CHAPTER XXXITIME THE UMPIRE
A BLAZING sun rode the heavens. The river was low; its yellow waters bore the look of oriental duplicity. Men and horses were being driven to take advantage of the continued low water. Each day was now showing its progress. The two ends of the trestle were creeping across the stream from their brush aprons, as though sentient, feeling their way; watching the foe; ready to spring the trap when the river was off guard.
“Things are humming,” wrote MacLean, Jr., to his father, who was inspecting the survey below Culiacan for the new line on the west coast. The focus was indeed visible. A few weeks of work, at the present rate, and the gap would be closed, Hardin’s big gate in it; the by-pass ready; the trap set for the Colorado. The tensity of a last spurt was in the air.
It was inspiring activity, this pitting of man’s cumulative skill against an elemental force. No Caucasian mind which did not tingle, feel the privileged thrill of it. To the stolid native, as he plodded on his raft all day under a blazing sky, or lifted his machete against the thorny mesquit or more insidious arrow-weed, this day of well-paid toil was his millennium, the fulfilment of the prophecy. His gods had so spoken. Food for his stomach, liquor for his stupefaction; the white man’smoney laid in a brown hand each Sunday morning was what the great gods forespoke. The completion of the work, the white man’s victory, would be an end of the fat time. A dull sense of this deepened the natural stolidity of their labor. Hasten? Why should they, and shorten their day of opportunity? Saturday night, feasting, dancing; then a day of rest, of stupor. To-day is theirs. The gods are speaking.
Between the two camps oscillated Coronel, silently squatting near the whites, jabbering his primitive Esperanto to the tribes. His friendship with the white chiefs, his age and natural leadership gave him a unique position in both camps. Forestier consulted him; Rickard referred to him. He was too lordly to work; long ago, he had thrown his fate with the Cocopahs whose name was a synonym for majestic idleness.
“But he’s worth a dozen workers,” Hamlin had once told Rickard. “Get Coronel on your side. He’s got influence; they do as he says.” Behind that grizzled mask, Rickard surmised a pride of authorship in the reclamation project. Coronel had known Powell; he had crossed the desert with Estrada; that his proudest boast. Assiduously, Rickard cultivated the old Indian who crouched days through by the bank of the river.
The engineers felt the whip of excitement. Silent, up at the Crossing, at work on the great concrete head-gate, which would ultimately control the water supply of the valley, was prodding his men to finish before the winter storms were on. His loyalty to the Hardin gate did not admit a contingency there, but it was the thought which lurked in every man’s mind. Never a man left his camp in the morning who did not look toward that span crawling across the treacherous stream,measure that widened by-pass. Would the gate stand? Would pilings driven through brush mats into a bed of silt, a bottomless pit, hold against that river, should it turn and lash its great tail? The Hardin men halloed for the gate, but looked each morning to see if it were still there. The Reclamation Service men and the engineers of the railroad were openly skeptical; Sisyphus outdone at his own game! Estrada and Rickard looked furtively at the gate, with doubt at each other. Uneasiness electrified the air.
Hardin, himself, was repressed, an eager live wire. His days he spent on the river; his nights, long hours of them, open-eyed, on his back, watching the slow-wheeling, star-pricked dome of desert sky. His was the suspense of the man on trial; this was his trial; Gerty, Rickard, the valley, his judge and jury. Gradually, the peace of the atom lost in infinity would absorb him; toward morning he would sleep. But the first touch of dawn would bring him back to the situation; the sun not so tender as the stars! Dishonored,—he had to make good, to make good to the men who loved him, to prove to Gerty who scorned failure— By the eternal, he must prove to Gerty! She must give him respect from those scornful eyes of hers. If ever he had worked, in his life, he must work for his life now! The gate grew to be a symbol with him of restored honor, an obsession of desire. It must be all right!
Rickard was all over the place, up at the Crossing with Silent at the concrete gate, Marshall’s gate; down the levee inspecting the bank with untiring vigilance; watching the mat-makers on the rafts weave their cross-threads of willow branches and steel cable; directing,reporting. “Watching every piece of rock that’s dumped in the river,” complained Wooster. “Believe he marks them at night!”
