Chapter 8

XX“The Forlorn Hope”

It was August. “Old Turtle-back” was showing up at the diggin’s and the river would reach low water-mark with less than half a foot.

Pole in hand, big John Johnson of the crew stood on the rocking raft anchored below The Big Mallard and opposite the rock where the boat had sunk and smiled his solemn smile at Bruce.

“Don’t know but what we ought to name her and break a bottle of ketchup over the bow of this here craft a’fore we la’nch her.”

“The Forlorn Hope, The Last Chance, or something appropriate like that,” Bruce suggested, although there was too much truth in the jest for him to smile. This attempt to recover the sunken boat was literally that. If it was gone, he was done. His work, all that he had been through, was wasted effort; the whole an expensive fiasco proving that the majority are sometimes right.

The suspense which Bruce had been under for more than two months would soon be ended one way or the other. Day and night it seemed to him he had thought of little else than the fate of the sunken boat. His brain was tired with conjecturing as to what had happened to her when the water had reached its flood. Had the force of it shoved her into deeper water? Had the sand which the water carried at that period filled and covered her? Had the current wrenched her to pieces and imbedded the machinery deep in the sediment and mud?

Questioning his own judgment, doubtful as to whether he was right or wrong, he had gone on with the work as though the machinery was to be recovered, yet all the time he was filled with sickening doubts. But it seemed as though his inborn tenacity of purpose, his mulish obstinacy, would not let him quit, driving him on to finish the flume and trestle 40 feet high with every green log and timber snaked in and put in place by hand; to finish the pressure box and penstock and the 200 feet of pipe-line riveted on the broiling hillside when the metal was almost too hot to touch with the bare hand. The foundation of the power house was ready for the machinery and the Pelton water-wheel had been installed. It had taken time and money and grimy sweat. Was it all in vain?

Asking himself the question for which ten minutes at most would find the answer Bruce sprang upon the tilting raft and nodded—

“Shove off.”

As Bruce balanced himself on the raft while the Swede poled slowly toward the rock that now arose from the water the size of a small house, he was thankful that the face can be made at times to serve as so good a mask. Not for the world would he have had John Johnson guess how afraid he was, how actually scared to death when the raft bumped against the huge brown rock and he knew that he must look over the side.

Holding the raft steady, Johnson kept his eyes on Bruce’s face as he peered into the river and searched the bottom. Not a muscle of Bruce’s face moved nor an eyelid flickered in the tense silence. Then he said quietly—

“John, she’s gone.”

A look of sympathy softened the Swede’s homely face.

Bruce straightened up.

“Gone!” he reiterated—“gone.”

Johnson might guess a little but he could never guess the whole of the despair which seemed to crush Bruce like an overwhelming weight as he stood looking at the sun shining upon the back of the twisting green snake of a river that he had thought he could beat; Johnson never had risked and lost anybody’s money but his own, he never had allowed a woman he loved to build her hopes upon his judgment and success. To have failed so quickly and so completely—oh, the mortification of it! the chagrin!

Finally Johnson said gently:

“Guess we might as well go back.”

Bruce winced. It reminded him what going back meant. To discharge the crew and telegraph his failure to Helen Dunbar, Harrah and the rest, then to watch the lumber dry out and the cracks widen in the flume, the rust take the machinery and the water-wheel go to ruin—that’swhat going back meant—taking up his lonely, pointless life where he had left it off, growing morbid, eccentric, like the other failures sulking in the hills.

“There were parts of two dynamos, one 50 horse-power motor, a keeper, and a field, beside the fly-wheel in the boat.” Bruce looked absently at Johnson but he was talking to himself. “I wonder, I wonder”—a gleam of hope lit up his face—“John, go up to Fritz Yandell’s and borrow that compass that he fished out of the river.”

Johnson looked puzzled but started in a hurry. Inan hour or so he was back, still puzzled; compasses he thought were for people who were lost.

“It’s only a chance, John, another forlorn hope, but there’s magnetic iron in those dynamos and the needle might show it if we can get above the boat.”

Johnson’s friendly eye shone instantly with interest. Starting from the spot of the wreck, he poled slowly down the river, keeping in line with the rock. Ten, twenty, thirty—fifty feet below the rock they poled and the needle did not waver from the north.

“She’d go to pieces before she ever travelled this far.” The glimmer of hope in Bruce’s eyes had died. “Either the needle won’t locate her or she’s drifted into the channel. If that’s the case we’ll never get her out.”

Then Johnson poled back and forth, zig-zagging from bank to bank, covering every foot of space, and still the needle hung steadfastly to its place.

They were all of fifty feet from where the boat had sunk and some forty feet from shore when Bruce cried sharply:

“Hold her steady! Wait!”

