CHAPTER XXXVIIA SUNDAY SPECTACLE
TROUBLE with the tribes, innocent and childish in its first aspect, was well grown before it was recognized. Disaffection was ripe, the bucks were heady, the white man’s silver acting like wine. Few of the braves had dreamed of ever possessing sums of money such as they drew down each Sunday morning. They were paid a white man’s wage, and to each group of ten went another man’s pay, “lagniappe,” to be paid to a squaw cook for the squad. The extra sum had excited from the first a gentle insurrection. Had they dared, they would have divided it among themselves, but the obloquy of “squaw man” confronted them. The discussion was weekly; over their pipes and their fires that sum was passed, itching their palms.
It was a solemn processional, smacking of ceremonial, which filed into Rickard’s ramada every Sunday. Pay time was the climax of their week, the symbol of the revel which followed. All day, the bucks danced and glutted.
Rickard began to suspect liquor again. The commandant and Forestier protested. There was no way of their getting liquor. Still Rickard shrugged, incredulous. In the Indian camp, Sunday was a day of feasting, followedby a gorged sleep; the next day, one of languor, of growing incohesion.
Rickard spoke of it to Coronel who was his “go-between,” as MacLean, Jr., dubbed him, a valuable interpreter, because he transcribed the spirit of an interview. Coronel’s patois, mongrel and pantomimic, was current coin among all the tribes.
“Like small baby,” hunched the old shoulders. “Happy baby. Pretty soon stop.”
With the next wages went a reprimand, then a warning. Still followed bad Mondays. It was easy to see that no work was to be expected from them on that day, their all-night feasting insufficiently slept off. Rickard then issued a formal warning to all the tribes.
The white men were being held antithetically by their habits of carousal; Rickard, doling out the weekly wage, had been observing the pitiable look of determination on the faces of the volatile hobo. “The look of ‘I can bear no more; I shall move on.’”
“Poor devils!” he exclaimed to MacLean as Number Ten, the hobo without a name, shuffled out, bearing his money in his hand and a farewell leer on his face. His number, bound by a circle, his mark and title, decorated each bridge and pier, so his boast ran, between New Orleans and San Francisco, and then again, New York. He was on his second round, and he had never bought a ticket in his life.
“Poor devils,” he repeated as the desert’s perspective claimed the tramp. “They always think that they are not coming back. It’s a mean trick we play on them.”
“What’s the trick?” queried MacLean absently, who was thinking of Innes Hardin. He had seen her on the river with his chief the evening before; and the flash ofbetrayal from the eyes of Rickard, the girl’s shy quenched gleam of surrender, had been a shock to him. Until that instant, he had thought she lined up with the rest of the Hardins in hating Rickard. So that was what had been going on under his nose! It looked settled to him; he would not have believed that no word had been spoken.
He had wondered since what variety of fool he had been making of himself. Trying to oust a man like Rickard—aman. That was the particular sting. He was reproaching himself for bloodlessness as he counted out moneys for his chief that afternoon. Surely, had he any spirit, his disappointment would have flared into bitter enmity against the man who had stolen what he was coveting. For Innes Hardin was a queen! He had never seen any one like her. Queer, he could not make himself hate Rickard. Something must be wrong with himself, to be able to sit there in the old familiar way, without bitterness in his heart.
“They think they are free men; free to go and come. And we own them, body and soul. They might as well be slaves for all they can do.”
MacLean frowned. “I don’t think I understand.” He put aside his problem for a while. He would settle that later.
“Lord! MacLean, didn’t you see ‘Ten’s’ face?”
Dimly, MacLean summoned a gaunt heat-seared visage; an unshaven, stubbled face of leering defiance. “He won’t come back again.”
“But he will. He’s got to come back. He can’t get through Yuma. That’s the trick. We have the screw on them. Yuma’s practised. She won’t let a man with a week’s wages in his pockets slip through her talons.They all mean to go. Lord! I see it in each of their faces as they come in here. As I pay them off, their eyes say: ‘I’ve got enough to be quit of you with your hell-hole. You can go to the devil for all the work you’ll get out of me.’ They don’t say it because they’re afraid, not of me, but of Yuma. They’re afraid of Yuma. And when she’s sucked them dry, they slink back here for one more week of it.”
