THE RIVER
THE RIVER
THE RIVERCHAPTER IMARSHALL SENDS FOR RICKARD
THE RIVER
THE large round clock was striking nine as “Casey” Rickard’s dancing step carried him into the outer office of Tod Marshall. The ushering clerk, coatless and vestless in expectation of the third, hot spring day, made a critical appraisement of the engineer’s get-up before he spoke. Then he stated that Mr. Marshall had not yet come.
For a London tie and a white silk shirt belted into white serge trousers were smart for Tucson. The clerks in the employ of the Overland Pacific and of the Sonora and Yaqui Railroads had stared at Rickard as he entered; they followed his progress through the room. He was a newcomer in Tucson. He had not yet acquired the apathetic habits of its citizens. He wore belts, instead of suspenders. His white trousers, duck or serge, carried a newly pressed crease each morning.
The office had not reached a verdict on the subject of K. C. Rickard. The shirt-sleeved, collarless clerks would have been quick to dub him a dandy were it not for a page of his history that was puzzling them. He had held a chair of engineering in some eastern city. Hehad resigned, the wind-tossed page said, to go on the road as a fireman. His rapid promotion had been spectacular; the last move, a few weeks ago, to fill an office position in Tucson. The summons had found him on the west coast of Mexico, where the Overland Pacific was pushing its tracks.
“You can wait here,” suggested the clerk, looking covertly at the shoes of the man who a few years before had been shoveling coal on a Wyoming engine. “Mr. Marshall said to wait.”
“Ribbons, instead of shoe-laces!” carped the human machine that must ever write letters which other men sign. “And a blue pin to match his tie! I call that going some!”
It would never have occurred to Rickard, had he thought about it at all that morning as he knotted his tie of dark, brilliant blue silk, that the selection of his lapis pin was a choice; it was an inevitable result, an instinctive discretion of his fingers. It warped, however, the suspended judgment of Marshall’s men who had never seen him shoveling coal, disfigured by a denim jumper. They did not know that they themselves were slovens; ruined by the climate that dulls vanity and wilts collars.
“Give him a year to change some of his fine habits!” wagered Smythe, the stoop-shouldered clerk, as the door of the inner office closed.
“To change his habits less!” amended the office wit. And then they fell to speculating what Marshall was going to do with him. What pawn was he in the game that every one in Tucson followed with eager self-interested concern? Marshall’s was the controlling hand in Arizona politics; the maker of governors, the arbiterof big corporations; president of a half-dozen railroads. Not a move of his on the board that escaped notice.
On the other side of the door, Rickard was echoing the office question. This play job, where did it lead to? He had liked his work, under Stratton. There had been some pretty problems to meet—what did Marshall mean to do with him?
The note had set the appointment for nine. Rickard glanced at his watch, and took out hisEngineering Review. It would be ten before that door opened on Tod Marshall!
He knew that, on the road, Marshall’s work began at dawn. “A man won’t break from overwork, or rust from underwork, if he follows the example of the sun,” Rickard had often heard him expound his favorite theory. “It is only the players, the sybarites, who can afford to pervert the arrangement nature intended for us.” But in Tucson, controlled by the wifely solicitude of his Claudia, he was coerced into a regular perversion. His office never saw him until the morning was half gone.
A half-hour later, Rickard finished reading a report on the diversion of a great western river. The name of Thomas Hardin had sent him off on a tangent of memory. The Thomas Hardin whose efforts to bring water to the desert of the Colorado had been so spectacularly unsuccessfulwasthe Tom Hardin he had known! The sister had told him so, the girl with the odd bronze eyes; opal matrix they were, with glints of gold, or was it green? She herself was as unlike the raw boor of his memory as a mountain lily is like the coarse rock of its background. Even a half-sister to Hardin, as Marshall, their host at dinner the week before, had explained it,—no,even that did not explain it. That any of the Hardin blood should be shared by the veins of that girl, why it was incredible! The name “Hardin” suggested crudity, loud-mouthed bragging; conceit. He could understand the failure of the river project since the sister had assured him that it was the same Tom Hardin who had gone to college at Lawrence; had married Gerty Holmes. Queer business, life, that he should cross, even so remotely, their orbits again. That was a chapter he liked to skip.
He walked over to the windows, shielded by bright awnings, and looked down on the city where the next few years of his life might be caught. Comforting to reflect that an engineer is like a soldier, never can be certain about to-morrow. Time enough to know that to-morrow meant Tucson! What was that threadbare proverb in the Overland Pacific that Tod Marshall always keeps his men until they lose their teeth? That defined the men who made themselves necessary!
His eyes were resting on the banalities of the modern city that had robbed “old town” of its flavor. Were it not for the beauty of the distant hills, the jar and rumble of the trains whose roar called to near-by pleasure cities, twinkling lights and crowded theaters, stretches of parks and recreation grounds, he, who loved the thrill and confinement of an engine, who had found enticement in a desert, a chapter of adventure in the barrancas of Mexico, would stifle in Tucson! American progress was as yet too thin a veneer on Mexican indifference to make the place endurable; as a city. Were it a village of ten thousand people, then he’d not be scolding at his hotel, The Rosales. He could find the limitations picturesque,even. The census it was that accused those dusty unswept floors, the stained cuspidors, the careless linen, and The Rosales the best place in town! One has a right to expect comforts in a city.