The needle wavered—agitated unmistakably—then the parts of the dynamos and the motor in the boat dragged the reluctant point of steel slowly, flutteringly, but surely, from its affinity, the magnetic North.

Bruce gulped at something in his throat before he spoke——

“John, we’vegother!”

“Iseeher!” Johnson executed a kind of dance on the rocking raft. “Lookee,” he pointed into the exasperatingly dense water, “see her there—like a shadow—herbow is shoved up four—five feet above her stern. Got her?”

Bruce nodded, then they looked at each other joyfully, and Bruce remembered afterward that they had giggled hysterically like two boys.

“The water’ll drop a foot yet,” Bruce said excitedly. “Can you dive?”

“First cousin to a musk-rat,” the Swede declared.

“We’ll build a raft like a hollow square, use a tripod and bring up the chain blocks. What we can’t raise with a grappling-hook, we’ll go after. John, we’re going to get it—every piece!”

“Bet yer life we’ll get her!” John cried responsively, “if I has to git drunk to do it and stand to my neck in water for a week.”

XXIToy

Bruce paused in the blithesome task of packing six by eights to look at the machinery which lay like a pile of junk on the river bank. Each time he passed he looked at it and always he felt the same hot impatience and burning sense of irritation.

The days, the weeks, months were going by and nothing moved.

Two months Jennings had named as the maximum of time required to set up the machines and have the plant in working order. “We’ll be throwin’ dirt by the middle of July,” he had said, confidently, and it was now close to the middle of September. The lost machinery was no longer an excuse, as every piece had been recovered by grappling and diving, and landed safely at the diggin’s.

Twice the whole crew save Jennings had dragged a heavy barge fifteen miles up the river, advancing only a pull at a time against the strong current, windlassing over the rapids with big John Johnson poling like mad to keep the boat off the rocks; sleeping at night in wet clothing, waking stiff and jaded as stage horses to go at it again. Six days they had been getting up, and a little over an hour coming down, while two trips had been necessary owing to the low stage of the water, which now made the running of a deeply loaded boat impossible. It had been a severe test of endurance and loyalty in which none had fallen short and no one among them had workedwith more tireless energy than Smaltz, or his erstwhile friend but present enemy, Porcupine Jim.

There was amazingly little damage done to the submerged machinery, and when the last bit of iron was unloaded on the bank, the years which had come upon Bruce in the weeks of strain and tension seemed to roll away. Unless some fresh calamity happened, by September, surely, they would be “throwing dirt.”

Now, as Bruce changed the lumber from the raw spot on his right shoulder to the raw spot on his left shoulder he was wondering how much more of a chance was due Jennings, how much longer he could hold his tongue. A more extended acquaintance with his “practical man” had taught him how easily a virtue may become a fault.

In his insistence upon solidity and exactitude he went beyond the point of careful workmanship and became a putterer. He was the King of Putterers. He could out-putter a plumber. And when he had finished it was usually some unimportant piece of work that any man who handled tools could have done as well in half the time.

Bruce had a favorite bush, thick, and a safe distance from the work, behind which it was his wont to retire at such times as the sight of Jennings puttering while the crew under him stood idle, became too much for Bruce’s nerves:

“He’d break the Bank of England!” Bruce would exclaim in a vehement whisper behind the bush. “If he’d been on the pay-roll of Rameses II, they’d have dug up his work intact. It’s fierce! As sure as shooting I’m going to run out of money.”

Yet so long as Jenningswasin charge, Bruce would not listen to attacks upon him behind his back, andJennings had succeeded in antagonizing almost all the crew. With the same regularity that the sun rose he and Woods, the carpenter, had their daily set-to, if over nothing more important than the mislaying of a file or saw—no doubt they were at it now.

Bruce sighed. It seemed eons ago that he had had time to watch the kingfisher flying to his nest or the water-ousel ducking and teetering sociably at his feet. They never came any more, neither they nor the black bear to his service-berry bush and Old Felix had learned in one bitter lesson how his confidence in man had been misplaced. Nothing came any more but annoyances, trouble, and thinking of trouble. Bruce wondered what was the matter with Toy. He had looked as grim and forbidding at breakfast as a Chinese god of war.

But it was no time to speculate, with a load of lumber grinding into his sore shoulder, so Bruce hurried on across the slippery foot-log and up a steep pitch to see the carpenter charging through the brush brandishing a saw as if it was a sabre.

