EVENING AT MILE 130
"Daddy!"
Big Jim Torrance, framed in the doorway of the shack, was deaf to
everything but the scene before him.
"Daddy!" There was a note of impatience in the girl's voice. "I know
what you're doing--" She appeared in the doorway between kitchen and
living room, enamel pan in one hand and a dish towel in the other. "Of
course! That horrid trestle--always that trestle! And you might have
been helping with the pans. You know how they stain my hands."
But the noise of the distant camp, lounging out now from the night
meal, crowded what small interstices of his attention remained from the
beloved trestle.
Out before him, painted in the vivid mesmeric colours of evening, lay a
vista dear to him--a new railway built in silent places. Across the
yellow grade the bush of Northern Canada stretched on and on, not thick
just here, but prophetic of the untracked forests beyond. On his left
a great cleft cut the earth, an eleven hundred yard valley, in the
middle of which ran a river, sweeping into sight up there round the
bend from the deep green of the bush--running placidly enough until it
struck the foaming rapids above the trestle--then smoothing into quiet
current and swinging back through the chasm to disappear into the
unknown behind the shack.
Five hundred yards up the wide bottom of the valley the construction
camp sprawled its ugly mass. From where he stood in the doorway he
looked down on it over the grade--its straggling unformed planning; the
flimsy shacks, half unhewn logs, half canvas, without respect for
streets or angles or lines; its half-hearted struggle to lift itself up
the slope to the sheltered forest above.
A disreputable, careless, disgusting picture of hardened man catering
only to his simplest needs. In large part the survival of previous
grade and bridge camps which had merely picked up their canvas when
they moved along, it had been patched up with more disreputable canvas,
now mouldy and torn, with bits of roof gone here, and windows and doors
missing there. The very dregs even of construction camps. Big Jim
Torrance himself had used it first on grade and had sold the portable
parts to a contractor with work further west. Then O'Connor, the first
contractor to tackle the trestle, had shoved his men into what was left
with orders to do their damnedest. And now Torrance again, having
taken over the task O'Connor had funked in a moment of panic.
Half a thousand bohunks[1] were existing there now, five hundred of the
wildest foreigners even Torrance had handled. But they were _his_
gang. And Mile 130 was _his_ camp. That thought had impelled him once
to punch the head of a leering engineer who rashly ventured to call it
"Torrance's pig-sty" in Torrance's hearing. The camp might go to
perdition so far as he was concerned, but he wasn't going to have any
rank outsider shoving it along.
With a determined little set to her lips, her only inheritance from her
father, Tressa Torrance passed through the living room and seized him
by the ear; and he returned to earth with a howl of mock pain.
"You little tyrant!" he protested, wrapping one arm about her and
hoisting her to his shoulder. "Your mother wasn't a patch to you."
She wriggled herself free and, still holding to the ear, led him into
the shack.
"At least you can empty the water," she ordered.
"Oh, I can do more than that. How about the pans?"
"They're done."
He was really contrite. "I guess I did forget, little girl."
"It's a habit you have."
He rubbed his moustached lips along her bare arm and swung her again to
his shoulder.
"Low bridge!"
She bent from her lofty perch until her cheek lay along his hair, and
they passed into the kitchen, where he set her down with elaborate care.
"I guess that trestle isn't through with me yet," he observed, a frown
marking his forehead. "It's dropped six inches in the last week." He
picked up a pan of dirty water and started for the door. "You won't be
beaten," she told him confidently. "It's sinking less every day.
You've put in half the country now--there must be bottom somewhere." He
disappeared without a word and tossed the water over the edge of the
chasm. "Anyway," she protested, as he returned, "looking at it isn't
going to stiffen its backbone. If it is, you can do the pans and I'll
do the looking. See those hands!" She held them outspread before his
face. "Aren't you ashamed?"
He tried to look as she desired.
"They're the dandiest little hands in the world to me. They're your
mother's over again. You don't need to care who sees them out here."
He saw the slight flush come to her cheeks, and his voice sobered.
"Adrian Conrad looks a pretty big fish where there's nobody but
bohunks."
"Adrian's a 'big fish' anywhere," she flamed, "and you know it.
