CHAPTER XXVTHE STOKERS
“COMPLETE, isn’t it?” Estrada was leading Innes Hardin through the engineers’ quarters.
“Yes, it’scomplete!”
Her brother had told her at breakfast that morning how grandly they had been wasting time! She would not let herself admire the precision of the arrangements, the showers back of the white men’s quarters, the mesquit-shaded kitchen. Gerty’s elaborate settling was of a piece, it would seem, with the new management. Housekeeping, not fighting, then, the new order of things!
Tom was afire to get his gate done. She knew what it meant to him; to the valley. The flood waters had to be controlled. That depended, Tom had proved to her, on the gate. And the men dance and play house, as if they were children, and every day counting!
She thought she was keeping her accusations to herself, but Estrada was watching her face.
“We are here, you know, for a siege. There are months of work ahead, hot months, hard months. The men have got to be kept well and contented. We can’t lose any time by sickness”— He wanted to add “and dissensions.” The split camp was painful to him, anEstrada. “Even after we finish the gate, if we do finish it—”
She wheeled on him, her eyes gleaming like deep yellow jewels. “You’ve never thought we could finish it!”
Estrada hesitated over his answer.
“You are a friend of Tom’s, Mr. Estrada?”
“Surely! But I am also an admirer of Mr. Rickard, I mean of his methods. I can never forget the levee.”
She had to acknowledge that Rickard had scored there. And the burning of the machinery had left a wound that she still must salve.
“You have no confidence in the gate?”
“The conditions have changed,” urged Estrada. “You’ve seen the mess-tent? As it was planned, it was all right, a hurry-up defense. Marshall all along intended the concrete gate for the permanent intake. Have you seen the gap the Hardin gate is to close? Have you heard what the last floods did to it? It’s now twenty-six hundred feet, and Disaster Island, which your brother planned to anchor to, swept away! If it can be done, it will, you can rest assured, with Rickard—” he saw the Hardin mouth then!—“and your brother’s zeal, and the strength of the railroad back of them. I haven’t shown you the office yet. Can you stand this glare? You ought to have smoked glasses.”
“I have. I forgot them.” She pulled her wide Mexican brim low over her eyes.
The camp formed a hollow trapezium; the Hardins’ tents, and Mrs. Dowker’s, were isolated on the short parallel. Rickard’s ramada and his tent were huddled with the engineers’. Across, toward the river, behind Ling’s mesquits, began another polygon, the camp offoremen and white labor. Some of these tents were empty.
“Is this Mexico, or the states?” asked Innes.
“Mexico.” She wondered why he halted so abruptly. She did not see, for the glare in her eyes, a woman’s skirt in the ramada they approached.
Estrada marched on.
Outside the ramada, the two women met. Gerty’s step carried her past like a high-bred horse. Her high heels cut into the hard sand. There was a suggestion of prance in her mien. She waved her hand gaily at the two, cried, “How hot it is!” and passed on.
Innes saw Rickard at his long pine table used for a desk.
“I can see it all from here.” Not for money would the sister of Tom Hardin go in!
Estrada saw by her face that the hope of conciliating the ex-manager by the sister was a false trail. She threw a curt nod to MacLean whom her glance just caught.
“Where are we going now?”
“I’m planning a trip to Arizona!” he returned. “You think this is all play. Now I’m going to show you the ‘stokers.’”
A few minutes later, he called out to her: “Step high!”
She looked at the ground, and then inquiringly at him. The ground was as flat as a hardwood floor.
“You are crossing the line,” he announced. “You are now in Arizona.”
“I thought the Indian camp was in Mexico, too?”
“No, across the river to avoid custom’s duty. See those roofs of boughs?”
He was making for a knoll from whence they could get a view of the river, and of the Hardin gate.
Her memory isolated a word of his. “The stokers—who are they?”
“We call them that. The brush-cutters. They look for all the world like the poor wretches in the ship’s engine-room.”
“Indians?”