“I want my ‘time,’” he shouted when he saw Bruce. “Him or me has got to quit. I won’t work with that feller—I won’t take orders from the likes o’ him! I never saw a man from Oregon yit that was worth the powder to blow him up! Half-baked, no-account fakirs, the whole lot of ’em—allus a hirin’ for somethin’ they cain’t do! Middle West renegades! Poor white trash! Oregon is the New Jersey of the Pacific coast; it’s the Missoury of the West. It ought to be throwed into some other state and its name wiped off the map. That there Jennings has got the ear-marks of Oregon printed on him like a governmint stamp. Every time I see that putterin’ web-foot’s tracks in the dustit makes me hot. He don’t know how to put up this plant no mor’n I do and you’ll find it out. If an Oregonian’d be offered a job teachin’ dead languages in a college he’d make a bluff at doin’ it if he couldn’t write his own name. Why them ‘web-feet’—”

“Just what in particular is the matter?” Bruce asked, as the carpenter paused, not for want of verbal ammunition but because he was out of breath.

“Matter!” panted Woods, “he’s got us strainin’ our life out puttin’ up them green four-by-eight’s when they’s no need. They’d carry a ocean cable, them cross-arms would. Four-by-fives is big enough for all the wire that’ll be strung here. John Johnson jest fell out’n a tree a liftin’ and like to broke a lung.”

“Do you feel sure that four-by-five’s are strong enough?”

“Try it—that’s all I ask.”

“You’d better come back to work.”

The carpenter hesitated.

“I don’t like to quit when you need me, but,” he waved the rip-saw in a significant gesture, “if that Oregonian gives me any more back-talk I aims to cut him up in chunks.”

It was the first time Bruce had countermanded one of Jennings’s orders but now he backed Woods up. He had shared the carpenter’s opinion that four-by-five’s were strong enough but he had said nothing, supposing that Jennings was following precedent and knew what he was about. Woods, too, had voiced a suspicion which kept rising in his mind as to whether Jenningsdidknow how to put up the machines. Was it possible that the unimportant detail work which Jennings insisted upon doing personally in order that it might be exactly right, was only a subterfuge toput off as long as possible the day when the showdown must come? Was it in his mind to draw his generous wages as long as he safely might then invent some plausible excuse to quit?

Bruce was not a fool but neither was he apt to be suspicious of a person he had no good reason to mistrust. He had made every allowance for Jennings’ slowness, but his bank account was rapidly reaching a stage where, even if he would, he could no longer humor Jennings’ mania for solidity.Somethinghad to move, and, taking Jennings aside, Bruce told him so.

The look which darkened Jennings’s face when his instructions to Woods were countermanded surprised Bruce. It was more than chagrin, it was—ugly. It prejudiced Bruce against him as all his puttering had failed to do. The correctness or incorrectness of his contention concerning the cross-arm seemed of less importance than the fact that Bruce’s interference had impaired his dignity—belittled him in the eyes of the crew.

“Am I the constructin’ ingineer, or ain’t I? If I am, I’m entitled to some respect.” More than ever Jennings looked like a bear pouting in a trap.

“What’s your dignity got to do with it?” Bruce demanded. “I’m General Manager, when it comes to that, and I’ve been packing cross-arms like a mule. This is no time to talk about what’s due you—get results. This pay-roll can’t go on forever, Jennings. There’s an end. At this rate it’ll come quick. You know what the success of this proposition means to me—my first, and, I beg of you don’t putter any more; get busy and put up those machines. You say that 50 horse-power motor has got to be rewound—”

“One man can’t work on that alone,” Jennings interrupted in a surly tone. “I can’t do anything on it until that other electrician comes in.”

“Get Smaltz to help you.”

“Smaltz! What does he know. Him holding out for them four-be-five cross-arms shows what he knows.”

“Sometimes I think he knows a good deal more than he lets on.”

“Don’t you think it,” Jennings sneered. “He don’t knowhalfas much as he lets on. Jest one of them rovin’ windjammers pickin’ up a little smatterin’ here and there. Run a power-house in the Coeur d’Alenes. Huh—what’s that! This here feller that I got comin’ is a ’lectrical genius. He’s worked with me on drudgers, and I know.”

Glaring at the victorious carpenter who, being human, sent back a grin, Jennings went to the power-house, mumbling to the last that “four-be-five’s” would never hold.

“I think I go now I think.”

“Toy!”

The old Chinaman at his elbow was dressed for travelling in a clean but unironed shirt; and his shoes had been newly hobbed. His round, black hat was pulled down purposefully as far as his ears would permit. All his possessions were stuffed into his best overalls with the legs tied around his waist and the pair of attached suspenders worn over his shoulders so that at first glance he presented the startling appearance of carrying a headless corpse pick-a-back.

Bruce looked at him in astonishment. He would as soon have thought of thus suddenly losing his right arm.

The Chinaman’s yellow face was impassive, his snuff-brown eyes quite blank.

“I go now,” he repeated.

