CHAPTER VA GAME OF CHECKERS
THE uneasy mood of the desert, the wind-blown sand, drove people indoors the next morning. Rickard was served a substantial, indifferently cooked breakfast in the dining-room of the Desert Hotel, whose limitations were as conspicuous to the newcomer as they were non-existent to the other men. They were finding it a soft contrast to sand-blown tents, to life in the open.
Later, he wandered through the group of staring idlers in the office, past the popular soda-stand and the few chair-tilters on the sidewalk, going on, as if without purpose, to the railroad sheds, and then on, down to the offices of the Desert Reclamation Company. He discovered it to be the one engaging spot in the hastily thrown-together town. There were oleanders, rose and white, blooming in the patch of purple blossoming alfalfa that stood for a lawn. Morning-glories clambered over the supports of the veranda, and on over the roof. Rickard’s deductions led him to the Hardins.
What school of experience had so changed the awkward country fellow? He had resented his rivalry, not that he was a rival, but that he was a boor. His kisses still warm on her lips, and she had turned to welcome, to coquet with Tom Hardin! The woman who was tobe his wife must be steadier than that! It had cooled his fever. Not for him the aspen who could shake and bend her pretty boughs to each rough breeze that blew!
Men tossed into a desert, fighting to keep a foothold, do not garland their offices with morning-glories! Was it the gracious quiet influence of a wife, a Gerty Hardin? The festive building he was approaching was as unexpected—as Captain Brandon! Rickard walked on, smiling.
He was fairly blown into the outer room, the door banging behind him. Every one looked up at the noisy interruption. There were several men in the long room. Among them two alert, clean-faced youths, college-graduates, or students out on furlough, the kind of stuff in his class at Lawrence. Three of the seasoned, road-coached type were leaning their chairs against the cool thick walls. One was puffing at a cigar. The other, a big shy giant, was drawing clouds of comfort from a pipe. There was a telegraph operator at work in one end of the room, her instrument rapidly clicking. In an opposite corner was a telephone exchange. A girl with a metal band around her forehead was punching connections between the valley towns. Rickard lost the feeling of having gone into a remote and isolated region. The twin towns were on the map.
One of the older men returned his nod. The young men returned their hastily withdrawn attention to their game of checkers. The other smoker was watching with cross-eyed absorption the rings his cigar was sending into the air. Rickard might not have been there.
One of the checker players looked up.
“Anything I can do for you? Do you want to see any one in particular?”
“No,” it was admitted. “No one in particular. I was just looking round.”
“It’s the show place of Calexico. I’ll take you around. It is the only place in town that is comfortable when it’s hot, or when the wind blows, and that’s the program all summer. Take my place, Pete.”
Pete, the young giant, with the face of his infancy enlarged rather than matured, slipped into the vacant chair. He had been the first to discover the stranger, but he had evaded the responsibility. The game immediately absorbed him.
“It’s nice here,” repeated the young fellow, leading the way. They were followed by a few idle glances.
Rickard looked with approval at the tall slim figure which was assuming the courtesy of the towns. The fine handsome face was almost too girlish, the muscles of the mouth too sensitive yet for manly beauty, but he liked the type. Lithe as a young desert-reared Indian, his manner and carriage told of a careful home and rigid school discipline.
It was the type Rickard liked, he was thinking, because it was the type he understood. He preferred the rapier to the bludgeon, the toughened college man to the world-veneered man of the field. He revered the progress of a Jefferson or a Hamilton; he would always distrust the evolution of a contemporary Lincoln. It is easier, he maintained, to skip classes, or grades in world discipline, than in a rigorous college. This was the kind which in his own classes had attracted him. He had missed them in his years on the road—in Mexico, Wyoming, North Dakota, where rough material had been his to shape.
He was ushered into a large cool room. The furnishingshe inventoried: a few stiff chairs, a long table and a typewriter desk, closed for the Sabbath.
“The stenographer’s room,” announced the lad superfluously.
“Whose stenographer?”
“General property, now. Every one has a right to use her time. She used to be Hardin’s, the general manager’s. She is his still, in a way. But Ogilvie keeps her busy most of the time.”
Rickard had not heard of Ogilvie. He made a mental register.
“When did Hardin go out?” He knew the date himself. He expected the answer would trail wisps of other information. He had a very active curiosity about Hardin. The man’s failures had been spectacular.
