At half-past three, Conniston, awakened with a start by the jangle and
clamor of Tommy Garton's little alarm-clock, got up and dressed. At
the lunch-counter the man who had been fidgety yesterday and was
merely sleepy this morning set coffee and flapjacks and bacon before
him. Before four he had saddled his horse, rolled into a neat bundle a
blanket and a couple of quilts from the cot upon which he had slept
last night, tied them behind his saddle, and was ready for the coming
of Bat Truxton. Then Truxton on horseback joined him. Conniston
mounted, acknowledged Truxton's short "Good mornin'," and rode with
him away from the sleeping village and out toward the south.
"Tommy's told you somethin' about what we got ahead of us?" Truxton
asked, when they had ridden half a mile in silence.
"Yes. We went over the whole thing together as well as we could in a
day's time."
"That's good. If any man's got a head on him for this sort of thing,
that man's Tommy Garton. He'd make it as plain as a man could on
paper, without goin' over the ground. To-day we're tyin' into those
seven sand-hills I mentioned last night. I've got two hundred men
workin' there. So they won't get in each other's way I've divided 'em
up in four gangs, fifty men to the gang. There's all kinds of men in
that two hundred, Conniston, and about the biggest part of your day's
work will be to sort of size your men up. I've divided 'em, not
accordin' to efficiency, but partly accordin' to nationality an'
mostly accordin' to cussedness. I'm givin' you the tame ones to begin
on. I'll take care of the ornery jaspers until you get your hand in.
But I can't spare more'n a day or two. Then it'll be up to you. You'll
have to swing the whole bunch, if you can. An' if you can't it'll be
up to you to quit! Oh, it ain't so all-fired hard, not if you've got
the savvy. I've got a foreman over each section that knows what he's
doin' an' will do pretty much everything if you can furnish the head
work."
"Where is the trouble with them? What do you mean by the ornery ones?
They're all here because they want to work, aren't they? If they get
dissatisfied they quit, don't they?"
Truxton looked at him curiously. "You got a lot of things to learn,
Conniston. Just you take a tip from me: You keep your eyes an' ears
real wide open for the next few days an' your mouth shut as long as
you can. Tommy explained to you about the opposition? About what
Oliver Swinnerton is doin' an' tryin' to do?"
"Yes."
"Then you remember that; don't overlook it for a minute, wakin' or
sleepin'. It'll explain a whole lot."
When they rode into the camp at Little Rome the two hundred men
employed there were just beginning to stir. Conniston's eyes took in
with no little interest the details of the camp. There was one long,
low tent, the canvas sides rolled up so that he could see a big
cooking-stove with two or three men working over it. This, plainly
enough, was the kitchen. From each side of the door a long line of
twelve-inch boards laid across saw-horses ran out across the level
sand. Upon the parallel boards were tin plates stacked high in piles,
tin cups, knives and forks, and scores of loaves of bread. There were
in addition perhaps twenty tin buckets half filled with sugar.
Scattered here and there upon the sand, some not twenty feet from the
tent, some a hundred yards, some few with a little straw under them,
the most of them with their blankets thrown upon the sand or upon
heaps of cut sage-brush, were Truxton's "muckers." They lay there like
a bivouacking army, their bodies disposed loosely, some upon their
backs, still sleeping heavily; many just sitting up, awakened by the
clatter of the cook's big iron spoon against a tin pan.
Behind the tent, picketed in rows by short ropes, were the horses and
mules. And lined up to the right of the tent were twenty big,
long-bodied Studebaker wagons, each with four barrels of water. Two
more wagons at the other side of the tent were piled high with boxes
and bags of provisions.