“But Toy—” There are a special set of sensations which accompany the announcement of the departure of cooks, Bruce felt distinctly when his heart hit his boots. To be without a cook just now was more than an annoyance—it was a tragedy—but mostly it was the Chinaman’s ingratitude that hurt.

“I go,” was the stubborn answer.

Bruce knew the tone.

“All right—go,” he answered coldly, “but first I want you to tell me why.”

A flame of anger leaped into Toy’s eyes; his whole face worked; he was stirred to the centre of his being.

“She kick on me!” he hissed. “She say I no can cook!”

Instantly Bruce understood. Jennings’s bride had been guilty of the one unforgivable offense. His own eyes flashed.

“Tell her to keep out of the kitchen.”

Toy shook his head.

“I no likee her; I no stay.”

“Won’t you stay if I ask you as a favor?”

The Chinaman reiterated in his stubborn monotone:

“She kick on my glub; I no likee her; I no stay.”

“You’re going to put me in an awful hole, Toy, if you go.”

“She want my job, I think. All light—I no care.”

Bruce knew him too well to argue. The Chinaman could see only one thing, and that loomed colossal. He had been insulted; his dignity would not permit him even to breathe under the same roof with a womanwho said he could not cook. He turned away abruptly and jogged down the trail with the overalls stuffed with his possessions bobbing ludicrously on his back.

Heavy-hearted Bruce watched him go. If Toy had forgotten that he owed him for his life he would not remind him, but he had thought that the Chinaman’s gratitude was deeper than this, although, it was true, he never had thanked him or indicated in any way that he realized or appreciated what Bruce had done. Nevertheless Bruce had believed that in his way Toy was fond of him, that deep under his yellow skin there was loyalty and a passive, undemonstrative affection. Obviously there was none. He was no different from other Chinamen, it seemed—the white man and his country were only means to an end.

Bruce would not have believed that anybody with oblique eyes and a shingled queue could have hurt him so. Of the three men he had befriended, two had turned the knife in him. He wondered cynically how soon he would hear from Uncle Bill.

XXIIThe General Manager

Jennings and Woods were now sworn enemies and the stringing of the wires became a matter of intense interest, as this was the test which would prove the truth or fallacy of Jennings’ cantankerous harping that the cross-arms were too light.

In isolated camps where there is no outside diversion such tests of opinion become momentous matters, and the present instance was no exception. Mrs. Jennings, too, had taken sides—her husband’s, naturally—and the anti-Jennings faction was made to realize fully the possibilities for revenge which lie within the jurisdiction of the cook.

The alacrity with which Jennings’s bride stepped into Toy’s shoes convinced Bruce that the Chinaman had been correct in his assertion, but he was helpless in the circumstances, and accepted the inevitable, being able for the first time to understand why there are wife-beaters.

Jennings had opined that his bride was “lasty.” She looked it. “Bertha” stood six feet in her moccasins and lifted a sack of flour as the weaker of her sex toy with a fan. She had an undershot jaw and a nose so retroussé that the crew asserted it was possible to observe the convolutions of her brain and see what she had planned for the next meal. Be that as it may, Bertha had them cowed to a man, with the possible exception of Porcupine Jim, whose hide no mere sarcasm could penetrate. There was general envy of the temerity which enabled Jim to ask for more biscuitswhen the plate was empty. Even Smaltz shrank involuntarily when she came toward him with her mouth on the bias and a look in her deep-set eyes which said that she would as soon, or sooner, pour the steaming contents of the coffee-pot down the back of his neck than in his cup, while Woods averred that “Doc” Tanner who fasted forty days didn’t have anything on him.

Nobody but Jennings shared Bertha’s hallucination that she could cook, and he was the recipient of special dishes, such delicacies as cup-custard, and toast. This in no wise added to Jennings’s popularity with the crew and when Bruce suggested as much to the unblushing bride she told him, with arms akimbo and her heels well planted some three feet apart, that if they “didn’t like it let ’em come and tell her so.”

Bertha was looking like a gargoyle when the men filed in for supper the night before the stringing of the wires was to begin. The fact that men antagonistic to her husband dared walk in before her eyes and eat, seemed like bravado, a challenge, and filled her with such black resentment that Bruce trembled for the carpenter when she hovered over him like a Fury, with a platter of bacon.

Woods, too, felt his peril, and intrepid soul though he was, seemed to contract, withdraw like a turtle into his flannel collar, as though already he felt the sizzling grease on his unprotected pate.

Conversation was at a standstill in the atmosphere charged with Bertha’s disapproval. Only Porcupine Jim, quite unconscious, unabashed, heaped his plate and ate with all the loud abandon of a Berkshire Red. Emboldened by the pangs of hunger a long way from satisfied, John Johnson tried to “palm” a fourth biscuitwhile surreptitiously reaching for a third. Unfortunately John was not sufficiently practised in the art of legerdemain and the biscuit slipped from his fingers. It fell off the table and rolled like a cartwheel to Bertha’s feet.

