Part 19 (1/2)
”I do. I can't prove it, of course. If I could, I'd go to New York and fight it out. And the whisky isn't all of it, or even the worst: there are women in some of these camps, and there would be more if Leckhard didn't stand guard at Saint's Rest and turn them back.”
”Heavens--what a cesspool!” said the attorney. ”Does a laboring man ever get out of here with any of his earnings?”
”Not if the MacMorroghs can help it. And you can figure for yourself what the moral atmosphere must be. We are less than two months old on the work, but already the Western Extension is a streak of crime; crime unpunished, and at times tacitly encouraged. You may say that my department isn't responsible--that this is the contractors' day and game. If that is true now--which it isn't--it will no longer be true when we come in with our own employees, the track-layers.”
But now Kenneth was shaking his head.
”I can't believe it, Ford. You're blue because Mr. Colbrith has thrown Mr. North into your boat as ballast. I don't blame you: but you mustn't let it make you color-blind.”
Ford said nothing. The day was yet young, and the long journey was still younger. It was at the noon halt, made at a subcontractor's camp near a great earth-cutting and a huge fill, that Kenneth had his object lesson.
They were standing at the door of the timekeeper's shanty--they had been the timekeeper's guests for the noon meal--and the big gang of Italians, with its inevitable Irish foreman, was already at work. Out at the head of the great fill a dozen men were dumping the carts as they came in an endless stream from the cutting. Suddenly there was a casting down of shovels, a shrill altercation, a clinch, a flash of steel in the August sunlight, and one of the disputants was down, his heels drumming on the soft earth in the death agony.
”Good G.o.d!” said Kenneth. ”It's a murder!” and he would have rushed in if Ford and the timekeeper had not held him back.
The object lesson was sufficiently shocking, but its sequel was still more revolting. Without one to kneel beside the dying man; indeed, without waiting until the drumming heels were still; the men callously put their shovels under the body, slid it over the lip of the dump and left it to be covered by the tumbling cataract of earth pouring from the tip-carts whose orderly procession had scarcely been interrupted by the tragedy.
Kenneth was silent for many minutes after they had left the camp of the Italians. He was a Western man only by adoption; of Anglo-Saxon blood, and so unable to condone the Latin's disregard for the sacredness of human life.
”That was simply terrible, Ford,” he said finally, and his voice was still in sympathy with the shaking hand that held the bridle-reins.
”Will nothing be done?”
”Nothing; unless the murdered man chances to have relatives or clansmen in one of the near-by camps--in which case there'll be another killing.”
”But the law,” said Kenneth.
”There is no law here higher than the caprice of Brian MacMorrogh.
Besides, it's too common--a mere episode; one of those which you said you couldn't believe, a little while back.”
”But can't you make the MacMorroghs do a little police work, for common decency's sake?”
Ford shook his head. ”They are quite on the other side of the fence, as I told you in the beginning. By winking at lawlessness of all kinds, their own particular brands of lawlessness, by which they and their backers make money, go unquestioned. So far from helping, they'd make it exceedingly difficult for any sheriff who should have the temerity to come in here in the discharge of his duty.”
”You foresaw all this before the contract was awarded?”
”Not all--though I had been told that the MacMorroghs ran 'open camps'
where the work was far enough from civilization to take the curse off.
What you've seen, and what I've been telling you, is bad enough, G.o.d knows; but it will be worse before it is better. After we've had a few pay-days, and the men begin to realize that they are here to toil and to be robbed ... Kenneth, it will be h.e.l.l on earth; and the company will pay for it--the company always pays in the end.”
”I've got a notion,” said the attorney, after another plodding mile of reflection; but what it was he did not say.
Ford and his companion reached Copah in the afternoon of the third day out from Saint's Rest, and, singularly enough, the mine owners who were disputing the extension right-of-way were found amenable to reason. What Kenneth did to secure the P. S-W. right-of-way across the mining claims, Ford did not know, or seek to know; though a word or two let fall by the attorney led him to believe that the Transcontinental encouragement was not quite specific enough in dollars and cents to warrant the obstructors in holding out.
Ford was for starting back the next morning: he had missed Brissac and both of the Bensons on the way over. But Kenneth confessed to being saddle-sore, and begged for another day's respite. Ford agreed without giving the matter a second thought. Upon such unconsidered trifles--an indifferent ”yes” or ”no”--turn the poised scales of life. For one other day the two Southwestern representatives put up at the Grand Union, Copah's tar-paper-covered simulacrum of a hotel; and during that day Ford contrived to sell his birthright for what he, himself, valued at the moment as a mess of pottage.
It was in this wise. At this period of its existence Copah, the future great, was merely a promise; a camp of magnificent prospects. Isolated by one hundred and fifty miles of wagon-road and pack-trail from one railroad base, and by forty miles of mountains from the other, its future turned upon the hope of cheaper transportation. As a gold camp it was an anomaly. With a single exception its ores were low grade, and the wagon-road and pack-trail freightage made them practically profitless to the miners.
The single exception was the ”Little Alicia,” and it was the coincidence of the name, rather than the eloquence of its impoverished owner, that first attracted Ford. From first to last he did not know the exact location of the mine. It was somewhere in the hills back of Copah, and Grigsby, the prospector who had discovered and opened it, had an office in the camp.