Besides, there's the Police. Counting you that makes four real nice
people. We've often been where there are fewer. The daughter of James
Torrance, the big railway contractor--"
"Big Jim Torrance, you mean," he interrupted, throwing back his huge
head to laugh. "The crudest boss that ever hammered a lazy bohunk to
his pick. No, no, little girl, not all your airs, not all my big jobs,
can make me more than a half-taught rough-neck--a success, I'll admit.
But the biggest success he ever had was in having a daughter--"
He dived for her, but she held him off by planting the bottom of the
pan on his face.
"Now," she ordered, "you finish your work."
By the time he had obeyed orders--emptied the last pan of water,
taken a look at the two horses in the stable behind the shack,
tossed his mud-caked boots through the back door to await his
pleasure--inter-larding between each chore another glance at the
trestle--Tressa was in her own room.
Torrance returned to the front door. A crash of musical instruments
broke from the ugly clutter of buildings on the river bottom.
"Do cut it short to-night, Tressa. Morani's got the orchestra going
already. Where that Italian devil stows music in that vile body of
his, and where he manages to find more of it in those other brutes,
beats me."
He could hear her moving about her room, sliding drawers, lifting and
dropping the implements of her evening toilet.
"Not another woman in a hundred miles," he grumbled, "at least not one
that matters. And yet I got to go through this waiting every night!"
She laughed, her mouth full of the coil of her hair.
His eye moved upward from the camp and settled on one lone shack that
crowned a promontory overlooking the ugly scene below.
"Koppy's at home," he called.
"Some day you'll find out something about your underforeman," she
teased.
"I wish I could," he returned so viciously that she laughed aloud.
"You've been wishing it a long time, but to date he seems innocent
enough. You don't need to care so long as he turns up to work every
morning."
"Innocent?" He snorted. "Them damn Poles can't be innocent. Ever
since them horses began to go-- If we could only do without the damn
heathen!"
"But you damn well can't."
"Tressa!" He stumbled back to her door with horrified eyes.
"My daddy's good enough to copy," she laughed.
"Your daddy, girl, is--is shocked. If I hear you--" He tossed his
hands up helplessly. "You're making your daddy so mealy-mouthed, the
first bohunk with a grouch will pull his nose. I've got to swear at
'em. If you don't let me tear loose a bit when I'm with you, the air's
going to be so blue next time I meet a bohunk that he'll think he's
gone to his last reward."
She came to the doorway of her room, coiling a loop of hair.
"Go and listen to the music, daddy. You need sweetening to-night."
The rough big fellow looked deep into her eyes. "I'd go plumb crazy in
this life without you, little girl."
"Sure you would," she agreed contentedly. "Now run along and do
Morani's orchestra justice. He deserves it."
He patted her cheek and returned to his favourite stand in the front
door.
The evening mysteries were deepening. Already the trunks of the trees
on the far bank of the river were merging into a dull mass. The play
of sunlight and shadow in the nearer forest was an etching of white and
black. The mellow sudden Western night was dropping glamorous mantle
over the familiar scene, softening the crudeness of the camp and
exalting the dying round of the forest's fight for solitude. The sand
of the grade gleamed with evening tint of ochre. The network of the
trestle was a maze of incised lines against the shaded bank opposite.
A solitary bird, astir beyond its bedtime, hovered against the sky,
cheeping to unseen brood below. Some swift-vanishing creature--wolf or
coyote--ran along the edge of the distant bank for a fearful, curious
glimpse of the persistent invasion of its venerable privacy. The sun,
like a mocking challenge, was painting with flaming hand its tremendous
but fleeting colour-picture on the northwest sky, where clouds unseen
by day hung ever ready for the evening-hour brush of the great artist.
The dirty canvas of the camp was laundered by the mysteries of
twilight. Living groups lay peacefully about the river bottom,
gambling, Torrance knew. For the moment the orchestra was resting.
But snatches of hideous sound came wafting on the evening air as music;
concertina, fiddle, mouth-organ, with here and there a cornet, a
mandolin, a guitar, many breathing individual melody, merged into one
vast harmony. Rasping voices lifted themselves in song. No laughter,
no shouting--only the sounds of men whose memories are more sensitive
than their feelings, who live in the past or the future, never in the
present. Evening was fluttering gently down, mellowing line and tone.