Truxton and Conniston unsaddled swiftly, and after staking out their
horses, Conniston throwing his roll of bedding down behind the tent,
they walked around to the front. Already most of the men were up,
rolling blankets or hurrying to the rude tables. Several of them had
gone to the aid of the cooks, and now were hurrying up and down
between the parallel boards, setting out immense black pots of coffee,
great lumps of butter, big pans of mush, beans, stewed "jerky," and
potatoes boiled in their jackets. The men who had rolled out of their
beds fully dressed, save for shoes, formed in a long line near the
tent door and moved swiftly along the tables, taking up knives,
forks, plates, and cups as they went, helping themselves generously to
each different dish as they came to it. Many stopped at the farther
ends of the boards, standing and eating from them. Many more took
their plates and cups of coffee away from the tables and squatted down
to eat, placing their dishes upon the sand. There was remarkably
little confusion, no time lost, as the two hundred men helped
themselves to their breakfast. They did not appear to have seen
Truxton; they glanced swiftly at Conniston and seemed to forget his
presence in their hunger.
Never had Conniston seen a crowd of men like these. There were
Americans there, and from the broken bits of conversation which
floated to him he knew that they hailed from east, west, north, and
south. There were Hungarians, Slavonians, Swedes--heavy, stolid,
slow-moving men whose knowledge of the English language rose and set
in "damn" and "hell." There were Chinamen and Japs--a dozen of the
slant-eyed, yellow-faced Orientals--the Chinamen all big, gaunt men
with their queues coiled about their heads. There were Italians, the
lower class known to the West as "Dagoes." And almost to the last man
of them they were the hardest-faced men he had ever seen.
There was a big, loose-limbed giant of an Englishman who walked like a
sailor, who carried a great white scar across his cheek and upper lip,
and who wore a long unscabbarded knife swinging from his belt. There
was a wiry little Frenchman who showed a deep scar at the base of his
throat, from which his shirt was rolled back, and who snarled like a
cat when another man accidentally trod upon his foot. Conniston saw a
dozen faces scarred as though by knife-cuts; twisted, evil faces;
dark, scowling faces; faces lined by unbridled passions; brutal,
heavy-jawed faces.
But if their faces showed the handiwork of the devil, from their chins
down they were men cast in the mold of the image of God. From the
biggest Dane standing close to six feet six inches to the smallest Jap
less than five feet tall, they were men of iron and steel. Quick-eyed,
quick-footed, hard, they were the sort of men to drive the fight
against the desert.
Breakfast finished, the men dropped their cups and plates into one of
two big tubs as they passed by the tent, their knives and forks into
another, and went quietly and promptly to work. Each man had his duty
and went about it without waiting to be told. They filled buckets at
the water-barrels and watered their horses; they harnessed and hitched
up to plows and scrapers; half a dozen of them hitched four horses to
each of six of the wagons whose barrels had been emptied, and swung
out across the plain toward the Half Moon for more water.
Truxton beckoned to Conniston and led him toward the south. And
suddenly, coming about the foot of a little knoll, Conniston had his
first glimpse of the main canal.
Here it was a great ditch, ten feet deep, thirty feet wide, its banks
sloping, the earth which had been dragged out of it by the scrapers
piled high upon each side in long mounds, like dikes. Truxton stood
staring at it, his eyes frowning, his jaw set and stern.
"There she is, Conniston. A simple enough thing to look at, but so is
the business end of a mule. This thing is goin' to make the Old Man a
thousand times over--or it's goin' to break him in two like a rotten
stick."
The workmen were coming up, driving their teams with dragging
trace-chains to be hitched to the scrapers and big plows standing
where they had quit work the night before. Truxton, tugging
thoughtfully at his grizzled mustache, watched them a moment as they
"hooked up" and dropped, one behind another, into a long, slow-moving
procession, the great shovel-like scrapers scooping up ton after ton
of the soft earth, dragging it up the slope where the end of the ditch
was, wheeling and dumping it along the edge of the excavation, turning
again, again going back down into the cut to scoop up other tons of
dirt, again to climb the incline to deposit it upon the bank. Here
Conniston counted forty-nine teams and forty-nine drivers. One man--it
was the big Englishman with the scarred lip and cheek and the
unsheathed knife--was standing ten feet away from the edge of the
ditch, his great bare arms folded, watching.
