Читать книгу The Fight on the Standing Stone - Lynde Francis - Страница 13

Table of Contents

As it came about, Stannard was destined to meet one other member of the private-car party sooner than he expected. After the potential riot at the tunnel mouth had been quelled, and the one man injured by the falling roof had been carried down to the valley level and rushed into camp on a hand-car, Stannard found a frank-faced, square-shouldered young stranger waiting in the yard for the arrival of the makeshift ambulance.

"My name's Kitts, and I'm licensed to saw your leg off," was the way in which the stalwart one introduced himself, clinching the introduction by showing an ominous-looking black bag. "Miss Anitra was telling us you'd had an accident, and I didn't know how well fixed you might be for surgical help."

"We're not fixed at all," said Stannard. "I've been yelping for six months to get the company to send me a camp doctor. When a man gets half killed we have to finish him by sending him down to the main line."

"Then I may take hold?" inquired the volunteer.

"Sure you may. I'm afraid it's a hopeless case, but the whole camp and everything in it is yours. Shoot out your orders and we'll obey them."

At that, Stannard was given to see a thing which stirs keen joy in the heart of any skilled workman; namely, the way in which another workman and a master of his craft brings things to pass. Kitts snapped out directions to the ambulance crew, and in an incredibly short space of time the crushed tunnel-driver was transferred to the shack which served as the camp emergency hospital. The young surgeon whipped out of his coat and went to work at once with Stannard for his assistant.

The Missourian had seen human repair jobs before, a gruesome number of them in the industrial field, but never anything to compare with the rapid mastercraft of the volunteer from the Egeria. The instant stripping of the injured man and the swift examination and diagnosis were like the dexterous passes in a sleight-of-hand trick.

"Broken bones until you can't rest," was the verdict, "but that seems to be the worst of it. We'll patch him up, all right. Put your knee right here and brace yourself—that's the ticket. Now hand me that roll of adhesive; and, say—couple of you fellows get busy whittling splints for this leg. J'ever see a careful mother gluing up the baby's broken doll, Stannard? This'll remind you of it."

Stannard was reminded of many things during the next few minutes, but chiefly of the strides which modern surgery has made in the hands of men like the adept who, with the corded muscles of a prize-fighter and the gentle touch of a woman, was giving a manipulation clinic, with the crushed and broken hard-rock man for a subject. After the clinic was over, he took Kitts to his own room in the headquarters cabin to give him a chance to wash up; and when he tried to show his appreciation he had the grateful experience of having his thanks cut short by the breezy young fellow who was scrubbing his hands in the wash-bucket.

"Cut that out—cut it all out, Stannard, old man. It's all in the day's work. The fellows on the football squad used to say that I broke more bones than I'd ever have a chance to mend, if I lived to be a hundred years old, so I'm only trying to be fair about it and catch up with my record."

"The man would have died before we could have chased him across the desert to Yellow Medicine."

"Don't you believe it! That kind is pretty hard to kill," laughed the bone-mender, skilfully catching the towel that Stannard tossed to him. And then: "I feel like smoking a pipe; if it isn't too late, and you're not too sleepy—"

Stannard protested that neither objection obtained. Kitts had his own briar, but he filled it out of the engineer's buckskin pouch of cut plug; after which they went out to sit on the rough slab bench beside the workroom door with the black, star-punctured September night sky for a canopy and the winking arc-lights of the yard to outline the shanties and tents of the sleeping camp and to bulk in the somber backgrounds of the surrounding mountains.

Two men, as likely to find each other congenial as the young Missourian and the upstanding, outspoken young surgeon, easily alight upon the common ground of friendly confidence. For a time the talk was desultory and reminiscent, harking readily back to college days which were but shallowly buried in the past for both. Farther along, it came down to the September night and to Stannard's problem, which—as he stated—was to get his railroad up to and through the mountain barrier before the snows came.

"You're going to make it all right, aren't you?" said Kitts.

"Barring too much bad luck, we ought to make it with a margin to spare," was the reply which lacked confidence only in the tone.

"Accidents?—like this one to-night, you mean?"

"Yes; accidents just like this one to-night," said Stannard gravely.

"I got the particulars only as Anitra Westervelt gave them," said the expert in human repairing. "It was a roof-slump in the tunnel, wasn't it?"

"Yes, we've got a bad proposition on our hands in the tunnel. In the nature of things, we couldn't make many preliminary test borings to determine the geological make-up of the mountain. By all the surface indications we should have found porphyry and solid granite. Instead, we've got into a mixed mass of loose stuff which requires the carefullest kind of work and pretty constant timbering. That is why we are rushing the approach track so frantically up the canyon. We've got to have it to transport the concreting material; and every day's delay means just so many more hollow teeth to plug up with the concrete arching."

"Then your 'overhead' is unsafe?"

"Yes, it has been unsafe all the way along, and to-night Fitzgerald, the heading boss, was getting ready to blow this particular soft spot down before it became dangerous to the men working under it. The dynamite went off prematurely."

"Of course, it was accidental?"

"I wish I could be sure of that, Kitts. But I can't be sure of it. There have been too many similar 'accidents.'"

"Good Lord! But you don't mean to say that you're letting it go without investigation."

"There isn't much left to investigate, after forty or fifty tons of rock have fallen in to bury all the evidences. But I did pry around as well as I could while Pearson was driving the 'muckers' on the job of getting the poor devil you've just been patching up out of his ready-made grave. What happened to-night has happened at least twice before. The dynamite was placed, and the wire connections were made; ready for the firing of the shot. After the firing wires are cut in, the 'dynamite boss,' as he is called, is supposed to stand over his plunger machine until the heading boss notifies him in person that the men are out and the drills have been dragged back. I don't know that I'm making it very clear."