MacLean drew in his lip, frowning at the memory of the stubbled face as it had glared at Rickard.
“You remember Jack, the hobo?”
“Arnica Jack?” In spite of his resolution to be miserable, MacLean laughed. The hobo’s weak ever-turning ankles made him the butt of the hobo camp. A bottle of arnica in his coat pocket, the insidious smell of the stuff which clung to his clothes, had drawn the inevitable sobriquet.
“He didn’t come in to-day. Poor devil! He’s trying to stick it out, and not draw his wages. You run a chance of being put off in the heart of the desert when you ride out on a brake-beam from Yuma. You’ve got to have a little ‘dough’ in your pocket to wheedle a man with a team, or a soft-hearted brakeman. Else it’s death. We’ve got it on them, a dead sure cinch.”
“Why haven’t I seen any of this?” demanded MacLean, sitting up, very red.
“It’s not on the surface. They go out swaggering Sunday; they come back cringing Monday. That’s all there is to it. But the situation with the Indians is more serious. They’re getting liquor in here, some way, the Lord only knows how. Maybe Coronel is right; he declares they are simply gorged with food, dead from their stuffed orgies. Anyway, they’re not fit for burning Mondaymorning. I’ve just sent them word by Coronel that it’s got to quit, or they do.”
“Suppose they do?” MacLean was startled. Not an Indian could be spared at that stage of the game.
“Bluff!” Rickard got up. “It’s caught white men before this. They won’t take the chance of losing that money. I’m off now to the Crossing. There’s a hitch at the concrete gate. I’ll be back this afternoon. I’ll leave you in charge here.”
“I’ll hold down your seat.” He did not remember his lagging enmity until Rickard’s dancing step had carried him out of sight. MacLean spent an hour unraveling the puzzle of it. If a man really loves a woman,—his question hurled a doubt at the integrity of his affection. Stoutly, he defended that. Yet, he should hate Rickard. His veins must run ice-water. An Ogilvie sort of man he was!
The next morning, Wooster broke into the ramada where MacLean sat clicking his typewriter.
“Where’s Casey?”
“Gone to the Crossing. Anything up?”
“Everything’s up.” Wooster flung his hat on the table. He stood, legs wide apart, his hands thrust into his pockets, looking down on Rickard’s secretary. “He’s done it now. Sent some all-fired, independent kindergarten orders to the Indians. Says they have to be in bed by ten o’clock, or some such hour on Saturday and Sunday nights. Indians won’t stand that! Any tenderfoot ought to know that. At this stage of the game, when we can’t afford to lose a man. It’s a strike, their answer. That’s what his monkeying has brought down on us.”
“They’re not going to quit?”
“They’ve sent word they won’t work on Mondays, and they will go to bed when they choose Saturday night. Losing one day a week! We can’t stand for that.”
“That’s not so bad.” MacLean was relieved. “I thought they were all going. He’ll find a way out.” He remembered then that he was speaking of his rival. This was an opportunity to put him in the wrong. Instead he was flaming to partisanship. No backbone! He found himself taking the side of the man he should be hating. “He’s no man’s goat.” Only sense of justice, this!
“Luck’s been playing into his hands,” spat Wooster. “But this will show him up. This’ll show Marshall his pet clerk. Tell Casey there’ll be no Indians to-morrow.” He sputtered angrily out of the office.
Rickard seemed pleased when MacLean made the announcement a few hours later. “Good! Now, we have something to work on.”
“You are losing the work of five hundred men for one day a week,” urged MacLean, observing him as curiously as though he were a stranger.
“We had already lost them. They have not given us a day’s work on Mondays for weeks past, and we’ve had to give them a full week’s pay. You can’t deduct for lazy work, not unless you’ve an overseer for each man.” His secretary was weighing him. “What do you intend to do about it?”
“Call their bluff,” grinned Casey, showing teeth tobacco had not had a chance to spoil. “Boycott them.” He was at his table, already, writing. He had forgotten to remove his duster or his hat. He was unconscious of his secretary’s new appraisement.