"That's one of your foremen," Truxton said, his eyes following
Conniston's. "Ben, his name is. He knows his business, too. He'll take
care of this gang for you while you come along with me. I'll show you
your other shift."
They followed a line marked by the survey stakes for a quarter of a
mile past the camp. Here another fifty men were at work; and here,
where the top of the sand had already been scraped away, a harder soil
called for the use of the big plows before the scrapers could be of
any use. The foreman here, a South-of-Market San-Franciscan by his
speech, shouted a command to one of the drivers and came up to
Truxton.
"Whatcher want to-day?" he demanded. "Ten foot?"
"Nine," Truxton told him, shortly. "Nine an' a half by the time you
get to that first stake. Nine three-quarters at the second. Can you
get that far to-day?"
The foreman turned a quid of tobacco, squinted his eye at the two
stakes, and nodded.
"Sure thing," he said.
And then he turned on his heel and went back to the point he had quit,
yelling his orders as he went.
"Another good man," Truxton muttered. "Thank the Lord, we've got some
of them you couldn't beat if you went a thousand miles for 'em."
Still farther on was the third gang, and beyond that the fourth. These
hundred men were at work on the "Seven Knolls." And there Truxton
himself would superintend the work to-day. He stopped and stood with
Conniston upon one of the mounds, from which they could see all that
was being done. And with slow, thoughtful carefulness he told
Conniston all that he could of the work in detail.
"You do a good deal of watchin' to-day," he ended. "Ben an' the
Lark--that's what they call that little cuss bossin' the second
gang--listen to him whistle an' you'll know why--know well what to do.
Right now an' right here the work's dead easy, Conniston. Only don't
go an' let 'em drive you in a hole where you have to admit you don't
know. You've _got_ to know."
The work here was in reality so simple that men like Ben and the Lark
grasped it quickly. Conniston had little trouble in seeing readily
what was to be done. The details Truxton furnished him.
When noon came they ate with the men. And at one o'clock Truxton
called Ben and the Lark aside and told them shortly that Conniston was
the new engineer and that they were to take orders from him. Whereupon
Conniston took upon himself the responsibility of "bossing" a hundred
men, the biggest responsibility which he had ever taken upon his
care-free shoulders.
He had seen the slow, measuring glances which both of his two foremen
had bestowed upon him when Truxton told them; knew that they accepted
him as their overseer because they took orders from Truxton, but saw
in their faces that they reserved judgment of him personally until
such time as they could see how much or how little he knew. He was not
greatly in fear of the outcome. The work was running so smoothly,
there were so few possible difficulties to come up now, that it seemed
to him that all he had to do was to stand and watch.
And at first he did little but watch and, as Truxton had suggested,
try to study his men. He saw that both the Lark and Ben said very few
words, that when they did speak they barked out short, explosive
commands surcharged with profanity, that when they interfered there
was a good reason for it, that their commands were obeyed without
hesitation and without question. Not once in two hours did either of
them so much as look toward him. And the long processions of men and
horses came and went, scooped and dumped their big scraper-loads, and
swung back into the ditch, each man of them moving like a machine.
It was after three o'clock when he noticed something which he would
have seen before had he been used to the work and the men. He saw the
long string of scrapers come to a halt for perhaps two minutes; saw
that the cause of the halt was a big Northlander who had stopped just
as he came upon the bank and was working over at race-chain which
seemed to be causing trouble. In a moment he started up again, the
other scrapers began to move, and Conniston dismissed the matter as of
no consequence. This was the gang over which Ben was foreman. He
glanced quickly at the big Englishman and saw that his eyes were upon
the Northlander. Again, not twenty minutes later, came a second brief
stoppage, again the Swede was working over a trace-chain--and now Ben
had swung about and was striding toward Conniston.
