CHAPTER XIIITHE FIGHTING CHANCE
“CASEY’S back; spying!” announced Wooster at mess one evening. By that time, the feeling against “Marshall’s man” was actively hostile. There had been a smudge of slumbering fires before Rickard had left the towns. Fanned by much talk during his absence, it had burst into active blaze. They were ready to show their resentment against the man who had supplanted Hardin, their Napoleon, if it cost them their places. By this time the cause of the desert was as compelling to these hardy soldiers as were the lily banners of France to the followers of the Little Corporal.
Rickard was not expected. He had been gone less than a week. The effect of his return was that of a person who returns suddenly into a room, hushing an active babel of tongues. He knew what he would find, ample reasons why! He was not given the satisfaction of locating any particular act of disobedience. The men presented a blank wall of politeness, reasonable and ineffectual. Silent explained, briefly, that he had not been able to collect enough men. Most of the force was busy in the Number Six District, trying to push the shattered Wistaria through by a new route before that year’s crops were entirely ruined. A gang was at Grant’s Heading; the floor needed bracing. Another squad, Irish’s, was inthe Volcano Lake Region, where they were excavating for the new head-gate.
“No hurry for that.” Rickard was glad to pick a flaw in such a perfect pattern. “You might have withdrawn those men, and put them to work on the levee.”
“I was given no authority to do that.”
The chief pretended to accept the reason; else it were a case of changing horses in mid-stream. What he had seen at the Heading, his peep at the exposed valley, his gleaning of the river’s history had convinced him that in haste and concentration lay the valley’s only chance. He must refuse to see the insubordination of the engineers, the seasoned desert-soldiers. He needed them, must win their confidence if he could. If not, they must save the valley, anyway! The imperturbable front of Silent, his bland big stare, exasperated him; easier to control the snapping terrier of a Wooster. He had told Silent distinctly to gather his men and rush the levee. A good soldier had made a better guess than his, and had stopped the casual work at Black Butte, or had found Indians! Thoughtfully, Rickard followed that last suggestion across the ditch into Mexicali.
He gathered all the recruits he needed that morning. The Indians, lazy Cocopahs, crept out of their huts to earn a few of the silver dollars held out to them by the new white boss. A few Mexican laborers were bribed to toss up earth to the west of the town. Estrada, at his request, put a squad of his road force at the service of the manager. He could not spare many men.
The railroad had already started the line projected by Hardin to Marshall the year before, a spur across the desert, dipping into Mexico between the lean restless sand-hills, from Calexico to Yuma. The Mexican governmenthad agreed to pay five thousand dollars a mile were the road completed at a certain period. Estrada was keeping his men on the jump to fill the contract, to make his nation pay the price. The completion of the road meant help to the valley; supplies, men, could be rushed through to the break.
In spite of his haunting sense of ultimate failure, the growing belief in the omnipotence of the Great Yellow Dragon as the Cocopahs visualized it, Estrada’s work was as intense as though he were hastening a sure victory. The dauntless spirit of the elder Estrada pushed the track over the hot sands where he must dance at times to keep his feet from burning. Many of the rails they laid at night.
“Hog-wild!” exclaimed Hardin when he saw the levee for the first time. “Gone hog-wild.” To him, the growing ridge of fine earth, like a soft heap of pulverized chocolate, was an absurd proof of misdirected energy. He walked down with Silent after dark to the gorge the river had cut on its last wild debauch, and stood on the newly upturned mound of earth. There was no water running now in the flood channel; it was a deep dry scar.
“It would be a good idea if it were necessary. It can do no harm.”
“Do no harm, and the gate hung up! He makes me sick. We’ve had all the floods coming to us this twenty years. He’s locking the barn after the horse is gone.”
The calm beauty of that desert night was wasted on the man whose life, he told himself, had been dishonored. He did not smell the pungent breath, the damp moist sweetness of the newly turned earth; did not see the star-pricked canopy spreading out toward illimitable horizons. The moon trailed its cold pale light across the sky, butHardin could not see. His view was a world of his making, a country peopled by his energy, the people who had turned him down. The eyes that were looking at the levee were no longer seeing another man’s folly; they were visualizing his head-gate, the gate that meant safety to the valley, the gate he was not allowed to complete. He was living over again, step by step, the chain of events that led to this exasperating deadlock; himself, incapacitated, helpless, seeing the thing which should be done, powerless to do it. The men who might win, petty enough to let the wish to put him in the wrong override the big opportunity to save the valley! He wondered again why he had not the sense to get out.