“I wish they were. No, Mexicans. Rickard couldn’t get enough Indians, and Mexicans can’t stand this.”
Beyond them stretched the river of yellow waters, dividing like the letter Y, the east branch the dry bed of the Colorado. From a distance they could see the great arm of the dredge drop into the mud of the new channel, by which the water was to be diverted through the Hardin gate. Innes watched the bucket rise, dripping with soft silt, saw the elbow crook as the arm swung slowly toward the bank.
“That’s where you danced last night,” he observed.
“I thought I was on a cruiser!”
“A cruiser’s also a battle-ship!”
A hot sweet smell rose from the bank. She thought her sudden sway of faintness was from the sun.
“It’s too much for you. That’s the arrow-weed.”
“I’ve smelt arrow-weed before. This is different.”
“Not in quantity before, Miss Hardin. I shouldn’t have brought you here. We will go back.”
“Is this what they are cutting?”
“They’re the stokers.”
“I don’t see them.” Her eyes questioned the mat of undergrowth.
“You can’t.”
She could not detect a human figure moving in theclot of branches. Then she caught the gleam of a machete. A face peered from an opening, blackened and strangling. Her cry sounded like pain.
“Oh, did you see him?” Dripping with sweat, gasping, it made a horrid sight.
“It’s not all play!” he observed.
“Look what he is doing, no, not that one.” From the tangle came running a dripping human. He tossed his hands, staring up at the burning bowl of a sky. No help there! The sun-baked sands, glittering like brass, gave no escape. He raised his hands, and they could see him take the poise of diver; like a projectile he shot into the pool of living green beneath.
“He thinks it’s water,” whispered Innes.
“He’sgot it,” cried Estrada, caught with excitement. “It’s a madness. One man died yesterday.”
“Died!”
“Why, no white man, for they’re white, those Mexican, can stand that hole. It’s an inferno. There have been two deaths already. If another goes, they’ll walk out. I’ve told Rickard; he knows. They’re superstitious as niggers—the third death—they’re boiling with discontent already. Then where’ll we be, where’ll the gate be?” The graceful indolence of the Cardenas was gone; he was all Estrada now, vehement and impassioned.
“He may die?”
“I shouldn’t have brought you here!”
He tried to get her away. Her eyes would not leave that pool of living green, the hole that the poor wretch had thought was cooling waters. The smell of cut arrow-weed, sickly sweet, smote against her nostrils. Then she saw a movement in the undergrowth. A group ofmen were pulling him out—she saw his face, distorted, livid. His lips were chattering; he screamed like a raucous ape.
“Did you see him?” she breathed.
“I sawthem,” his answer was grim. He watched them, their composite expression foreboding, as they bore to camp the struggling madman.
“Is he really mad? Do they get over it?”
“They get over it!” He did not tell her how! To divert her, he told her that these were the men for whom Porter had been scouring Zacatecas.
“Mexicans don’t take kindly to a contract when it means arrow-weed. Rickard’s Indians haven’t come yet, the men Forestier’s promised; he’s the Indian agent. The hoboes are still wandering in, but not in the numbers we expected. Rickard was right. You can’t count on that sort of labor.”
Rickard was right? She glanced sharply at the beautiful face of her companion. Then who was wrong? She was growing sensitive, ready for a slight to hit her brother.
“If they go, I wouldn’t swap places with Rickard.” The Mexican was moody.
For the first time, she forgot to notice the incongruity of his speech. His years at an American college had given him a vocabulary which belied his nationality. She was resenting his concern. Every one thinking of Rickard! What responsibility was his? He was here to direct the work, but if it failed, was the stigma not all her brother’s? She flamed into speech.
“It’s a snap for him, for Mr. Rickard,” she cried. “All the pioneering, the breaking of earth has beendone!Your father, Mr. Estrada, and my brother paved the way for him. With the entire equipment of a great organization like the O. P. behind him—money, men, everything, it isn’t fair. He’ll walk in and win, and the world will think he did it.”