“But you can’t afford to take the chance—” began MacLean, forcing a tepid hostility.
“Oh, can’t I?” His tone suggested, “You’re playing on the track, kid.”
Reddening, the boy persisted. “But the others—the engineers,canyou afford to? Suppose you lose?”
Rickard threw down his pen. “I’ve got to have workers, not dabbers! If I’m to lose the Indians, the sooner I know it the better. I don’t want to know what the others think. I’ve got to go straight ahead. Don’t think I’ve not seen their faces. Take this note to Wooster. Tell him to take Coronel and see Forestier.”
On his way, MacLean felt like the match that is to set off a charge of dynamite. Wooster would go straight up in the air. Those Hardin men would make an uproar that would be heard at Yuma!
He found Wooster at the river-bank, with Tom Hardin. The two men were watching a pile-driver set a rebellious pile for the new trestles. Two new trestles were to supplement the one which had been bent out of line by the weight of settling drift. The pile-driver had no Sabbath, now. The piles must be placed before rock could be poured between. Marshall’s plan was being followed, though jeered at by Reclamation men and the engineers of the D. R. Company.
“Stop the mattress weaving and dump like hell!” had been his orders.
No one believed that the soft silt bottom of the river which cut out like salt would hold a pour of rock. Marshall, aided by Rickard, schemed to fight power with haste. Faster than the current could wash it down-stream, the crews would rain gravel and rock on to the treacherous river-bed.
“And there’s always the concrete gate when everything else fails,” Marshall was fond of repeating when he saw polite incredulity in opposing faces.
“Boycott the Indians, well, I’m blowed,” the beady eyes sparked at Hardin. “Now, he’s cut his own throat.”
“By the eternal!” swore Hardin. MacLean left the two engineers matching oaths. “If he wins out on this!” he was speculating as he made his way back to his copying, “I’ll back him against anything. Wonder how he feels, inside, about it? I know just how I’d feel. Scared stiff.”
There was an ominous quiet the next day. Not an Indian offered to work at the river. A few stolid bucks came to their tasks on Tuesday morning; they were told by Rickard himself that there was no work for them. Rickard appeared ignorant of the antagonism of the engineers.
Wooster watched the Yumas carry their stormy faces back to their camp.
“Garl darn it,” he cried. “There’s his chance, and he lost it.”
An unfathered rumor started that Rickard was in with the Reclamation Service men; that he wanted the work to fail; to be adopted by the Service. MacLean broke a lance or two against the absurd slander. He was making the discovery that a man’s friendship for a man may be deeper than a man’s love for a woman. It was upsetting all his preconceived notions. He was backing his hot young will for Rickard to win out. He got to blow-point that evening with Bodefeldt. He avoided Wooster and Silent and Hardin. It inflamed his boyish loyalty to find that he was losing his old friendships. He was a Rickard man. He was made to feel the reproach of it.
Wednesday dawned dully. Not an Indian reported. Squatting in their camp, they listened to “Fig Tree Jim” and Joe Apache, the insurgent bucks. Coronel passed from camp to camp, his advice unpopular. “They would get their pay, and stay out Monday beside. Joe Apache said so.”
Scouts sent out to watch the work on the river reported it was crippled. The white man would be sending for the Indian soon. The waiting braves sat on their haunches, grinning and smoking their pipes.
On Thursday, Forestier, who must feed his reservation Indians while away from the reservation, grew anxious. He tried arguments with the Indians; then with Rickard. That engineer had just been closeted with Marshall who was taking a swift run out to Tucson that day. Rickard would not budge from his position. The Indians must work Monday, or not at all. He refused to discuss the situation with Forestier, or any one. He was apparently engrossed with the setting of the piles. That the brush-cutting was held up, the work on the levee halted, he waived as unimportant. The look of the Hardin faction was getting on his nerves; he was learning to swear and smile at the same time.
Marshall carried a worried face from the Heading. He must back his man in this! And he never forgot the levee. Still, if he should fail— He determined to arrange to pull some track crews from Salton and the West Coast to send to Rickard for emergency.