“And kick the whole bucket over,” he grumbled. “I would, too, if I had the sense I was born with. Get out, and begin over again somewhere. Not stay for more kicks. They’d find they’d be wanting me back again. I will get out. I’ll not stay a month longer.”
“Rickard’s gone hog-wild,” he told his family the next morning. “Building a levee between the towns! The man’s off his head.”
“There really isn’t any danger?” Gerty’s anxiety made the deep blue eyes look black.
Innes looked up for Tom’s answer. His face was ugly with passion.
“Danger! It’s a bluff, a big show of activity here, because he’s buffaloed; he doesn’t know how to tackle the job out there.”
It had begun to look that way to more than one. It was talked over at Coulter’s store; in the outer office of the D. R. Company where the engineers foregathered; among the chair-tilters who idled in front of the Desert Hotel.“The man does not know how to tackle his job!” A levee, and the gate held up! What protection to the towns would be that toy levee if the river should return on one of its spectacular sprees? A levee, and the intake itself not guarded? He was whispered of as an incompetent; one of Marshall’s clerks. He was given a short time to blow himself out. A bookman, a theorist.
“As well put sentinels a few miles from prison, and leave the jail doors open!” This was Wooster’s gibe. All saw the Colorado as a marauder at large. “And a little heap of sand stacked up to scare it off! It’s a scream!”
Mrs. Hardin found it difficult to meet with diplomacy the confidences which inevitably came her way. As Hardin’s wife, she was expected to enjoy the universal censure the new man was acquiring. Gerty’s light touches, too slight for championship, passed as a sweet charity. Her own position those days was trying. She did not yet know her diplomatic lesson.
Apparently unaware of the talk, Rickard spent the greater part of his time superintending the levee. He could trust no one else to do it, no one unless it were Estrada, who was rushing his steel rails through to the front, and was needed there.
Things were moving under his constant goading. The extra pay was showing results. He should be at the Heading now, he kept telling himself, but he was convinced that the instant he turned his back, the work on the levee would stop; and all the reasons excellent! Some emergency would be cooked up to warrant the withdrawal of the hands. Chafe as he might at the situation, it was to be guerrilla warfare. Not a fight in the open, he knew how to meet that, but this baffling resistance, thepolite silence of the office when he entered,—“Well, they’ll be doing my way pretty soon, or my name isn’t Rickard. That’s flat.”
He was fretting to be at work, to start the wheels of the O. P., its vast machinery toward his problem. He knew that that organization, like well-drilled militia, was ready for his call. The call lagged, not that he did not need men, but there was no place ready for them. The camp, that was another rub. There was no camp! It was not equipped for a sudden inflation of men. The inefficiency of the projectors of this desert scheme had never seemed so criminal as when he had surveyed the equipment at the intake. “Get ready first; your tools, your stoves, your beds.” That was the training of the good executive, of men like Marshall and MacLean. Nothing to be left to chance; to foresee emergencies, not to be taken by them unaware. The reason of Hardin’s downfall was his slipshod habits. How could he be a good officer who had never drilled as a soldier? There was the gap at the intake, Hardin’s grotesque folly, widened from one hundred feet to ten times the original cut; widening every day, with neither equipment nor camp adequate to push through a work of half the original magnitude. Cutting away, moreover, was the island, Disaster Island; it had received apt christening by the engineers, its baptismal water the Colorado. The last floods had played with it as though it were a bar of sugar. There was no rock at hand; no rock on the way, no rock ordered. Could any one piece together such recklessness?
Rickard knew where he would get his rock. Already he had requisitioned the entire output of the Tacna and Patagonia quarries. He had ordered steam shovels tobe installed at the quarry back of old Hamlin’s. That rock pit would be his first crutch, and the gravel bed,—that was a find! As he paced the levee west of the towns, he was planning his campaign. Porter was scouring Zacatecas for men; he himself had offered, as bait, free transportation; the O. P. he knew would back him. He was going to throw out a spur-track from the Heading, touching at the quarry and gravel pit, on to the main road at Yuma. Double track most of the way; sidings every three miles. Rock must be rushed; the trains must be pushed through. He itched to begin. It never occurred to him that, like Hardin, he might fail.