"Yes, you are. I know the mining stunt like a book; I put in part of my apprenticeship as company surgeon in the anthracite field. Go on with your story."

"To-night, as on two other occasions, Truman, the dynamite boss, was called away from his machine after the wires had been coupled in on the fuses. Somebody that he couldn't see or identify in the darkness yelled to him that his wires were crossed. He says he threw the safety-switch and went to investigate. Before he had taken ten steps the charge exploded."

"My heavens!" ejaculated the listener. "But why—why in the name of conscience would anybody want to do such a thing as that?"

Stannard pulled at his pipe in sober silence for a full minute before he replied. Being neither more nor less secretive than other young men of his temperament and training, he was not given to talking loosely to comparative strangers. But the frank, open-eyed young surgeon was an exception, and his sympathy and interest were unmistakably sincere. Stannard began at the beginning, giving Kitts a brief outline of a situation which was likely to climax in a right-of-way war for the possession of Standing Stone Canyon.

"Now you know why we're rushing and why we are suspicious of anything that makes for delay," he ended. "Greer, the chief of construction on the Overland Northern, is an unscrupulous fighter, and he wouldn't hesitate to load us up with trouble-makers from his own camps if he thought he could hold us back."

Kitts held his peace for a little while before he said: "I'm only an innocent bystander, and these matters are miles out of my line; but honestly, Stannard, the thing doesn't seem to hold together. You say that the Overland Northern people will fight you for a right-of-way up the Standing Stone. As you explained it, the Overland Northern scheme is merely to parallel or confiscate your road through some four or five miles of your approach canyon. What's that got to do with your tunnel? How can they hope to further their scheme by holding you up on a part of your job that doesn't concern them?"

"Frankly, Kitts, I don't know. As I've said, Greer is an unscrupulous fighter. He'd hit out wherever he thought he could hit hardest. The Overland is our strongest competitor on transcontinental business, and if this tunnel of mine should turn out to be a failure it would cripple us badly in the money market, and make us just that much weaker in the business fight."

"I see; but still the motive seems rather indirect; too indirect to warrant this dynamite business in your tunnel." Kitts paused to relight his pipe, and when he went on he had taken the other necessary step which brought him into the field of frank partizanship. "If I were you, Stannard, I should dig a bit deeper and ask myself if the fact that the Egeria is camping out over yonder on that side-track has any bearing upon the puzzle."

"We can hardly discuss that," said the Missourian. "You are Mr. Westervelt's guest."

"Not altogether," was the quick reply. "I am Mrs. Grantham's family physician. It pleases her to believe that she has fatty degeneration of the heart,—which she hasn't,—and she wouldn't come along unless Dolly and I could come, too—afraid of the altitude. It was all right; I have a staving good office partner, and though we've been married a couple of months, Dolly and I hadn't had any wedding trip. So I turned the practice over to Bentley and told Mrs. Grantham we were It."

"In that case, I am taking all the pointers I can get. What's your notion?"

"I don't know that I have any. But we're a queerly assorted bunch for a pleasure party, and it strikes me that we've come to a mighty curious place to hunt bears. If you'll take it from me, there'll be more to follow. Some of us—the women, the Englishman, the painter-man and yours truly—are merely fill-ins. Cancel us out, and you have remaining a Wall Street money king, a mighty smooth stock broker who has turned a dozen little bull-and-bear tricks for Mr. Westervelt, and a clubman hanger-on who has been known to fetch and carry for Mr. Westervelt in some of these same little quiet shearings of the woolly lambs. That's gossip, pure and simple, and now I've got it out of my system, I'll trot along and go to bed."

For a long half-hour after the square-shouldered figure of Doctor Billy had disappeared among the yard shadows, Stannard kept his place on the bench, smoking in solitary silence and brooding thoughtfully over the possibilities which might be involved in the private-car invasion.

That Kitts should have been able to throw new light on the situation was not singular. The bystander in any game can always see many moves that the players fail to see. But, granting the young surgeon's hint that bigger game than the hypothetical brown bears was afoot, what was Westervelt's object? If it were merely an interference in behalf of the Overland Northern, why was he taking such a roundabout way of interposing it, and why had he encumbered himself with a car-load of non-combatants whose presence might easily obstruct the obstructionist?

The young Missourian was still puzzling over these answerless questions when he finally got up to go and turn in, the one clear conclusion arising out of the yeasty turmoil being a troubled conviction that he had been seriously underrating the resources of Judson Greer and his associates in the advancing Overland Northern army of dispossession.

At the door of the work-room he met Roddy. The assistant's clothes were dusty, and he looked hollow-eyed and weary.

"Hello!" said the young chief. "I thought you had turned in hours ago, Jacksie. Where have you been?"

"I've been taking a little hike for my health. Got a wireless and had to go and answer it."

"A wireless? Was that your contrivance that I saw working on top of the Stone, a couple of hours ago?"

"That's her," was the laconic reply. "I sent Stedman up there with a good glass this afternoon. What you saw was his wig-wag report to me. He's been seeing things."

"What did he see?"

"He saw what I've just seen—at a good bit closer range. Greer has moved up one step nearer. His new grade camp is now within five miles of the Travois, and he's working a night gang. I wanted to make sure, so I took a tramp in the dark. To-morrow, or the next day at farthest, we'll be hearing his dynamite. Now you see why I wanted those Winchesters. Good-night: I'm dead on my feet and I'm going to bunk in."