The young fellow was thinking aloud. “The dam went November twenty-ninth. Hardin was given a decent interval to resign. Of course, he was fired. It was an outrage—” He remembered that he was speaking to a stranger, and broke off suddenly. Rickard did not question him. He made another note. Why was it an outrage, or why did it appear so? In perspective, from the Mexican barranca, where he had been at the time, the failure of that dam had been another bar sinister against Hardin.
“I see that you are from the University of California?” he said, following his courier to the door that opened on a long covered inner porch. Another lawn of alfalfa rested the eyes weary of dust and sand. A few willows and castor-beans of mushroom habit shut out the desert, denied the lean naked presence just beyond the leafy screen. Rickard nodded at the pin of gold and blue enamel.
“Out for a year,” glowed the lad. “Dad wanted me to get some real stuff in my head. He said the Colorado would give me more lessons—more real knowledge in a year than I’d get in six at college. I kicked up an awful row—”
The older man smiled. “Of course. You didn’t want to leave your class.”
“You’re a college man, then.” Rickard uncovered his “frat” pin under his vest lapel. “Father wasn’t. He couldn’t understand. It was tough.”
“You don’t want to go back now?”
The boy made a wry face. “He expects me to go back in August. Says I must. Think I’d leave the desert if the Colorado goes on another rampage? Miss the chance of a lifetime? I’ll make him see it. If I don’t, I’ll buck, that’s all.”
“You did not tell me your name,” was suggested.
“MacLean, George MacLean,” said the young man rather consciously. It was a good deal to live up to. He always felt the appraisement which followed that admission. George MacLean, elder, was known among the railroad circles to be a man of iron, one of the strongest of the heads of the Overland Pacific system. He was not the sort of man a son could speak lightly of disobeying.
“Of course, every one calls me Junior.”
“I guess you’ll go back if he wants you to,” smiled Rickard.
“Oh, but what a rotten trick it would be!” exclaimed the son of the man of iron. “To throw me out of college—I was daffy to finish with my class, and to get me here, to get me interested—and then after I’ve lost my place to pull me back. Why, there are things happeningevery day that are a liberal education. They are only just beginning to understand what they are bucking up against. The Colorado’s an unknown quantity, even old engineers are right up against it. There are new problems coming up every day. The Indians call her a yellow dragon, but she’s a tricky woman, she’s an eel; she’s giving us sums to break our teeth on.”
The man smiled at the eager mongrel imagery.
“I’ll not go,” said MacLean.
“Fathers seem wise the year after where they seem blind the year before!”
“I’ll not go!” the boy blustered. Rickard suspected that he was bolstering up his courage.
“Who has the next room?”
“Used to be the general manager’s. Ogilvie uses it now.”
“And who did you say was Ogilvie?” They turned back into the room.
“You can go in. He’s not here. He is the new auditor, an expert accountant from Los Angeles. Put in by the O. P. when it assumed control last year. He used to come down once a month. After Hardin went out, he came down to stay.”
“Whose say-so?”
“I don’t know. The accounts were rotten, that’s no office secret. The world knows that. Hardin is blamed for it. It isn’t fair. Look at Sather’s stone palace in Los Angeles. Look at Hardin’s tent, his shabby clothes.”
“I’d like to meet Ogilvie,” observed the general manager.
“Oh, he’s not much to meet. A pale white-livered vegetarian, a theosophist. You’ve seen ’em. Los Angelesis full of ’em. He was here when Hardin was fired. You could see him see his opportunity. His chest swelled up. He looked as if he had tasted meat for the first time. He thought that he could woozle into the empty place! He went back to Los Angeles, convinced them that the auditor should be here, protect the company’s interests. It sounded mysterious, sleuth-like, as if he had discovered something, so they let him bring the books down here. He is supposed to be ferreting. But he’s ‘woozling.’ He used to be in the outer office. Said the noise made his head ache, so he moved in here. All the committee meetings are held here, and occasionally the directors’ meetings. Water companies’, too. Ogilvie’s taking notes—wants to be the next general manager, it sticks out all over him.”
“What’s the derivation of woozle?” this with deep gravity.
“Wait till you see Ogilvie!” laughed his entertainer. Then as an afterthought: “This is all public gossip. He’s fair game.”
The door opened behind them, and Rickard saw the man whose description had been so deftly knocked off. He recognized the type seen so frequently in Southern California towns, the pale damaged exile whose chance of reprieve is conditioned by stern rules of diet and sobriety. It was the temperament which must perforce translate a personal necessity into a religious dogma.