"Hi say there," he said, as he came to Conniston's side. "Bat says
Hi'm to take horders off you. Do you want me to 'andle those Johnnies?
Hor do you figure on a-stepping in? Hi?"
"What do you mean?" demanded Conniston, a bit puzzled. "I haven't
interfered with you, have I?"
"No. Hi just want to know, you know. Hi 'andle 'em my wi, hor Hi quit,
you know."
"You are to do just as you have always done," Conniston told him,
shortly. "If you can handle them, all right. Go to it. If you need any
help--What's the matter?"
"Hi don't awsk any 'elp," muttered Ben. "Just one man--"
"You mean that Swede with the big white mare in the lead?" interrupted
Conniston, quickly.
Ben looked at him swiftly. Grunting an answer which Conniston did not
catch, he turned and went back along the edge of the ditch.
The Swede was again coming up the bank. At the top he did as he had
done more than once before: turned out in a wide circle, letting two
men pass him. The Englishman strode swiftly toward him.
"Hi, there, you big Swede!" he yelled, his words accompanied by a
volley of insulting epithets born in the slums of London. "Wot you
trying to do? Want the 'ole works to pawss you w'ile you rest? You
blooming spoonbill, get inter that! Step lively, man!"
The Northlander's heavy, slow-moving feet stopped entirely as he
turned a stolid face toward the foreman.
"I bane to like I tam plase," he muttered, slowly. "Yo bane go hell."
The big Englishman sprang back, swept up a broken pick-handle half
buried in the sand, and leaped forward. As he leaped he swung the bit
of heavy, hard wood above his head. The Swede dropped his reins and
threw up his arms to guard himself, but the pick-handle, wielded in a
great, sinewy right hand, beat down his arms and struck him a crashing
blow across his forehead. Conniston heard the thud of it where he
stood. The Swede's arms flew out and he went down like a steer in a
slaughter-house.
"You bloody spoonbill!" cried the Englishman, standing over the
prostrate body. "Wot are you laying down for? Get hup, hor Hi'll beat
the bloody 'ead hoff your bloody shoulders! Get hup!"
Slowly, weakly, reeling as he got upon his knees, the Swede rose to
his feet. A great, smoldering, cold-blooded wrath shone in his blue
eyes, mingled with a surly fear. He made no motion toward the man who
stood three feet from him threatening him. Nor did he stir toward his
fallen reins. Instead he turned half about toward the camp.
"I bane quit," he muttered, thickly. "I bane get my time."
"Quit!" yelled Ben--"quit, will you!"
The Swede muttered something which Conniston did not catch. Ben took
one short, quick step forward, swinging his pick-handle high above his
head. For a moment the Swede paused, hesitating. And then, again
muttering, he stooped, picked up his reins, and swung his team back
into the cut.
The other men had all stopped to watch. Now Ben swung about upon them,
his voice lifted in a string of cockney oaths, commanding them not to
stand still all day, but to get to work. At almost his first word the
teams began to move again, the men laughing, calling to one another,
jeering at the defeated Swede, or merely shrugging their shoulders.
And Greek Conniston, his face still white from what he had just
witnessed, began to see, although still dimly, what it was he had
taken into his two hands to do.
He glanced down at his hands. The middle finger of the right one, with
which he had struck Brayley's heavy cheek-bone, was swollen to twice
its natural size, stiff and sore. The nails were broken and blackened.
There were a dozen scratches and little cuts. The palms were hard and
calloused, with bits of loose skin along the base of the fingers where
blisters had formed and broken and healed over.
He lifted his head, and his speculative eyes ran back along the ditch.
The work was again running smoothly, quietly, save for the clanking of
the scrapers and the men's voices calling to their horses and mules,
each man intent upon his own duty, the face of the desert as peaceful
as the hot, clear arch of the sky above.