THE FIGHTING CHANCE
“CASEY’S back; spying!” announced Wooster at mess one evening. By that
time, the feeling against “Marshall’s man” was actively hostile. There
had been a smudge of slumbering fires before Rickard had left the
towns. Fanned by much talk during his absence, it had burst into active
blaze. They were ready to show their resentment against the man who
had supplanted Hardin, their Napoleon, if it cost them their places.
By this time the cause of the desert was as compelling to these hardy
soldiers as were the lily banners of France to the followers of the
Little Corporal.
Rickard was not expected. He had been gone less than a week. The
effect of his return was that of a person who returns suddenly into a
room, hushing an active babel of tongues. He knew what he would find,
ample reasons why! He was not given the satisfaction of locating any
particular act of disobedience. The men presented a blank wall of
politeness, reasonable and ineffectual. Silent explained, briefly,
that he had not been able to collect enough men. Most of the force was
busy in the Number Six District, trying to push the shattered Wistaria
through by a new route before that year’s crops were entirely ruined. A
gang was at Grant’s Heading; the floor needed bracing. Another squad,
Irish’s, was in the Volcano Lake Region, where they were excavating
for the new head-gate.
“No hurry for that.” Rickard was glad to pick a flaw in such a perfect
pattern. “You might have withdrawn those men, and put them to work on
the levee.”
“I was given no authority to do that.”
The chief pretended to accept the reason; else it were a case of
changing horses in mid-stream. What he had seen at the Heading, his
peep at the exposed valley, his gleaning of the river’s history had
convinced him that in haste and concentration lay the valley’s only
chance. He must refuse to see the insubordination of the engineers,
the seasoned desert-soldiers. He needed them, must win their
confidence if he could. If not, they must save the valley, anyway! The
imperturbable front of Silent, his bland big stare, exasperated him;
easier to control the snapping terrier of a Wooster. He had told Silent
distinctly to gather his men and rush the levee. A good soldier had
made a better guess than his, and had stopped the casual work at Black
Butte, or had found Indians! Thoughtfully, Rickard followed that last
suggestion across the ditch into Mexicali.
He gathered all the recruits he needed that morning. The Indians,
lazy Cocopahs, crept out of their huts to earn a few of the silver
dollars held out to them by the new white boss. A few Mexican laborers
were bribed to toss up earth to the west of the town. Estrada, at his
request, put a squad of his road force at the service of the manager.
He could not spare many men.
The railroad had already started the line projected by Hardin to
Marshall the year before, a spur across the desert, dipping into Mexico
between the lean restless sand-hills, from Calexico to Yuma. The
Mexican government had agreed to pay five thousand dollars a mile were
the road completed at a certain period. Estrada was keeping his men on
the jump to fill the contract, to make his nation pay the price. The
completion of the road meant help to the valley; supplies, men, could
be rushed through to the break.
In spite of his haunting sense of ultimate failure, the growing
belief in the omnipotence of the Great Yellow Dragon as the Cocopahs
visualized it, Estrada’s work was as intense as though he were
hastening a sure victory. The dauntless spirit of the elder Estrada
pushed the track over the hot sands where he must dance at times to
keep his feet from burning. Many of the rails they laid at night.
“Hog-wild!” exclaimed Hardin when he saw the levee for the first time.
“Gone hog-wild.” To him, the growing ridge of fine earth, like a soft
heap of pulverized chocolate, was an absurd proof of misdirected
energy. He walked down with Silent after dark to the gorge the river
had cut on its last wild debauch, and stood on the newly upturned mound
of earth. There was no water running now in the flood channel; it was a
deep dry scar.
“It would be a good idea if it were necessary. It can do no harm.”
“Do no harm, and the gate hung up! He makes me sick. We’ve had all the
floods coming to us this twenty years. He’s locking the barn after the
horse is gone.”
The calm beauty of that desert night was wasted on the man whose life,
he told himself, had been dishonored. He did not smell the pungent
breath, the damp moist sweetness of the newly turned earth; did not
see the star-pricked canopy spreading out toward illimitable horizons.
The moon trailed its cold pale light across the sky, but Hardin could
not see. His view was a world of his making, a country peopled by his
energy, the people who had turned him down. The eyes that were looking
at the levee were no longer seeing another man’s folly; they were
visualizing his head-gate, the gate that meant safety to the valley,
the gate he was not allowed to complete. He was living over again, step
by step, the chain of events that led to this exasperating deadlock;
himself, incapacitated, helpless, seeing the thing which should be
done, powerless to do it. The men who might win, petty enough to let
the wish to put him in the wrong override the big opportunity to save
the valley! He wondered again why he had not the sense to get out.