“Shan’t I bring you in the shovel, Mr. Johnson?” she inquired in a tone of deadly politeness as she polished the biscuit on her lip and returned it to the plate.

John’s ears flamed, also his neck and face. The honest Swede looked like a sheep-killing dog caught in the act. He dared not answer, and she added:

“There’s three apiece.”

“Mrs. Jennings, I haven’t put the camp on half-rations yet.” Bruce was mutinous at last.

The bride drew herself up and reared back from the waist-line until she looked all of seven feet tall. The row of short locks that hung down like a row of fish-hooks beneath a knob of black hair seemed to stand out straight and the window rattled in its casing as she swarmed down on Bruce.

“Look a here, young feller, I don’t need no boss to tell me how much to cook!”

Jennings protested mildly:

“Now don’t you go and git upset, Babe.”

“Babe” turned upon him savagely:

“And don’t you go to takin’ sides! I’m used to livin’ good an’ when I think what I give up to come down here to this hole—”

“I know ’taint what you’re used to,” Jennings agreed in a conciliatory tone.

Smaltz took this occasion to ostentatiously inspect a confection the upper and lower crusts of which stuck together like two pieces of adhesive plaster.

“Looks like somebudy’s been high-gradin’ this here pie.”

The criticism might have touched even a mild-tempered cook; it made a demon of Bertha. She started around the table with the obvious intention of doing Smaltz bodily harm, but at the moment, Porcupine Jim, whose roving eye had been searching the table for more food, lighted upon one of the special dishes set before Jennings’ plate.

Itlookedlike rice pudding with raisins in it! If there was one delicacy which appealed to James’s palate more than another it was rice pudding with raisins in it. He arose from the bench in all the pristine splendor of the orange-colored cotton undershirt in which he worked and dined, and reached for the pudding. It was a considerable distance and he was unable to reach it by merely stretching himself over the table, so James, unhampered by the rules of etiquette prescribed by a finical Society, put his knee on the table and buried his thumb in the pudding as he dragged it toward him by the rim.

Without warning he sat down so hard and so suddenly that his feet flew up and kicked the table underneath.

“Leggo!” he gurgled.

For answer Bertha took another twist around the stout neck-band of his orange undergarment.

“I’ll learn you rough-necks some manners!” she panted. “I’ll git the respect that’s comin’ to a lady if I have to clean out this here camp!”

“You quit, now!” He rolled a pair of wild, beseeching eyes around the table. “Somebudy take her off!”

“Coward—to fight a woman!” She fell back witha section of James’s shirt in one hand, with the other reaching for his hair.

He clapped the crook of his elbow over his ear and started to slide under the table when the special Providence that looks after Swedes intervened. A long, plump, shining bull-snake took that particular moment to slip off one of the log beams and bounce on the bride’s head.

She threw herself on Jennings emitting sounds like forty catamounts tied in a bag. The flying crew jammed in the doorway, burst through and never stopped to look behind until they were well outside.

“Hy-sterics,” said the carpenter who was married—“she’s took a fit.”

“Hydrophoby—she must a bit herself!” Porcupine Jim was vigorously massaging his neck.

The bride was sitting on the floor beating her heels, when Bruce put his head in the door cautiously:

“If there’s anything I can do—”

Bertha renewed her screams at sight of him.

“They is—” she shrieked—“Git out!”

“You don’t want to go near ’em when they’re in a tantrum,” advised the carpenter in an experienced tone. “But that’s about the hardest one I ever see.”

Jennings, staggering manfully under his burden, bore the hysterical Amazon to her tent and it remained for Bruce to do her work.

“That’s a devil of a job for a General Manager,” commented John Johnson sympathetically, as he stood in the doorway watching Bruce, with his sleeves rolled up, scraping assiduously at the bottom of a frying-pan.

Bruce smiled grimly but made no reply. He had been thinking the same thing himself.

Bruce often had watched an ant trying to move a bread-crumb many times its size, pushing with all its feet braced, rushing it with its head, backing off and considering and going at it again. Failing, running frantically around in front to drag and pull and tug. Trying it this way and that, stopping to rest for an instant then tackling it in fresh frenzy—and getting nowhere, until, out of pity, he gave it a lift.

Bruce felt that this power-plant was his bread-crumb, and tug and push and struggle as he would he could not make it budge. The thought, too, was becoming a conviction that Jennings, who should have helped him push, was riding on the other side.

“I wouldn’t even mind his riding,” Bruce said to himself ironically, “if he wouldn’t drag his feet.”

He was hoping with all his heart that the much discussed cross-arms would hold, for when the wires were up and stretched across the river he would feel that the bread-crumb had at leastmoved.