“This gentleman’s just,—is just looking around,” stammered MacLean, blundering, confused.
The vegetarian nodded, taking off his felt sombrero and putting it on a chair with care.
The stranger observed that he had pleasant quarters.
Ogilvie said that they answered very well.
“Are there other offices than those I have seen?” Rickard demanded of MacLean.
He shook his head. “Dormitories. We sleep here, a lot of us when we are not on duty. At least, we don’t sleep inside, unless it blows us in. We sleep out there.” He nodded in the direction of the lawn. “We dress and ‘gas’ in there.” His hand waved toward the rooms beyond.
By this time it was apparent that no one, save Hardin, knew of his coming. He was ahead of Marshall’s letters. He did not like the flavor of his entrance.
“What provision is being made for a new general manager?”
The question, aimed carelessly, hit the auditor.
“They are not talking of filling the position just yet,” he responded. “There is no need, at present. The work is going along nicely, better I might say, adjusted as it now is, than it did before.”
“I heard that they had sent a man from the Tucson office to represent Mr. Marshall.”
“Did you hear his name?” stammered Ogilvie.
“Rickard.”
The auditor recovered himself. “I would have heard of it, were it true. I am in close touch with the Los Angeles office.”
“It is true.”
“How do you know?” Ogilvie’s dismay was too sudden; the flabby facial muscles betrayed him.
“I’m Rickard.” The new general manager took the swivel chair behind the flat-top desk. “Sit down. I’d like to have a talk with you.”
“If you will excuse me,” Ogilvie’s bluff was as anemic as his crushed appearance. “I—I am busy thismorning. Might I—trouble you—for a few minutes? My papers are in this desk.”
Rickard now knew his man to the shallow depths of his white-corpuscled soul. “If I won’t be in your way, I’ll hang around here. I’ve the day to kill.”
His sarcasm was lost in transit. Ogilvie said that Mr. Rickard would not be in his way. He would move his papers into the next room to-morrow.
The engineer moved to the French windows that opened on the alfalfa lawn. A vigorous growth of willows marked the course of New River which had cut so perilously near the towns. A letter, “b,” picked out in quick river vegetation told the story of the flood. The old channel, there it was; the curved arm of the “b,” one could tell that by the tall willows, had been too tortuous, too slow for those sweeping waters. The flow had divided, cutting the stem of the letter, carrying the flood waters swifter down-grade. The flow had divided,—hm! divided perhaps the danger, too! An idea in that! He would see that better from the water-tower he’d spied at entering. Another flood, and a gamble whether Mexicali or Calexico would get the worst of it. Unless one was ready. A levee—west of the American town!
“Excuse me, sir—do you need me?” He turned back into the room. He could see that MacLean was aching to get out of the room. Ogilvie had visibly withered. A blight seemed to fall on him as his white blue-veined fingers made a bluff among his papers.
“Thank you.” Rickard nodded at MacLean, who burst into the outer office.
“It’s the new general manager from Tucson—Rickard’s his name.” His whisper ran around the walls ofthe room where other arrivals were tilting their chairs. “The new general manager! Ogilvie woozled for nothing. You should have seen his face!”
“Did any one know that he was coming?” Silent, the tanned giant, spoke.
“That’s Marshall all over,” said Wooster, bright-eyed and wiry, removing his pipe. “He likes to move in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. (Used to sing that when I was a kid!) No announcement. Simply: ‘Enter Rickard!’”
“More like this,” said Silent. “Exit Hardin. Enter Ogilvie. Enter Rickard.”
“And exit Ogilvie,” cried MacLean.
“It’s a—damned shame,” burst out Wooster. No one asked him what he meant. Every man in the room was thinking of Hardin whose shadow this reclamation work was.
“What’s Rickard doing?” asked the infantile Hercules at the checker-board. The force called him Pete, which was a short cut to Frederick Augustus Bodefeldt.
“Taking Ogilvie’s measure,” this from MacLean.
“Then he’s doing something else by this time. That wouldn’t take him five minutes unless he’s a gull,” snapped Wooster, who hated Ogilvie as a rat does a snake.