“And kick the whole bucket over,” he grumbled. “I would, too, if I had
the sense I was born with. Get out, and begin over again somewhere. Not
stay for more kicks. They’d find they’d be wanting me back again. I
will get out. I’ll not stay a month longer.”
“Rickard’s gone hog-wild,” he told his family the next morning.
“Building a levee between the towns! The man’s off his head.”
“There really isn’t any danger?” Gerty’s anxiety made the deep blue
eyes look black.
Innes looked up for Tom’s answer. His face was ugly with passion.
“Danger! It’s a bluff, a big show of activity here, because he’s
buffaloed; he doesn’t know how to tackle the job out there.”
It had begun to look that way to more than one. It was talked over at
Coulter’s store; in the outer office of the D. R. Company where the
engineers foregathered; among the chair-tilters who idled in front of
the Desert Hotel. “The man does not know how to tackle his job!” A
levee, and the gate held up! What protection to the towns would be that
toy levee if the river should return on one of its spectacular sprees?
A levee, and the intake itself not guarded? He was whispered of as an
incompetent; one of Marshall’s clerks. He was given a short time to
blow himself out. A bookman, a theorist.
“As well put sentinels a few miles from prison, and leave the jail
doors open!” This was Wooster’s gibe. All saw the Colorado as a
marauder at large. “And a little heap of sand stacked up to scare it
off! It’s a scream!”
Mrs. Hardin found it difficult to meet with diplomacy the confidences
which inevitably came her way. As Hardin’s wife, she was expected to
enjoy the universal censure the new man was acquiring. Gerty’s light
touches, too slight for championship, passed as a sweet charity. Her
own position those days was trying. She did not yet know her diplomatic
lesson.
Apparently unaware of the talk, Rickard spent the greater part of his
time superintending the levee. He could trust no one else to do it, no
one unless it were Estrada, who was rushing his steel rails through to
the front, and was needed there.
Things were moving under his constant goading. The extra pay was
showing results. He should be at the Heading now, he kept telling
himself, but he was convinced that the instant he turned his back,
the work on the levee would stop; and all the reasons excellent! Some
emergency would be cooked up to warrant the withdrawal of the hands.
Chafe as he might at the situation, it was to be guerrilla warfare.
Not a fight in the open, he knew how to meet that, but this baffling
resistance, the polite silence of the office when he entered,--“Well,
they’ll be doing my way pretty soon, or my name isn’t Rickard. That’s
flat.”
He was fretting to be at work, to start the wheels of the O. P., its
vast machinery toward his problem. He knew that that organization, like
well-drilled militia, was ready for his call. The call lagged, not
that he did not need men, but there was no place ready for them. The
camp, that was another rub. There was no camp! It was not equipped for
a sudden inflation of men. The inefficiency of the projectors of this
desert scheme had never seemed so criminal as when he had surveyed the
equipment at the intake. “Get ready first; your tools, your stoves,
your beds.” That was the training of the good executive, of men
like Marshall and MacLean. Nothing to be left to chance; to foresee
emergencies, not to be taken by them unaware. The reason of Hardin’s
downfall was his slipshod habits. How could he be a good officer who
had never drilled as a soldier? There was the gap at the intake,
Hardin’s grotesque folly, widened from one hundred feet to ten times
the original cut; widening every day, with neither equipment nor camp
adequate to push through a work of half the original magnitude. Cutting
away, moreover, was the island, Disaster Island; it had received apt
christening by the engineers, its baptismal water the Colorado. The
last floods had played with it as though it were a bar of sugar. There
was no rock at hand; no rock on the way, no rock ordered. Could any one
piece together such recklessness?
Rickard knew where he would get his rock. Already he had requisitioned
the entire output of the Tacna and Patagonia quarries. He had ordered
steam shovels to be installed at the quarry back of old Hamlin’s.
That rock pit would be his first crutch, and the gravel bed,--that
was a find! As he paced the levee west of the towns, he was planning
his campaign. Porter was scouring Zacatecas for men; he himself had
offered, as bait, free transportation; the O. P. he knew would back
him. He was going to throw out a spur-track from the Heading, touching
at the quarry and gravel pit, on to the main road at Yuma. Double track
most of the way; sidings every three miles. Rock must be rushed; the
trains must be pushed through. He itched to begin. It never occurred to
him that, like Hardin, he might fail.
