eyes were troubled; a puzzle brooded in them. “It’s a purely
negative sense that I’ve had, since I was a child. Something
falls between me and a plan. If I said it was a veil, it would
be--something!” His voice fell to a ghost of tunefulness. “And
it’s--nothing. A blank--I know then it’s not going to happen. It is
terribly final! It’s happened, often. Now, I wait for that--veil. When
it falls, I know what it means.”
“And you have had that--sense about this river business?”
Estrada turned his pensive gaze on the American. “Yes, often. I
thought, after father’s death, that that was what it meant. But it came
again. It kept coming. I had it while you were all talking, just now.
I don’t speak of this. It sounds chicken-hearted. And I’m in this with
all my soul--my father--I couldn’t do it any other way, but--”
“You think we are going to fail?”
“I can’t see it finished,” was Estrada’s mournful answer. He turned
again to stare out of the window.
An odd sense of unreality rested for an instant on Rickard. Swiftly
he rejected it. Outside, the sunshine, the work to be done, the river
running wild--
“You’ve been too much in the valley, Mr. Estrada!” Estrada looked at
him, and then his glance went back to the car window. His silence said
plainly: “Oh, I knew you would not believe me!”
“I mean, this country gets on men’s nerves. It’s so--omnipotent! The
victories are all to the river’s side, as yet. We’re pygmies, fighting
Titans. We fear what we have never conquered.”
“Oh, that!” He could see that Estrada would not argue with him. “Oh, we
all get that. The personal feeling, as if it were really a dragon, and
we trying to shackle it with our wisps of straw!”
“A few lace handkerchiefs and a chiffon veil!” sang Rickard’s memory.
“We get the sense of being resented, of angry power. We feel like
interlopers in this desert. She tells us all, in her own terrible,
silent way, ‘You don’t belong here!’”
“That has been quoted to me, silently, too!” laughed Rickard. And they
were on solid ground again.
“Who are the river-men in the valley?” demanded the newcomer. “I want
to meet them, to talk to them.”
“Cor’nel, he’s an Indian. He’s worth talking to. He knows its history,
its legends. Perhaps some of it is history.”
“Where’s he to be found?”
“You’ll run across him! Whenever anything’s up, he is on hand. He
senses it. And then there’s Matt Hamlin.”
“I’ll see him, of course. Has he been up the river?”
“No, but I’ll tell you two who have. Maldonado, a half-breed, who
lives some twenty miles down the river from Hamlin’s. He knows the
Gila as though he were pure Indian. The Gila’s tricky! Maldonado’s
grandfather was a trapper, his great-grandfather, they say, a priest.
The women were all Indian. He’s smart. Smart and bad.”
Estrada’s Japanese servant came back into the car to offer tea, freshly
iced.
“That’s what I want, smart river-men, not tea!” laughed Rickard. “I
want river history.”
“There’s another man you ought to meet.” Before he spoke the name,
Rickard had a flash of telepathy; he knew Estrada would say, “Brandon.”
“He was with the second Powell expedition. He’s written the book on the
river. He knows it, if any man does.”
“That’s so. I’d forgotten about him. I think I’ll run up and have a
talk with him.”
“This instant?” smiled the Mexican, for his guest had risen. “There’s
no train out until to-night.”
“I’ll ask Mr. MacLean to take a passenger. That will save me several
hours; and an uncomfortable trip.”
“You wanted these maps.” Estrada was gathering them together.
Queer, how that name had flashed from Estrada’s mind to his. He hadn’t
thought about Brandon--there was something in it, in the vitality, the
force of thought. If that were true, then why not the other, that odd
sense that Estrada spoke of? Seeing clear!
“Your maps, Mr. Rickard!”
“Thank you. And you can just strangle that foreboding of yours, Mr.
Estrada. For I tell you, we’re going to govern that river!”
Estrada’s pensive smile followed the dancing step of the engineer until
it carried him out of sight. Perhaps? Because he was the son of his
father, he must work as hard as if conviction went with him, as if
success waited at the other end of the long road. But it was not going
to be. He would never see that river shackled--