“I’m good for a lifetime here, if I want it,” his thoughts would work back to the starting place. “If I knuckle down to it, let him grow to depend on me, it’s as good as settled that I am buried in Tucson!” Hadn’t he heard Marshall himself say that he “didn’t keep a kindergarten—that his office wasn’t a training-school for men!” He wanted his men to stay! That, one of the reasons of the great man’s power; detail rested on the shoulders of his employees. It kept his own brain clear, receptive to big achievements.
“Perhaps as the work unrolls, as I see more of what he wants of me, why he wants me, I may like it, I may get to shout for Tucson!” It was improbable enough to smile over! Child’s work, compared to Mexico. He was never tired—that was his grievance; he had it, now; he was never tired.
The distinction of serving Marshall well certainly had its drawbacks. He wanted to sweep on. Whether he had a definite terminal, a concrete goal, had he ever stopped to think? Specialization had always a fascination for him. It was that which had thrown him out of his instructorship into the fire-box of a western engine. It had governed his course at college—to know one thing well, and then to prove that he knew it well! Contented in the Mexican barrancas, here he was chafing, restive, after a few weeks of Tucson. For what was he getting here? Adding what scrap of experience to the rounding of his profession?
Retrospectively, engineering could hardly be said to bethe work of his choice. Rather had it appeared to choose him. From boyhood engineers had always been, to him, the soldiers of modern civilization. To conquer and subdue mountains, to shackle wild rivers, to suspend trestles over dizzy heights, to throw the tracks of an advancing civilization along a newly blazed trail, there would always be a thrill in it for him. It had changed the best quarter-back of his high school into the primmest of students at college. Only for a short time had he let his vanity side-track him, when the honor of teaching what he had learned stopped his own progress. A rut—! He remembered the day when it had burst on him, the realization of the rut he was in. He could see his Lawrence schoolroom, could see yet the face under the red-haired mop belonging to Jerry Matson—queer he remembered the name after all those years! He could picture the look of consternation when he threw down his book, and announced his desertion.
“Casey was off his feed,” he had heard one of the students say as he passed a buzzing group in the hall. “He looks peaked.”
He had handed in his resignation the next day. A month later, and he was shoveling coal on the steep grades of Wyoming.
“Marshall keeps his men with him!” The engineer’s glance traveled around the fleckless office. A stranger to Marshall would get a wrong idea of the man who worked in it! Those precise files, the desk, orderly and polished, the gleaming linoleum—and then the man who made the negro janitor’s life a proud burden! His clothes always crumpled—spots, too, unless his Claudia had had a chance at them! Black string tie askew, all the outward visible signs of the southern gentleman of assured ancestry.Not even a valet would ever keep Tod Marshall up to the standard of that office. What did he have servants for, he had demanded of Rickard, if it were not to jump after him, picking up the loose ends he dropped?
Curious thing, magnetism. That man’s step on the stair, and every man-jack of them would jump to attention, from Ben, the colored janitor, who would not swap his post for a sinecure so long as Tod Marshall’s one lung kept him in Arizona, to Smythe, the stoop-shouldered clerk, who had followed Marshall’s cough from San Francisco. Poor Smythe! as inextricably entangled in the meshes of red tape as was the hapless Lady of Shalott in the web of her own snarled loom. It was said in Arizona—he himself had met the statement in Tucson—that any man who had ever worked for Tod Marshall would rather be warmed by the reflection of his greatness than be given posts of personal distinction.
Rickard found his office the only attractive place in the desert city. Shining and airy, even in the hottest days, its gaily screened windows were far enough above the street to give a charitable perspective. Restive as he was under the inaction of the last few weeks, he could acknowledge a quaintness of foreign suggestion in the mixture of Indian and Mexican influence, hampered, rather than helped, by American aggressiveness. Over the heads of a group of low buildings he could see the roof of the old mission church, now the lounging place for roisterers and sponges. There, the fiery mescal, the terrible tequila, were sending many a white lad to destruction.
Those office buildings across the street, gay with canvas, suggested American enterprise. In the distance were the substantial structures of the lusty western university. Down by the track the new home of the Overland Pacificwas nearing completion. In the street below, young girls with their crisp duck skirts and colored waists gave the touch of blossoming. Mexican women wrapped in the inevitable black shawl were jostling one another’s baskets. The scene was full of color and charm, but to the watcher who was eager to be on and doing, it cried teasingly of inertia.
Was it office routine Marshall intended him for? He admired without stint Tod Marshall, but he preferred to work by the side of the other kind, the strong men, without physical handicap, the men who take risks, the men who live the life of soldiers. That was the life he wanted. He would wait long enough to get Marshall’s intention, and then, if it meant—this! he would break loose. He would go back to the front where he belonged; back to the firing-line.
As the hands of the round clock in the outer office were pointing to ten, the door opened and Marshall entered. His clothes, of indefinite blackish hue, would have disgraced an eastern man. His string tie had a starboard list, and his hat was ready for a rummage sale. But few would have looked at his clothes. The latent energy of the dynamic spirit that would frequently turn that quiet office into a maelstrom gleamed in those Indian-black eyes. Beneath the shabby cloth, one suspected the daily polished skin; under the old slouch hat was the mouth of purpose, the lips that no woman, even his Claudia, had kissed without the thrill of fear.
Marshall glanced back at the clock, and then toward his visitor.
“On time!” he observed.
Rickard, smiling, put his book in his pocket.