“Though it’s no pink tea,” he told himself, “it’s no picnic.” At
Tucson, he knew that the situation was a grave one, but his talk
with Brandon, who knew his river signs as does a good Indian, made
the year a significant, eventful one. Matt Hamlin, too, whose shrewd
eyes had grown river-wise, he, too, had had tales to tell of the
tricky river. Maldonado, the half-breed, had confirmed their portents
while they sat together under his oleander, famous throughout that
section of the country. And powerfully had Cor’nel, the Indian who
had piloted Estrada’s party across the desert, whom Rickard had met
at the Crossing, deeply had he impressed him. The river grew into a
malevolent, mocking personality; he could see it a dragon of yellow
waters, dragging its slow sluggish length across the baked desert
sands; deceiving men by its inertness; luring the explorer by a mild
mood, to rise suddenly with its wild fellow, the Gila, sending boat and
boatmen to their swift doom.
Rickard was thinking of the half-breed, Maldonado, as he inspected
the new stretch of levee between the towns. He had heard from others
besides Estrada of the river knowledge of this descendant of trapper
and squaw, and had thought it worth while to ride the twenty miles from
down the river to talk with him. The man’s suavity, his narrow slits
of eyes, the lips thin and facile, deep lines of cruelty falling from
them, had repelled his visitor. The mystery of the place followed him.
Why the ’dobe wall which completely surrounded the small low dwellings?
Why the cautious admittance, the atmosphere of suspicion? Rickard had
seen the wife, a frightened shadow of a woman; had seen her flinch when
the brute called her. He had questioned Cor’nel about the half-breed.
He was remembering the wrinkles of contempt on the old Indian’s face as
he delivered himself of an oracular grunt.
“White man? No. Indian? No! Coyote!”
Though he suspected Maldonado would lie on principle, though it might
be that two-thirds of his glib tissue were false, yet a thread of truth
coincident with the others, Brandon and Hamlin and Cor’nel, might be
pulled out of his romantic fabric.
“When the waters of the Gila run red, look for trouble!” He doubted
that they ever ran red. He would ask Cor’nel. He had also spoken of a
cycle, known to Indians, of a hundredth year, when the Dragon grows
restless; this he had declared was a hundredth year.
On the road from Maldonado’s, Rickard had met several Indians swaying
from their saddles; a half-breed lurching unsteadily toward Yuma. He
had made note of that. Who was selling liquor to those Indians, those
half-breeds? Maldonado could have told him, Maldonado who wore the
dirty unrecognizable uniform of a rurale. Rickard was going to use
Indian labor; must depend, he knew, for steady work, the brush clearing
and the mattress weaving, on the natives. If any one was selling
mescal and tequila within a day’s ride of the Heading, it was his place
to find out.
Following his talk with Maldonado, and the accidental happy chance
meeting with Coronel at the Crossing, Rickard had written his first
report to Tod Marshall. Before he had come to the Heading, he had
expected to advise against the completion of the wooden head-gate
at the Crossing. Hamlin had given him a new view-point. There was a
fighting chance. And he wanted to be fair. Next to being successful, he
wanted to be fair.
He smiled as he remembered MacLean’s cramped fingers after the
dictation was done. “Holy Minnie,” he had exclaimed, rubbing his
joints. “If you call that going slow!”
“It’s time to be hearing from Marshall,” Rickard was thinking, as he
walked back to the hotel. “I wonder what he will say.” He felt it
had been fair to put it up to Marshall; personally, he would like to
begin with a clean slate; begin right. Clumsy work had been done, it
was true, yet there were urgent reasons now for haste; and the gate
was nearly half done! He had gone carefully over the situation. The
heavy snowfall, unprecedented for years, a hundred, according to the
Indians,--on the Wind River Mountains--the lakes swollen with ice,
the Gila restless, the summer floods yet to be met; perhaps, he now
thought, he had been overfair in emphasizing the arguments for the
head-gate. For the hundred feet were now a thousand feet--yet he had
spoken of that to Marshall: “Calculate for yourself the difference in
expense since the flood widened the break. It is a vastly different
problem now. Disaster Island, which they figured on for anchor, is a
mere pit of corroding sugar in the channel. An infant Colorado could
wash it away. However, a lot of work has already been done, and a lot
of money spent. There is a fighting chance. Perhaps the bad year is all
Indian talk.”
A guess, at best, whatever they did! It was pure gamble what the tricky
Colorado would do. Anyway, he had given the whole situation to Marshall.
In his box at the hotel was a telegram which had been sent over from
the office; from Tod Marshall. “Take the fighting chance. But remember
to speak more respectfully of Indians!”
“Marshall all over,” laughed his subordinate. “Now, it’s a case of
hustle! But dollars to doughnuts, as Junior says, we don’t do it!”