Even to Big Jim Torrance at such an hour came the appeal of dimly
reverent things. Here on the fringe of prairie and forest, in the
vast spaces of Northern Canada where wolf met coyote, Torrance was
waging a big fight. Last year he had brought the grade, a simple
task, east of the mountains. Somewhere far down the list of
sub-sub-contractors--fleas on larger fleas almost ad infinitum--he had
built that gleaming line of yellow sand that held the sleepers and the
rails--almost with his own hands. From far over the horizon to the
east he had crept along westward, urging on his big gang with
relentless but just hand. And out there before his door they had
driven the last spike at the very edge of the valley that cut the
landscape.
There was the end of his contract. Eastward the line awaited only the
final ballasting. Westward--that was different.
The great river chasm that had ended his task was baffling O'Connor,
the bridge contractor. For the irregular, winding gouge in the earth,
reminder of the day when some tremendous torrent teemed there from the
mountains hundreds of miles to the west, was more than a mere cutting
to fill. Eleven hundred yards, one foot, four inches from bank to bank
(Torrance knew every measurement to the last inch), by one hundred and
forty-one feet, eight inches deep, was task enough. Where the railway
was to span the Tepee River, meandering in the midst of the valley, the
water ran only seventy yards wide; nowhere in sight was it more than
one hundred and fifty. And there was solid bottom to it.
But down there, one hundred and fifty feet below Torrance's eyes, was
two hundred yards of quicksands. There lay the real job.
O'Connor had tackled it blithely enough, while Torrance was hustling
grade from the east. But when Big Jim Torrance, his task completed,
had rolled down his sleeves and commenced to pack, O'Connor was more
than worried. Tressa had skipped about the packing with happy songs,
for they were going East--to civilisation.
Then Torrance had gone to take a last look at O'Connor's progress, and
O'Connor had turned haggard eyes on his friend and bent his head over
his arms and wept. The quicksands were beating him.
Torrance fled back to the end-of-steel village at Mile 127, that
ghastly face before him, the picture of a strong man weeping. And for
three days he drank himself to forgetfulness.
On the morning of the fourth day he rolled up his sleeves again, waved
his hand after the fleeing O'Connor, and signed a fresh contract for
himself. Nature, the enemy he had been threshing into submission all
his life, was not going to block the beautiful grade he had built.
With the effects of the acidulated poison of Mile 127 still in his
limbs but clear of his brain he shook his fist at the quicksands.
And now, eleven months later, he was still shaking his fist--and his
curses were deeper and more bitter. For the quicksands were fighting
to the last ditch, swallowing whole forests of trees and hills of rock,
and opening its maw for more. Friends urged Torrance to ask leave to
move the grade north or south to sounder bottom. But Torrance was not
built that way. Besides, he had great reverence for a survey. Even a
bridge, where a filled-in trestle was planned--a bridge with a span two
hundred yards long--impossible!
Torrance stood in the doorway and cast his eye along the line of steel
above the trestle. Only a week ago it had been shored up again, and
fewer supply trains than usual had passed. Yet it was down six inches.
The orchestra Chico Morani, a mere Dago bohunk himself, had organised
among the men, burst afresh. And every other sound ceased. Even the
gambling groups out before the camp paused to listen.
"Morani's started on the second number, Tressa. Thank Heaven he has
one redeeming feature, if he is a Wop."
"This isn't your loving night, daddy. It must be my cooking--"
"There's Koppy just come out of his shack. A couple with him, Werner
and Heppel, I bet."
"Dear me!" she teased out to him. "And I've been so careful with the
meals." A few moments of mirror concentration. "But I know what it
really is--that trestle. It's nerves. . . . Till that hole's filled
you're just an ordinary sick man. . . . And you know you can't stand
the twilight. Come in and light up. . . . Adrian'll be here in a few
minutes and read you back to peace. . . . And don't forget, daddy,
we're almost out of books. You'll have to send for more by the next
supply train. Constable Williams is to lend me his catalogues to make
out a new list."
She stopped, conscious of a tense stillness from the room beyond. For
a fleeting moment she listened, then hurried out, fastening the last
pin in her belt.
Her father, feet braced, was staring tensely over the grade past the
camp. And in his hand, half raised, was the rifle that always hung in
a rack beside the door.
[1] The term applied to foreign laborers, especially on railway
construction.