CHAPTER XITHE RIVALS
FROM the window of the adobe office building of the company, Hardin saw Rickard jump from the rear platform of the train as it slowed into the station. He noticed that the new manager carried no bag.
“Wonder what he’s decided to do about the head-gate. He didn’t waste much time out there.” Hardin was fidgeting in his seat, his eyes on the approaching figure. His desk was cluttered with untouched papers; there was a report to be made; Hardin had several times made a great show of getting out his books, sharpening his pencils, but he was as restless as a girl when a lover’s declaration lingers. Marshall had held up the gate—what did Marshall know about it, he’d like to know, sitting at his office desk in Tucson? They were losing valuable time. He wondered what Rickard would report to his chief; he vowed to himself that he would not show his eagerness by inquiring. “Ask him, please him by truckling? I’d see the gate rot first.”
Rickard passed through the room, nodding to his office force. The door of the inner office shut behind him. Hardin stared at the blank surface. He moved restlessly in his swivel chair. Did the fellow think a big thing like that could hang on while he unpacked his trunks and settled his bureau drawers? He picked up apencil, jabbing at the paper of his report. He covered the sheet with figures—three hundred—six hundred. Six hundred feet. Whose fault that the intake had widened, doubling its width, trebling its problem? Whose but Marshall’s, who had sent down one of his office clerks to see what Hardin was doing? Wouldn’t any man in his senses know that the way Maitland would distinguish himself would be by discrediting Hardin, by throwing bouquets to Marshall; praisinghisplan? They all go at it the same sickening way! Office clerks, bah! Sure, Maitland had advised against the completion of the gate. Said it would cost more in time and money than Hardin’s estimates. “Thanks to Maitland it did,” growled Hardin, scrawling figures over the page. “By the time Maitland finished monkeying with that toy dam of his the river had widened the break from three hundred to six hundred feet. For that, they throw mud at me. Oh, it makes me sick.” Hardin flung his broken pencil out of the window.
Rickard reentered the room. The question leaped from Hardin.
“The head-gate—are you going on with it?”
Rickard looked curiously at the flushed antagonistic face of the man he had supplanted. The thought crossed his mind that perhaps Hardin had taken to drinking. It made his answer curt.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know!”
“I have no report to make, Mr. Hardin, until I see the gate.”
“And you went to the Crossing without going down to the head-gate?” Hardin did not try to conceal his disgust.
“I did not go to the Crossing.”
“Didn’t go—!” Hardin’s mouth was agape. Then he rudely swiveled his chair. The door slammed behind Rickard.
Hadn’t been to the Crossing? Then where in Hades did he go? “Truckling to MacLean! Those office clerks! I know them. Jumping for favors from the man higher up.” He ticked off on his fingers the days the new manager had already squandered. Saturday, he threw in perversely the day of Rickard’s arrival, Saturday, Sunday, he loafed all day Sunday, Monday—and this was Wednesday. What could a man find in the valley to do if he didn’t rush straight to the gate? The gate upon which the whole valley hung? Gerty’s dinner occurred to him. “He never intended to come,” he reflected with satisfaction. “He’ll have to be starting for the Heading to-morrow. Already, it’s a farce, five days!”
He halted MacLean who was passing him, a stenographic pad under his arm, a battered copy ofThorns and Orange Blossomsin his hand. He was cramming night and day, requisitioning the good-natured to read aloud at a snail’s pace. He had found the novel under Bodefeldt’s bureau and had held up Pete to give him a page of dictation from the classic.
“Are you going to the Crossing to-morrow?” Hardin knew he should be too proud to betray his eagerness, but the words ran away with him.
“Not to-morrow. Mr. Rickard just told me he might not be able to get off until next week.”
Hardin’s anger sputtered. “Next week. Why does he rush so? Why doesn’t he go next year? The Colorado’s so gentle, it’d wait for him, I’m sure. Next week! It’s a put-up job, that’s what it is. Oh, I can see through a fence with a knot-hole as big as your head. He doesn’twant to finish the head-gate. He wants to put off going until it’s too late to go on with it; I know him. He’d risk the whole thing, and all the money the O. P. has chucked into it, just to start with a clean slate; to get the glory of stopping the river himself. It turns my stomach; it’s a plot.” The lower lip shot out.