When Bruce crossed to the work the next morning, the “come-along” was clamped to the transmission wire and hooked to the block-and-tackle. Naturally Jennings had charge of the stretching of the wire and he selected Smaltz as his assistant.

All the crew, intensely interested in the test, stood around as Jennings, taciturn and sour and addressing no one but Smaltz, puttered about his preparations.

Finally he cried:

“Ready-O!”

The wire tightened and the slack disappeared under Smaltz’s steady pull. The carpenter and the crew watched the cross-arm anxiously as the strain came upon it under the taut wire. Their faces brightened as it held.

Smaltz looked at Jennings quizzically.

“More?”

“You ain’t heard me tell you yet to stop,” was the snarling answer.

“Here goes, then.” Smaltz’s face wore an expressive grin as he put his strength on the rope of the block-and-tackle, which gave him the pull of a four-horse team.

Bruce heard the cross-arm splinter as he came up the trail through the brush.

Jennings turned to Woods and said offensively:

“Old as you are, I guess I kin learn you somethin’ yet.”

The carpenter’s face had turned white. With a gesture Bruce stopped his belligerent advance.

“Try the next one, Jennings,” he said quietly.

Once more the slack was taken up and the wire grew taut—so taut it would have twanged like a fiddle-string if it had been struck. Jennings did not give Smaltz the sign to stop even when the cross-arm cracked. Without a word of protest Bruce watched the stout four-by-five splinter and drop off.

“There—you see—I told you so! I knowed!” Jennings looked triumphantly at the carpenter as he spoke. Then, turning to the crew: “Knock ’em off—every one.NowI’ll do it right!”

Not a man moved and for an instant Bruce dared not trust himself to speak. When he did speak it was in a tone that made Jennings look up startled:

“You’ll come across the river and get your time.” His surprise was genuine as Bruce went on—“Do you imagine,” he asked savagely, trying to steady his voice, “that I haven’t intelligence enough to know that you’ve got to allow for the swaying of the trees inthe wind, for the contraction and expansion of heat and cold, for the weight of snow and sleet? Do you think I haven’t brains enough to see when you’re deliberately destroying another man’s work? I’ve been trying to make myself believe in you—believe that in spite of your faults you were honest. Now I know that you’ve been drawing pay for months for work you don’t know how to do. I can’t see any difference between you and any common thief who takes what doesn’t belong to him. Right here you quit! Vamoose!” Bruce made a sweeping gesture—“You go up that hill as quick as the Lord will let you.”

XXIII“Good Enough”

“Alf” Banule, the electrical genius for whom Jennings had sent to help him rewind an armature and who therefore had taken Jennings’s place as constructing engineer, had the distinction of being the only person Bruce had ever seen who could remove his socks without taking off his shoes. He accomplished the feat with ease for the reason that there were never any toes in the aforesaid shoes. As he himself said, he would have been a tall man if there had not been so much of him turned up at the end.

The only way he was able to wear shoes at all, save those made to order, was to cut out the toes; the same applied to his socks, and the exposed portion of his bare feet had not that dimpled pinkness which moves poets to song. From the rear, Banule’s shoes looked like two bobsleds going down hill, and from the front the effect of the loose soles was that of two great mouths opening and closing. Yet he skimmed the river boulders at amazing speed, seeming to find no inconvenience in the flap-flapping of the loose leather as he leaped from rock to rock.

In contrast to his yawning shoes and a pair of trousers the original shade of which was a matter of uncertainty, together with a black satine shirt whose color made change unnecessary, was a stylish Tyrolese hat—green felt—with a butterfly bow perched jauntily on one side. And underneath this stylishness there was a prematurely bald head covered with smudges of machine grease which it could readily be believedwere souvenirs of his apprentice days in the machine shop. If indifference to appearance be a mark of genius it would be impossible to deny Banule’s claim to the title.

He was the direct antithesis of Jennings, harnessed lightning in clothes, working early and late. He flew at the machinery like a madman, yelling for wrenches, and rivets and bolts, chiselling, and soldering, and oiling, until the fly-wheel was on its shaft in the power-house, and the dynamos, dragged at top speed from the river-bank, no longer looked like a pile of junk. The switchboard went up, and the pressure gauge, and the wiring for the power-house light. But for all Bruce’s relief at seeing things moving, he had a feeling of uneasiness lest there was too much haste. “Good enough—that’s good enough!” were the words oftenest on Banule’s lips. They filled Bruce with vague forebodings, misgivings, and he came to feel a flash of irritation each time the genius said airily: “Oh, that’s good enough.”

Bruce warned him often—“Don’t slight your work—do it right if it takes twice as long.”