They were preparing for the final rush. In a week or two, the work would be continuous, night-shifts to begin when the rock-pouring commenced. Large lamps were being suspended across the channel, acetylene whose candle-power was that of an arc light. Soon there would be no night at the break. When the time for the quick coup would come, the dam must be closed without break or slip. One mat was down, dropped on the floor that had already swallowed two such gigantic mouthfuls; covered with rock; pinned down to the slippery bottom with piles. Another mat was ready to drop; rock was waiting to be poured over it; the deepest place in the channel was reduced from fifteen to seven feet. Each day the overpour, anxiously measured, increased. A third steam-shovel had been added; the railroad sent in several work-trains fully equipped for service; attracted by the excitement, the hoboes were commencing to come in, from New Orleans where the sewer system was finished and throwing men out of work; from Los Angeles, released by the completion of the San Pedro breakwater; from San Francisco they were turning, the excitement over. No fat pickings there!
It was a battle of big numbers, a duel of great force where time was the umpire. Any minute hot weather might fall on those snowy peaks up yonder, and the released waters, rushing down, would tear out the defenses as a wave breaks over a child’s fort made of sand. This was a race, and all knew it. A regular traindespatch system was in force that the inrushing cars might drop their burden of rock and gravel and be off after more. The Dragon was being fed rude meals, its appetite whetted by the glut of pouring rock.
Tod Marshall came down from Tucson in his car. The coming of thePalmyraand Claudia rippled the social waters at the Front for days ahead. Gerty Hardin, to whom had been rudely flung days of leisure, though she still hated Rickard, wondered if she were not glad that her hours were to be her own when the grand Mrs. Marshall came. For Marshall was a great man, the man of the Southwest; his wife, whom she had not yet met, must be a personage. Gerty’s position as a helper of Ling’s might have been misunderstood. Yet too proud to tell her astonished family that she wanted to desert the mess-tent, she shook herself from her injury, and “did up” all her lingerie gowns. Mrs. Marshall was not going to patronize her, even if her husband had snubbed Tom. It was hot, ironing in her tent, the doors closed. It would have hurt her to acknowledge the importance of the impending visit.
Everything carried a sting those indoor hours. She was aflame with hot vanity. Twice, she had openly encouraged him; twice, he had flouted her. That was his kind! Men who prefer Mexicans—! She would never forgive him, never!
She followed devious channels to involve Tom’s responsibility. There was a cabal against the wife of Hardin. Working like a servant! she called it necessity. Everything, every one punished her for that one act of folly. Life had caught her. She saw no way,as she ironed her mull ruffles, no way out of her cage. Her spirit beat wild wings against her bars. If she could see a way out!
She really was not free to establish an honest independent life. Horticulturists speak of the habit of a plant. Psychologists take the long road and find a Mediterranean word; temperament. Gerty was a vine; its habit to cling for support. Her tendrils had been rudely torn, thrown back at herself; world-winds were waiting their chance at her—a vine is not a pretty thing when it trails in the dust— Sometimes she would shiver over her ironing-board when she thought of the dust. She knew her habit, which she, too, called temperament. Nothing to do but to stay with Tom!
Maddening, too, that Rickard would not see that he had hurt her. His bow was just as friendly as before. Friendly! Was that all it had ever been? At the mess-table, she caught his eyes turning toward, resting on, Innes Hardin. The girl herself did not seem to notice—artful, subterranean, such stalking! That was why she had come running back to the Heading! That the reason of her anger when she had hinted of the Maldonado. She learned to hate Innes. Before the girl’s return, she had had a chance; she knew she had had a chance. He had been caught by youth, ah, that the truth that seared! Youth! Youth that need not fear the morning light, the swift passing months!Shehad no time to lose. Her heart felt old.
The mess-meals grew intolerable to her. She would watch for the shock of those conscious glances that she felt every one must see. She, Gerty Hardin, cast aside for a hoyden in khakis! The girl’s play at unconsciousness infuriated her. Deep! Ah, she knew now hergame! Riding fifteen miles down the levee to pay a pretended visit to a laborer’s wife, Mrs. Parrish! As if she were interested in Mrs. Parrish! Jolting in a box-car to see the concrete head-gate with MacLean; walking with Estrada, meeting Rickard, of course, everywhere; her yellow khakis in every corner of the camp. A promiscuous coquette, she changed the word to “careful”; playing her cards slowly; waiting for victory to make a hero of Rickard; pretending to take issue with Tom—ha, she knew her, at last!