MacLean’s attention was deferential. He had always liked Hardin; all the fellows did. But he was jumping off wrong this time. He’d brought it all on himself.
“One would think he’d been brought up in a convent, he finds the valley so distracting. Time to go to dinners. Sickening!”
MacLean did not understand the allusion.
“He said,” MacLean hesitated, wondering if the statement had been a confidence. But Bodefeldt had been there. “He said something about a levee for the towns. He’s got to investigate that before he goes to the front.”
“A levee? Well, wouldn’t that jar you?” Hardin addressed the stenographer in the transparent shirt-waist. “Does he think we’re going to have another flood this season? Thinks it’s going to reach the hotel and wet his clothes? Take the starch out of his shirts?” He flung out of his chair, throwing the papers back into a drawer.
He stamped out of the office, mad clear through. To this crisis they had sent down a dandy, a bookman who wanted to build a levee. Oh, hell! He laughed out his bitterness aloud, and did not care that Coulter, who kept the store, and two gaily dressed squaws turned to look after him. For it was a crisis, and the O. P. was making it so. They should have learned their lesson by this time. TrustMaitland? And now, Rickard!
“They’ll come crawling after me to help them after this fellow’s buried himself under river mud, come callingto me as they did after Maitland failed. ‘Please, Mr. Hardin, won’t you come back and finish your gate!’ I’ll see them dead first. No, I’ll be fool enough to do it. I can’t help myself. I’m a Hardin. I have to finish what I’ve begun.”
It was not because this was a pet enterprise, the great work of his life, that he must eagerly eat humble pie, take the buffets, the falls, and come whining back when they whistled to him. He told himself that it was because of his debt to the valley, to the ranchers. He saw himself sacrificing everything to a great obligation. “Who was the Bible fellow who led his people across the desert? I must polish up my Bible,” he resolved. He remembered that he had not opened one since his mother’s death, and that was so long past that the thought brought no physical thrill.
The colonists were about desperate. Who could blame them? The last year’s floods had worked havoc with their crops; this year had been a horror. The district they called Number Six was a screaming irony of ruin. The last debauch of the river had made great gashes through the ranches, had scoured deep gorges which had undermined the canals on which the water supply for Number Six depended. The suits were piling up against the D. R., damage suits, and they hold up his gate, while he gets the curses of the valley. And Mr. Rickard thinks he’ll build a levee!
Hardin was in the mood to fancy slights. He was convinced that Petrie went back into the bank to avoid him. Two ranchers, Hollister and Wilson, from the Palo Verde, busy with their teams, did not return his halloo. The ranchers hated him. “That’s what you get for crucifying yourself.”
He flung himself on the couch in the tent. Gerty was laying a careful cloth for supper. A brave determined smile was arranged on her lips. The noon storm had passed. She hummed a gay little tune. If there was anything Hardin hated, it was humming.
“You’ll have your dude to dinner all right,” her husband announced. “He’s in town.”
“Yes, I know,” rejoined his spouse. “I had a letter from him yesterday. From Imperial.”
Tom sat up glaring. “He wrote to you fromImperial?”
His wife misplaced the accent. She misunderstood Tom’s scowl. It was the old story over again. Whenever those two men came together, the old feeling of jealousy must be revived again! It was unpleasant, of course, very unpleasant to have men care like that, but it made life exciting. Life had been getting a little stale lately; like a book of obvious even plot. Rickard’s entrance into the story gave a new interest, a new twist. She hummed an air from a new opera that had set the world waltzing.
Hardin’s thoughts did not touch her at the hem. He was at the head-gate, his gate. What the deuce had Rickard gone to Imperial for? If he wasn’t the darndest ass! Imperial! And the gate hung up!
“For God’s sake stop that buzzing!”
The happy little noise was quenched. Innes, entering at that moment, heard the rough order. She looked imploringly at her sister-in-law.
“Supper’s on the table,” cried Gerty, the fixed determined smile still on her lips.