“You wouldn’t like it to fail, would you? And it’s not so easy as you think, Miss Hardin.” He was carefully picking his way. “He’s told he has a free hand, but he hasn’t. The work’s stopped up there at Laguna; there’s no use going on with that until we make good. If we can’t control the river here, their quicksand works go, but you know that?”
She nodded. Tom had told her all that.
“Those men are swarming in here like bees to honey. They’ve been told to help, and then they are curious. They have all got ideas of their own. And they’re talking and writing to the higher-ups. It all gets back to Rickard, sooner or later.”
“He doesn’t have to please them,” murmured the girl.
“Not directly. But the O. P. didn’t go into this forever! The road was the most deeply interested corporation with power. Marshall got Faraday to promise to put up the money. He promised to make it good with his own money if he couldn’t stop the river. I heard this on the inside! But he wanted it stopped his way. He wanted his own men in, men who would take his orders—” he pulled himself away from thin ice. “The O. P. did not expect to get in as they have. Now, they can’t get out! The work’s got to please the Service men, or it won’t be recommended to the government. That’s what’s tying Rickard up—that, and other things.”
It sounded new to her.
“And some of these fellows are yelling so, you can hear them in Washington.” She stole an amused look at him. How American he was!
They were back at the encampment. Slowly, they walked across the open space, which was glittering in the sun. Innes was acknowledging, silently, a headache. The trip, she said to herself, had depressed her.
When they reached the Hardin tents, she felt obliged to offer hospitality. “Won’t you come in, Mr. Estrada? My sister would love to make a cup of tea for you.” She knew her invitation lacked cordiality. Her temples were bursting. “It’s an eye headache,” she told herself. “I should have had my glasses.”
She tried to forget it as she thanked him for “her trip into Mexico,” and renewed her invitation to tea.
He said he had to go, but he lingered. He said good-by, and stayed. His look held hers for that instant, the look she could never fathom. Then he turned away. She watched him out of sight.
At table, that evening, her family heard with surprise Gerty’s announcement that they were to eat in the mess-tent with the men. It was too hot to cook any longer; this had been one of the hottest days in the year.
“Let me cook!” urged Innes. “It’s only fair. And I want to do something to justify my being here.” Her words recurred to Gerty later.
“Sometimes the autumn heat is the worst. Besides, it is all arranged. We begin to-morrow. You heard too, then, what Mr. Rickard said about not wanting women in camp?”
“No, I did not! But to be here without doing anything, just being one more mouth to feed, and head to cover—I’d feel more comfortable,” she added.
“He gave it out in the towns that he did not want men’s wives or families following them to the Heading. He made an exception for Mrs. Parrish—she was too timid to leave, and Mrs. Dowker, and, of course, it was different with me.”
Innes felt uncomfortable.
“It’s all right being with Tom,” she began.
“Why is it all right? Who am I?” He lifted his eyes from his plate. It came home to Innes that it was not his camp any longer. She thought, then, that she would go back to Los Angeles the next week.
She expected to hear a protest to the new arrangement from Tom. She was to see a new development—sullen resignation. If he would accept it, she must not argue. Both sister and brother knew why it was too warm to cook any longer. Gerty found them both dull.
“That poor Mexican.” She remembered Estrada’s concern. “The one who went mad? Have you heard how he was?”
“Dead. The peons are all stampeding.”
“Who’s stampeding?” Gerty came back from a deep reverie. Lavender, it had just been decided, was to be the color of the next frock. It was cool and not too positive. She must remember to send out for samples that day. She could not recall having heard Rickard express himself about colors. She wondered if he had preferences or aversions to shades. He must like green; she remembered he had admired that mandarin skirt. “And if the lavender fades, I can rinse it in purple ink.”
Innes was telling Tom of the tragedy of the afternoon.
“Oh, don’t,” cried Gerty, pushing away her plate. “I can’t hear of such things.” They saw that her pretty eyes were full of tears. “You know I can’t.”