Saturday night, the camp went gloomily to bed. On the Indian side, there was no revel, no feasting or dancing. Forestier was closeted with Rickard.
“I’ll have to take them back to their reservations,” he said. “I can’t keep them here, we can’t afford to.They’ve got to be fed. You know, Rickard, the howl that’d be raised if the thing gets out twisted. Sentimental, the Indian feeling is, you and I know that, but it’d be uncomfortable. The man who’d kick an Indian out of his back yard would go to Washington to start up a scandal if any blamed buck says he was starving.”
“Hold them here a few days, you can,” Rickard was worried, himself. Forestier could not keep them out of their reservations if they were not earning money. He knew that. Already, he was needing them badly at the river. Something, will or reason, he was not sure, would not let him give in.
“Just two or three days,” he urged Forestier.
“I’ll try.” The face of the Indian agent was not reassuring. Rickard did not turn in until after midnight, planning alternatives. He was sleeping hard when MacLean, at dawn, dashed into his tent.
“Quick, what does this mean?”
Rickard was scrambling into his clothes. It was the river, of course. The trestles had been carried out? He was into his khaki trousers and slippers. He made a dive into his shirt as he followed MacLean to the tent door, his head working through the bag of cloth to the light-well at the top.
“Look over there,” cried MacLean. “What do you think of that?”
It was a splendid spectacle, and staged superbly. For background, the sharp-edged mountains flushing to pinks and purples against a one-hued sky; the river-growth of the old channel uniting them, blotting out miles of desert, into a flat scene. On the opposite bank of the New River, five hundred strong, lined up formidably, their faces grotesque and ferocious with paint, were theseven tribes. The sun’s rays glinted up from their fire-arms, shot-guns, revolvers, into a motley of defiance! Cocopahs, with streaming hair, blanketed Navajos, short-haired Pimas, those in front reining in their silent pinto ponies, and all motionless, silent in that early morning light.
“What does it mean?” whispered MacLean. Rickard did not answer. He had one nauseous instant, as he looked toward Innes’ tent. Then he noticed a movement in the throng; he saw it was the pressing of newcomers toward the front of the brilliant mass. Brown naked chests gleamed with wet paint. Black shirts, striped with white and yellow and red, made a strange serpent effect. Ropes of beads weighted down their shoulders; ribbons streamed from their arms.
The barbaric spectacle stood immovable. The stir came from the near bank. The camp was rising. From each tent, a face thrust out casually, stayed to watch, startled. The unsettled condition of the days past had prepared the stage for some climax; the surprise loomed savage and threatening.
MacLean was watching Rickard’s face. The manager had drawn back into the shadow of his tent. He expected to see them wheel and ride out of camp; this then their ultimatum. He did not fear worse trouble, now that nauseous half-second was over; they had too much to lose; there was no one to organize, to mobilize. Still, they were Indians—he was trying to make out their faces; the whites, surprised—the squads divided, at the levee, up at the Crossing!
MacLean had turned to watch the Indians; he heard a chuckle. Rickard broke into laughter.
“See, the white horse, no, in front—”
“By jove,” MacLean slapped his thigh. “Coronel! They had me buffaloed. What do you think it is?”
Rickard stepped out into the wash of morning air, and waved a solemn salute across the river. Gravely, it was returned by Coronel.
“What does it mean?” demanded MacLean.
“It means we’ve won,” chuckled his chief, coming back into his tent.
“If you haven’t the best—luck,” substituted MacLean, self-consciously.
“If you say ‘luck’ to me,” grinned Rickard, “I’ll cane you! Get out, I want my shower. They’ll be coming over here now.”
An hour later, after every one in camp had looked and speculated and smiled, the first thrill passed, at the massed Indians, Coronel led in a picked group of the tribes. If the white chief would recall the boycott, the Monday strike was over. The white man’s silver had won.
Rickard shook hands all around, and commended Coronel privately. “You’ll get a present for this.” The wrinkled face was majestically inscrutable.
“They could never do it like white men,” commented Rickard after they had left the ramada. “They must get up that bit of bravado; they are like children—” He never finished his sentence. He was thinking of a little white tent, and an instant of nausea when he had first seen those waiting Indians.