“Though it’s no pink tea,” he told himself, “it’s no picnic.” At Tucson, he knew that the situation was a grave one, but his talk with Brandon, who knew his river signs as does a good Indian, made the year a significant, eventful one. Matt Hamlin, too, whose shrewd eyes had grown river-wise, he, too, had had tales to tell of the tricky river. Maldonado, the half-breed, had confirmed their portents while they sat together under his oleander, famous throughout that section of the country. And powerfully had Cor’nel, the Indian who had piloted Estrada’s party across the desert, whom Rickard had met at the Crossing, deeply had he impressed him. The river grew into a malevolent, mocking personality; he could see it a dragon of yellow waters, dragging its slow sluggish length across the baked desert sands; deceiving men by its inertness; luring the explorer by a mild mood, to rise suddenly with its wild fellow, the Gila, sending boat and boatmen to their swift doom.
Rickard was thinking of the half-breed, Maldonado, as he inspected the new stretch of levee between the towns. He had heard from others besides Estrada ofthe river knowledge of this descendant of trapper and squaw, and had thought it worth while to ride the twenty miles from down the river to talk with him. The man’s suavity, his narrow slits of eyes, the lips thin and facile, deep lines of cruelty falling from them, had repelled his visitor. The mystery of the place followed him. Why the ’dobe wall which completely surrounded the small low dwellings? Why the cautious admittance, the atmosphere of suspicion? Rickard had seen the wife, a frightened shadow of a woman; had seen her flinch when the brute called her. He had questioned Cor’nel about the half-breed. He was remembering the wrinkles of contempt on the old Indian’s face as he delivered himself of an oracular grunt.
“White man? No. Indian? No! Coyote!”
Though he suspected Maldonado would lie on principle, though it might be that two-thirds of his glib tissue were false, yet a thread of truth coincident with the others, Brandon and Hamlin and Cor’nel, might be pulled out of his romantic fabric.
“When the waters of the Gila run red, look for trouble!” He doubted that they ever ran red. He would ask Cor’nel. He had also spoken of a cycle, known to Indians, of a hundredth year, when the Dragon grows restless; this he had declared was a hundredth year.
On the road from Maldonado’s, Rickard had met several Indians swaying from their saddles; a half-breed lurching unsteadily toward Yuma. He had made note of that. Who was selling liquor to those Indians, those half-breeds? Maldonado could have told him, Maldonado who wore the dirty unrecognizable uniform of a rurale. Rickard was going to use Indian labor; must depend, he knew, for steady work, the brush clearing andthe mattress weaving, on the natives. If any one was selling mescal and tequila within a day’s ride of the Heading, it was his place to find out.
Following his talk with Maldonado, and the accidental happy chance meeting with Coronel at the Crossing, Rickard had written his first report to Tod Marshall. Before he had come to the Heading, he had expected to advise against the completion of the wooden head-gate at the Crossing. Hamlin had given him a new view-point. There was a fighting chance. And he wanted to be fair. Next to being successful, he wanted to be fair.
He smiled as he remembered MacLean’s cramped fingers after the dictation was done. “Holy Minnie,” he had exclaimed, rubbing his joints. “If you call that going slow!”
“It’s time to be hearing from Marshall,” Rickard was thinking, as he walked back to the hotel. “I wonder what he will say.” He felt it had been fair to put it up to Marshall; personally, he would like to begin with a clean slate; begin right. Clumsy work had been done, it was true, yet there were urgent reasons now for haste; and the gate was nearly half done! He had gone carefully over the situation. The heavy snowfall, unprecedented for years, a hundred, according to the Indians,—on the Wind River Mountains—the lakes swollen with ice, the Gila restless, the summer floods yet to be met; perhaps, he now thought, he had been overfair in emphasizing the arguments for the head-gate. For the hundred feet were now a thousand feet—yet he had spoken of that to Marshall: “Calculate for yourself the difference in expense since the flood widened the break. It is a vastly different problem now. Disaster Island, which they figured on for anchor, is a mere pit of corroding sugar in thechannel. An infant Colorado could wash it away. However, a lot of work has already been done, and a lot of money spent. There is a fighting chance. Perhaps the bad year is all Indian talk.”
A guess, at best, whatever they did! It was pure gamble what the tricky Colorado would do. Anyway, he had given the whole situation to Marshall.
In his box at the hotel was a telegram which had been sent over from the office; from Tod Marshall. “Take the fighting chance. But remember to speak more respectfully of Indians!”
“Marshall all over,” laughed his subordinate. “Now, it’s a case of hustle! But dollars to doughnuts, as Junior says, we don’t do it!”