Banule always made the same cheering answer: “Don’t worry, everything is going fine; in less than a month we’ll be generating ‘juice’.” And Bruce tried to find comfort in the assurance.

When Bruce pulled the lever which opened the valve, and heard the hiss of the water when it shot from the nozzle and hit the wheel, and watched the belt, and shaft, and big fly-wheel speed up until the spokes were a blur and the breeze it created lifted his hair, it was the happiest moment of his life. When he saw the thread of carbon filament in the glass bulb turn red and grow to a bright, white light, he hadsomething of the feeling of ecstasy that he imagined a mother must have when she looks at her first-born—a mixture of wonder and joy.

He had an odd, intimate feeling—a strong feeling of affection—for every piece of machinery in the power-house. He liked to hear the squeak of the belting and the steady chug-chug of the water-wheels; the purr of the dynamos was music, and he kept the commutators free from dust with loving care.

But these moments alone in the power-house were high-lights in a world of shadows. His periods of elation were brief, for so many things went wrong, and so often, that sometimes he wondered if it was the way some guardian angel had of warning him, of trying to prevent him from keeping on and making a big mistake bigger; or was it only the tests that the Fates have a way of putting humans through and, failing to break their hearts, sometimes let them win?

Important as the power-house was it was only a small portion of the whole. There was still the 10-inch pump in the pump-house with its 75 horse-power motor and the donkey engine with the 50 horse-power motor to get to working right, not to mention the flume and sluice-boxes, with their variety of riffles and every practicable device for trapping the elusive fine gold. And not the least of Bruce’s increasing anxieties was “Alf” Banule with his constant “good enough.”

It was well toward the end of October and Bruce, hurrying over the trail with sheets of mica for Banule, who was working on the submerged motor which had to be rewound, noticed that the willows were turning black. What a lot had happened since he had noticed the willows turning black last year! A lifetimeof hopes and fears, and new experiences had been crowded into twelve flying months.

His mind straying for a moment from the work and its many problems, he fell to thinking of Helen Dunbar and her last letter. When he was not thinking of undercurrents or expanded metal riffles or wondering anxiously if the 10-inch and 8-inch pumps were going to raise sufficient water, or if the foundation built on piling, instead of cement, was “good enough,” Bruce was thinking of the girl he loved.

She had written in her last letter—Bruce knew them all by heart—

I had a visitor yesterday. You will be as surprised, when I tell you who it was, as I was to see him. Have you guessed? I’m sure you haven’t. None other than our friend Sprudell—very apologetic—very humble and contrite, and with an explanation to offer for his behavior that was really most ingenious. There’s no denying he has cleverness of a kind—craft, perhaps, is a better word.His humility was touching but so unlike him that I should have been alarmed if he had not been so obviously sincere.Nevertheless his visit has upset me. I’ve been worried ever since. Perhaps you’ll only laugh at me when I tell you that it is because I am afraid foryou. Truly I am! I don’t know that I can explain exactly so you’ll understand but there was something disturbing which Ifeltwhen he spoke quite casually of you. It was almost too intangible to put into words but it was like a gloating secret satisfaction, as though he had the best of you in some way, the whip-hand.It may be just a silly notion, one of those fears that pop into one’s head in the most inexplicable way and stick, refusing to be driven out by any amount of logic. Tell me, is there anything that he can do to you? Any way that he can harm you?I am nervous—anxious—and I cannot help it.

His humility was touching but so unlike him that I should have been alarmed if he had not been so obviously sincere.

Nevertheless his visit has upset me. I’ve been worried ever since. Perhaps you’ll only laugh at me when I tell you that it is because I am afraid foryou. Truly I am! I don’t know that I can explain exactly so you’ll understand but there was something disturbing which Ifeltwhen he spoke quite casually of you. It was almost too intangible to put into words but it was like a gloating secret satisfaction, as though he had the best of you in some way, the whip-hand.

It may be just a silly notion, one of those fears that pop into one’s head in the most inexplicable way and stick, refusing to be driven out by any amount of logic. Tell me, is there anything that he can do to you? Any way that he can harm you?

I am nervous—anxious—and I cannot help it.

She was anxious about him! That fact was paramount. Somebody in the world was worrying overhim. He stopped short in the trail with fresh wonder of it. Every time he thought of it, it gave him a thrill. His face, that had been set in tired, harsh lines of late, softened with a smile of happiness.

And he did so long to give her substantial evidence of his gratitude. If that machinery ever started—if the scrapers ever got to hauling dirt—her reward, his reward, would come quick. That was one of the compensating features of mining; if the returns came at all they came quick. Bruce started on, hastening his footsteps until he almost ran.

The electrical genius was driving a nail with a spirit-level when Bruce reached the pump-house and Bruce flared up in quick wrath.

