Part 4 (1/2)
And then, with the freedom born of long service in the unfettered areas where discipline means obedience but not servility, the man added: ”I wouldn't be standin' in your shoes this minute for all the money the Arcadia Company could pay me, Mr. Ballard.”
Ballard was young, fit, vigorous, and in abounding health. Moreover, he was a typical product of an age which scoffs at superst.i.tion and is impatient of all things irreducible to the terms of algebraic formulas.
But here and now, on the actual scene of the fatalities, the ”two sheer accidents and a commonplace tragedy” were somewhat less easily dismissed than when he had thus contemptuously named them for Gardiner in the Boston railway station. Notwithstanding, he was quite well able to shake off the little thrill of disquietude and to laugh at Hoskins's vicarious anxiety.
”I wasn't raised in the woods, Hoskins, but there was plenty of tall timber near enough to save me from being scared by an owl,” he a.s.severated. Then, as a towering derrick head loomed gallows-like in the gathering dusk, with a white blotch of masonry to fill the ravine over which it stood sentinel: ”Is that our camp?”
”That's Elbow Canyon,” said the engineman; and he shut off steam and woke the hill echoes with the whistle.
Ballard made out something of the lay of the land at the headquarters while the engine was slowing through the temporary yard. There was the orderly disorder of a construction terminal: tracks littered with cars of material, a range of rough shed shelters for the stone-cutters, a dotting of sleeping-huts and adobes on a little mesa above, and a huge, weathered mess-tent, lighted within, and glowing orange-hued in the twilight. Back of the camp the rounded hills grew suddenly precipitous, but through the river gap guarded by the sentinel derrick, there was a vista distantly backgrounded by the ma.s.s of the main range rising darkly under its evergreens, with the lights of a great house starring the deeper shadow.
V
”FIRE IN THE ROCK!”
Bromley was on hand to meet his new chief when Ballard dropped from the step of the halted engine. A few years older, and browned to a tender mahogany by the sun of the alt.i.tudes and the winds of the desert, he was still the Bromley of Ballard's college memories: compact, alert, boyishly smiling, neat, and well-groomed. With Anglo-Saxon ancestry on both sides, the meeting could not be demonstrative.
”Same little old 'Beau Bromley,'” was Ballard's greeting to go with the hearty hand-grip; and Bromley's reply was in keeping. After which they climbed the slope to the mesa and the headquarters office in comradely silence, not because there was nothing to be said, but because the greater part of it would keep.
Having picked up the engine ”special” with his field-gla.s.s as it came down the final zigzag in the descent from the pa.s.s, Bromley had supper waiting in the adobe-walled shack which served as the engineers'
quarters; and until the pipes were lighted after the meal there was little talk save of the golden past. But when the camp cook had cleared the table, Ballard reluctantly closed the book of reminiscence and gave the business affair its due.
”How are you coming on with the work, Loudon?” he asked. ”Don't need a chief, do you?”
”Don't you believe it!” said the subst.i.tute, with such heartfelt emphasis that Ballard smiled. ”I'm telling you right now, Breckenridge, I never was so glad to s.h.i.+ft a responsibility since I was born. Another month of it alone would have turned me gray.”
”And yet, in my hearing, people are always saying that you are nothing less than a genius when it comes to handling workingmen. Isn't it so?”
”Oh, that part of it is all right. It's the hoodoo that is making an old man of me before my time.”
”The what?”
Bromley moved uneasily in his chair, and Ballard could have sworn that he gave a quick glance into the dark corners of the room before he said: ”I'm giving you the men's name for it. But with or without a name, it hangs over this job like the shadow of a devil-bat's wings. The men sit around and smoke and talk about it till bedtime, and the next day some fellow makes a bad hitch on a stone, or a team runs away, or a blast hangs fire in the quarry, and we have a dead man for supper.
Breckenridge, it is simply _h.e.l.l_!”
Ballard shook his head incredulously.
”You've let a few ill-natured coincidences rattle you,” was his comment.
”What is it? Or, rather, what is at the bottom of it?”
”I don't know; n.o.body knows. The 'coincidences,' as you call them, were here when I came; handed down from Braithwaite's drowning, I suppose.
Then Sanderson got tangled up with Manuel's woman--as clear a case of superinduced insanity as ever existed--and in less than two months he and Manuel jumped in with Winchesters, and poor Billy pa.s.sed out. That got on everybody's nerves, of course; and then Macpherson came. You know what he was--a hard-headed, sarcastic old Scotchman, with the bitterest tongue that was ever hung in the middle and adjusted to wag both ways.
He tried ridicule; and when that didn't stop the crazy happenings, he took to bullyragging. The day the derrick fell on him he was swearing horribly at the hoister engineer; and he died with an oath in his mouth.”
The Kentuckian sat back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head.
”Let me get one thing straight before you go on. Mr. Pelham told me of a sc.r.a.p between the company and an old fellow up here who claims everything in sight. Has this emotional insanity you are talking about anything to do with the old cattle king's objection to being syndicated out of existence?”
”No; only incidentally in Sanderson's affair--which, after all, was a purely personal quarrel between two men over a woman. And I wouldn't care to say that Manuel was wholly to blame in that.”