Her first call at thePalmyradiscovered the mistress in a wash gown of obscure cut and color, with a white apron a serving maid might wear. Knitting her pale-colored wools, Mrs. Marshall had little to give out but monosyllables. Gerty was forced to carry the conversation. Mrs. Marshall did not appear to see her visitor’s correctness, the harmony of color, the good lines. Time thrown away, that laundering!
That avenue dull, time again hung heavily. The gay evenings on theDeltawere abandoned; the men coming back from the river too tired, too warm to dance. She began to discover it was hideously hot. Perhaps, she might go out, after all—
She decided to tell her family that it was too warm to continue the commissary activity; Rickard was enough of a gentleman to let her cover her hurt; she could safely assume that! Yet it stung her to think what Innes might be thinking, what, perhaps, he had told her! Every one must be wondering, speculating! In her life, Gerty had felt keenly but twice; each time Rickard it was who had hurt her. That mocking superior eye of his! Bitterly she hated him.
“Tom,” she said one night. He turned with a swiftthrill of expectation, for her voice sounded kind; like the Gerty of old. “I have always heard that Mr. Marshall has terribly strict ideas—for every one but himself, I mean!”
“That’s a good one.” It was the first laugh in weeks of moodiness. Hardin was thinking of the poker games.
“I’m serious. I think he ought to hear of that Mexican woman.”
“Have you heard anything else?”
There was no new thread in her fabric of suspicions. To Hardin, it brought a memory of time past to be sitting thus familiarly together, Gerty in her negligee, her hair disarranged, looking up into his face. He did not suspect he was a pawn in her scheme of retribution.
“It ought not to be allowed.” The blue eyes were purpling with anger. “Mr. Marshall ought to be told. It is demoralizing in a camp like this. I thought you said the governor of Lower California had sent a commandant here.”
“To suppress liquor-selling and gambling.” Hardin did not say that the request had come from Rickard.
“And persons without visible means of support,” quoted his wife with triumph.
“That does not apply to the Mexican,” frowned Hardin. He did not want to be dragged into this.
“You ought to tell Mr. Marshall,” persisted Gerty.
“I tell Marshall anything against his pet clerk?” The Hardin lip shot out. “He’d throw me out of the company.”
The pretty scene was spoiled. To his dismay, she burst into a storm of tears, tears of self-pity. Her life lay in tatters at her feet, the pretty fabric rent, torn between the rude handling of those two men. She couldnot have reasoned out her injury, made it convincing, built out of dreams as it was, heartless, scheming dreams. Because she could not tell it, her sobbing was the more violent, her complaints incoherent. Tom gathered enough fragments to piece the old story. “Ashamed of him. He had dragged her down into his humiliation.” His sweet moment had passed.
He spent a few futile moments trying to comfort her.
“Don’t come near me.” It burst from her; a cry of revulsion. He stared at her, the woman meeting his eyes in flushed defiance. The hatred which he saw, her bitterness, corroded his pride, scorched his self-love. Nothing would kill his love for her; he knew that in that blackest of moments. His affection for her was part of his life. It went cringing to her feet, puppy-like, but he called it back, whipped it to its place. That was all over now. No woman could dread him twice like that. He shivered at what he had seen. The man breathed deep as he got up and looked about him. It was over. He would not elaborate his awakening with words. He would never forget that look of dread, of hate. He left her tent.
That night, the cot under the stars had no tenant. Hardin had it out with himself down the levee. Strange that this bitter man could have the same hopeful blood in him which had whipped his pulse at Lawrence! He was still a young man, and God! How tired he was! He was in a net of bitter circumstance. What was he to do, where to go? He was too old, too tired and sore to begin over again, and the bitter irony of it! He only wanted what he had lost, the love of the woman who hated him, the respect of the valley into which his life had been sucked. God! He was tired.
He saw the dry forsaken channel of the Colorado; grim symbol of his life! Where was the youthful hope, the conviction that everything would come his way? The potential richness of the soil upturned by yesterday’s shovel on the dike found him cold. That night, there was no future to his bitterness. Hunting for the fault, he found the real Hardin, not the man he had been spending his days with, the man he had expected to be, but the man the world saw passing. Perhaps life holds no more tragic instant than when we stand over the grave of what we thought we were, throw the sod over the ashes, facing the lonely yoking with the man that is. Hardin shivered unto himself; and grew old.
That valley might fulfil Estrada’s vision and his labor; might yield the harvest of happy homes; but his was not there. He had been the sacrifice.