The door opened and Rickard came in. Almost simultaneously the outer door opened to admit Hardin. Who would introduce the new general manager to the dismissed one? The thought flashed from MacLean to Silent, to the telegraph operator. Bodefeldt doubled over the checker-board, pretending not to see them. Confusion, embarrassment was on every face. Nobody spoke. Hardin was coming closer.
“Hello, Hardin.”
“Hello, Rickard.”
It appeared friendly enough to the surprised office. Both men were glad that it was over.
“Nice offices,” remarked Hardin, his legs outspread, his hands in his pockets.
“Ogilvie is satisfied with them.” The men rather overdid the laugh.
“Finding the dust pretty tough?” inquired Hardin.
“I spent a month in San Francisco last summer!” was the rejoinder. “This is a haven, though, from the street. Thought I’d loaf for to-day.” Was Hardin game to do the right thing, introduce him as the new chief to his subordinates? Nothing, it developed, was further from his intention. Hardin, his legs outstretched, kept before his face the bland impenetrable smile of the oriental. It was clearly not Rickard’s move. The checker players fidgeted. Rickard’s silence was interrogative. Hardin still smiled.
The outer door opened.
The newcomer, evidently a favorite, walked into a noisy welcome, the “boys’” embarrassment overdoing it. He was of middle height, slender; a Mexican with Castilian ancestry written in his high-bred features, his grace and his straight dark hair.
“Good morning, Estrada,” said Hardin with the same meaningless smile.
“Good morning, gentlemen.” The Mexican’s greeting paused at Rickard.
“Mr. Estrada, Mr. Rickard.”
Every one in the office saw Hardin snub his other opportunity. He had betrayed to every one his deep hurt,his raw wound. When he had stepped down, under cover of a resignation, he had saved his face by telling every one that a rupture with Maitland, one of the directors of the reorganized company, had made it impossible for them to serve together, and that Maitland’s wealth and importance to the company demanded his own sacrifice. Two months before Rickard’s appearance, Maitland had been discovered dead in his bath in a Los Angeles hotel. Though no one had been witless enough to speak of their hope to Hardin, he knew that all his force was daily expecting his reinstatement. Rickard’s entrance was another stab to their chief.
“The son of the general?” The new manager held out his hand. “General Estrada, friend of Mexican liberty, founder of steamship companies and father of the Imperial Valley?”
“That makes me a brother of the valley,” Estrada’s smile was sensitive and sweet.
“He did good work in his day,” added Rickard rather stupidly.
Estrada looked at Hardin, hesitated, then passed on to the checker players, and stood behind MacLean.
“I saw your father in Los Angeles.”
MacLean’s eager face flushed. “Did you speak to him? Did you tell him how hard it would be for me to go back?”
“I did what I could. But it was a busy time. There were several meetings of the board. At the last two, he was present.”
“You mean?”
“He was chosen to fill the vacancy made by Maitland’s death.”
MacLean’s eyes wavered toward Hardin, whose nonchalance had not faltered. Had he not heard, or did he know, already?
“I’d like to have a meeting, a conference, to-morrow morning.” Rickard was speaking. “Mr. Hardin, will you set the hour at your convenience?”
Because it was so kindly done, Hardin showed his first resentment. “It will not be possible for me to be there. I’m going to Los Angeles in the morning.” He turned and left the office, Estrada following him.
“Oh, Mr. Hardin, you mustn’t take it that way,” he expostulated, concern in each sensitive feature.
“I’ll take orders from him, but he gave me none,” growled Hardin. “It’s not what you think. I’m not sore. But I don’t like him. He’s a fancy dude. He’s not the man for this job.”
“Then you knew him before?” It was a surprise to Estrada.
“At college. He was my—er, instructor. Marshall found him in the class room. A theory-slinger.”
Estrada’s thoughtful glance rested on the angry face. Was this genuine, or did not Hardin know of the years Rickard had served on the road; of the job in the heat-baked barrancas of Mexico where Marshall had “found” him? But he would not try again to persuade Hardin to give up his trip to Los Angeles. It might be better, after all, for the new manager to take charge with his predecessor out of the way.
“MacLean’s coming down to-night,” he threw out, still watching Hardin’s face. “With Babcock.”
“I won’t be missed.” Hardin’s mouth was bitter. “Estrada, if I had the sense of a goat, I’d sell out, sell my stock to MacLean, and quit. What’s in all this, forme? Does any one doubt my reason for staying? It would be like leaving a sinking ship, like deserting the passengers and crew one had brought on board. God! I’d like to go! But how can I? I’ve got hold of the tail of the bear, and I can’t let go!”