“Stop that, Banule! Isn’t there a hammer on this place?”

“Didn’t see one handy,” Banule replied cheerfully, “took the first thing I could reach.”

“It just about keeps one pack-train on the trail supplying you with tools.”

“Guess I am a little careless.” Banule seemed unruffled by the reproach—because he had heard it so many times before, no doubt.

“Yes, you’re careless,” Bruce answered vigorously, “and I’m telling you straight it worries me; I can’t help wondering if your carelessness extends to your work. There, you know, you’ve got me, for I can’t tell. I must trust you absolutely.”

Banule shrugged a shoulder—

“This ain’t the first plant I’ve put up, you know.” He added—“I’ll guarantee that inside two weeks we’ll be throwin’ dirt. Eh, Smaltz? Ain’t I right?”

Smaltz, who was stooping over, did not immediately look up. Bruce saw an odd expression cross his face—an expression that was something like derision. When he felt Bruce looking at him it vanished instantly and he straightened up.

“Why, yes,” with his customary grin, “looks like we orter make astart.”

The peculiar emphasis did not escape Bruce and he was still thinking of the look he had caught on Smaltz’s face as he asked Banule:

“Is this mica right? Is it the kind you need?”

Smaltz looked at Banule from the corner of his eye.

“’Taint exactly what I ought to have,” Banule responded cheerfully. “I forgot to specify when I ordered, but I guess I can make it do—it’s good enough.”

It seemed to Bruce that his over-strained nerves snapped all at once. He did not recognize the sound of his voice when he turned on Banule:

“S’help me, I’m goin’ to break every bone in your body if you don’t cut out that ‘good enough’! How many hundred times have I got to tell you that nothing’s good enough on this plant until it’s right?”

“I didn’t mean anything,” Banule mumbled, temporarily cowed.

Bruce heard Smaltz snicker as he walked away.

The sluice-boxes upon which Bruce was putting the finishing touches were his particular pride. They were four feet wide and nearly a quarter of a mile in length. The eight per cent grade was steep enough to carry off boulders twice, three times, the size of a man’s head when there was a force of water behind them.

The last box was well over the river at a point where it was sufficiently swift to take off the “tailings” and keep it free. The top earth, which had to be removed to uncover the sand-bank, was full of jagged rocks that had come down in snowslides from the mountain and below this top earth was a strata of small, smooth boulders—“river wash.”

This troublesome “overburden” necessitated the use of iron instead of wooden riffles, as the bumping and grinding of the boulders would soon have worn the latter down to nothing. So, for many weary trips, a string of footsore pack-horses had picked their way down the dangerous trail from Ore City, loaded to their limit with pierced iron strips, rods, heavy sacks of nuts and bolts.

It had been laborious, nerve-racking work and every trip had had its accident, culminating in the loss of the best pack-horse in the string, the horse having slipped off the trail, scattering its pack, as Smaltz announced it, “from hell to breakfast.”

But the iron strips and rods were made into riffles now, and laid. Bruce surveyed the whole with intense satisfaction as he stood by the sluice-boxes looking down the long grade. It washiswork and he knew that he had done it well. He had spared no labor to have it right—nothing had been just “good enough.”

There was cocoa matting under the riffles of the first six boxes. Half-way the length of the sluice-boxes the finest gravel, yellow and black sand, dropped through perforated sheet-iron grizzles into the “undercurrents” while the rocks and boulders rushed on through the sluice-boxes to the river.

At the end of the undercurrents there was a wide table having a slight grade, and this table was coveredwith canton flannel over which was placed more riffles of expanded metal. And, as a final precaution, lest some infinitesimal amount of gold escape, there was a mercury trap below the table. While Bruce was expecting to catch the greater part of it in the first six sluice-boxes he was not taking a single chance.

Now, as he stood by the sluice-boxes looking their length, he allowed himself to dream for a moment of the days when the mercury, turned to amalgam, should be lying thick with gold behind the riffles; to anticipate the unspeakable happiness of telegraphing his success to Helen Dunbar.

Even with the tangible evidence before his eyes it was hard to realize that after all the struggle, he was so near his goal. The ceaseless strain and anxiety had left their marks upon his face. He looked older by years than when he had stood by the river dipping water into his old-fashioned cradle and watching “Slim” scramble among the rocks.

But it would be worth it all—all and more—he told himself exultingly, if he succeeded—as he must. His eyes shone with enthusiasm and he tingled with his joy, as he thought what success meant.

A sound behind him brought him back to earth. He turned to see Toy picking his way gingerly over the rocks.

“You old rascal!” he cried joyfully. “Dog-gone, I’m glad to see you, though you don’t deserve it.”

“I come back now,” the Chinaman announced serenely. “No go way no more I think.”

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