“No one doubts you—” began Estrada. Hardin turned away, with an ugly oath. The Mexican stood watching his stumbling anger. “Poor Hardin!”
In the office, Rickard was speaking to MacLean, whom he had drawn to one side, out of ear-shot of the checker players.
“I want you to do something for me, not at all agreeable!” His tone implied that the boy was not given the chance to beg off. “What time does the train pull out in the morning?”
“Six-fifteen.”
“I’ll have a letter for you, at the hotel at six. Be on time. I want to catch Hardin before he leaves for Los Angeles. If he’s really going. I’ll give him to-day to think it over. But he can’t disregard an order as he did my invitation. I didn’t want to rub it in before the men.”
MacLean stared; then said that he thought he was not likely to!
Rickard left the office in time to see Hardin shutting the outer gate behind him. His exit released a chorus of indignant voices.
“An outrage!”
“A damned shame!” This from Wooster.
“Hardin’s luck!”
On the other side of the door, Rickard deliberated. The hotel and its curious loungers, or his new office, where Ogilvie was making a great show of occupation? He had not seen Estrada. He was making a suddendive for his hotel, when the gentle voice of the Mexican hailed him.
“Will you come to my car? It’s on the siding right here. We can have a little lunch, and then look over some maps together. I have some pictures of the river and the gate. They may be new to you.”
Rickard spent the afternoon in the car. The twin towns did not seem so hostile. He thought he might like the Mexican.
Estrada was earning his father’s mantle. He was the superintendent of the road which the Overland Pacific was building between the twin towns and the Crossing; a director of the Desert Reclamation Company; and the head of a small subsidiary company which had been created to protect rights and keep harmonious relation with the sister country. Rickard found him full of meat, and heard, for the first time consecutively, the story of the rakish river. Particularly interesting to him was the relation of Hardin to the company.
“He has the bad luck, that man!” exclaimed Estrada’s soft tuneful voice. “Everything is in his hands, capital is promised, and he goes to New York to have the papers drawn up. The day he gets there, theMaineis destroyed. Of course, capital is shy. He’s had the devil’s own luck with men: Gifford, honest, but mulish; Sather, mulish and not honest—oh, there’s a string of them. Once, he went to Hermosillo to get an option on my father’s lands. They were already covered by an option held by some men in Scotland. Another man would have waited for the three months to pass. Not Hardin. He went to Scotland, thought he’d interest those men with his maps and papers. He owned all the data, then. He’d made the survey.”
Estrada repeated the story Brandon and Marshall had told, with little discrepancy. A friendly refrain followed the narrative. “He has the bad luck, that man!”
“And the Scotched option?” reminded Rickard, smiling at his own poor joke.
“It was just that. A case of Hardin luck again. He stopped off in London to interest some capital there; following up a lead developed on the steamer. He was never a man to neglect a chance. Nothing came of it, though, and when he reached Glasgow, he found his man had died two days before. Or been killed, I’ve forgotten which. Three times Hardin’s crossed the ocean trying to corner the opportunity he thought he had found. It isn’t laziness, is his trouble. It’s just infernal luck.”
“Or over-astuteness, or procrastination,” criticized his listener to himself. He knew now what it was that had so changed Hardin. A man can not travel, even though he be hounding down a quick scent, without meeting strong influences. He had been thrown with hard men, strong men. It was an inevitable chiseling; not a miracle.
“I want to hear more of this some day. But this map. I don’t understand what you told me of this by-pass, Mr. Estrada.”
Their heads were still bending over Estrada’s rough work-bench when the Japanese cook announced that dinner was waiting in the adjoining car. MacLean and Bodefeldt and several young engineers joined them.
It had been, outwardly, a wasted day. Rickard had lounged, socially and physically. But before he turned in that night, he had learned the names and dispositions of his force; and some of their prejudices. Nothing, he summed up, could be guessed from the gentleness of the Mexican’s manner; Wooster’s antagonism was openand snappish. Silent was to be watched; and Hardin had already shown his hand.
The river, as he thought of it, appeared the least formidable of his opponents. He was imaging it as a high-spirited horse, maddened by the fumbling of its would-be captors. His task it was to lasso the proud stallion, lead it in bridled to the sterile land. No wonder Hardin was sore; his noose had slipped off one time too many! Hardin’sluck!