Читать книгу The Fight on the Standing Stone - Lynde Francis - Страница 5

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The sun, poising for its early autumn afternoon plunge behind the snow balds on high Buckskin, was doing its best to idealize in a golden glow of color the commissary, the bunk shanties, the long strings of material cars, and the other bare utilities of Travois, the end-of-track construction camp. Beyond the camp with its gridironing of railroad tracks the Standing Stone, clear, snow-cold and sparkling, caught the suffusing tint in the spray flung up by the boulders in its tortuous bed; and even the black smoke belching from the stacks of the two big "camel-back" locomotives in the yard turned to a pearl gray with pink undertones as it rose to diffuse itself in the upper effulgences.

Over a great gash scoring the nearer shoulder of the Buckskin like a fresh wound a dull yellow mist hung in mid air; and as Stannard came out of the camp telegraph shack with a tissue copy of a telegram crumpled viciously in his fist, the rumbling grunt of the dynamite floated down from the jagged scar on Buckskin to be passed back and forth in diminishing echoes between the Dogtooth and Rock-Face, twin bulkings inclosing the Travois valley like the crooking fingers of a pair of hollowed hands.

Crossing the straggling camp street to come by the shortest path to the end-of-track yard, the stalwart young chief of construction fell afoul of Callahan and his car-repairing mate at work jacking up a steel flat to replace a broken drawbar. Because he was in the mood to snap at anything that came in his way, he stopped short and wheeled upon the two men under the flat-car.

"Who smashed that drawbar, Patsy?"

"Sure, I dunno, Sorr," returned the car-repairer. And then, loyal to his yardmates: "I'm thinking maybe 'twas done on the main line, before we'd be getting the car on the Cut-off at all."

"No, it wasn't; it was done right here in this yard! Write out a report of it and give the number of the shift that turned it over to you. I'm going to make an example of some of these clock-watchers that are too lazy to ride a kick-off and set the brakes. Have you seen Mr. Roddy since he came down from the tunnel?"

"I did, Sorr. 'Twas him I saw going across the thracks to the river wid his fishin'-pole, not twinty minut's ago."

Stannard faced about and strode away in the direction indicated, still gripping the tissue telegram. Callahan winked slyly at his mate. "'Tis bad news the boss has been getting," he commented. "I'd not like to be Misther Jackson Roddy to be caught wid a fishin'-pole in me hand before quittin' time."

"You're batty!" scoffed the helper, "Them things don't count with the bosses. And anyway, Mr. Roddy is off his shift when he comes down from the tunnel."

"'Tis bad news, all the same," Callahan insisted. "Misther Stannard is a foine upshtandin' young man whin he's at himself, but whin his mad's up I'd sooner be findin' tin dollars on the dump than to have the b'y hit out at me wid annything less than a feather bed between the two av us. 'Tis a twinty-horse-power mule kick he'd put behind thim two fishties av his, this minut!"

True to the Irishman's characterization, Stannard gave a very fair imitation of a young giant ferociously angry when he had crossed the tracks to come upon his assistant wading knee-deep in the icy waters of the Standing Stone and skilfully playing a fine mountain trout in the boiling eddies.

"Get out of that mill-tail and come and listen to this, Jackson!" he called from the bank, bellowing to make himself heard above the drumming of the torrent.

Roddy, a small man with baby-blue eyes and the jaw of a bulldog, waded ashore obediently, playing the fish as he came and deftly slipping the landing-net under it when the fight ended in the shallows.

"What's eating you now?" he grumbled. At altitude five thousand feet in the short-grass hills the distinctions of rank and file fall easily into the scrap-heap with the other purely ornamental traditions.

"Get on to this," rasped the chief; and thereupon he smoothed the crumpled telegram and read it aloud. "'President Merriam's private car Egeria, and extra Pullman, with hunting party from New York will run special, Brinker, conductor, Gaffney, engineman, Yellow Medicine to Travois, leaving here four-fifteen. Mr. Westervelt, in charge of party, wants you to arrange side-track accommodation for Egeria and extra best place in Travois yard where ladies won't be annoyed. Pennoyer, Agent.' Do you get that, Jackson? Wouldn't that make you let out a yell and break for the timber! 'Ladies'—that's what he says—'Ladies'!—in this God-forsaken, howling wilderness of a man's camp. Wah!"

Roddy grinned. He had unjointed his fly rod and was picking up the creel which already held trout enough for the mess supper-table.

"That reminds me of the story of the fellow who saw one of your brother Missourians at a bar and remarked that he'd give a thousand dollars for a thirst like that. Woman, lovely woman, doesn't appeal to me that way. I wish she did."

The athletic young chief of staff growled like a dog.

"Come down to earth, Jacksie, and look this thing in the eye for a minute. What in thunder are we going to do with a junketing picnic party right in the thick of this latest mix-up—with the hard-rock men threatening to strike on us, and the Overland Northern building three miles a day to cut us out of Standing Stone Canyon? Silas Westervelt is one of our directors, and he ought to have known better than to throw in a handicap like this."

"You know Mr. Westervelt then, do you?"

"I've met him," said Stannard shortly. "He was on the G. L. & P. Securities Board last year when I went to New York to fight this Cut-off scheme to a finish."

The assistant nodded. In common with the other members of the engineering staff he knew the story of the Cut-off scheme; how Stannard, serving his apprenticeship as a division engineer on the Yellow Medicine district of the main line, had evolved the great idea of the short cut across the Yellow Desert and the tunnel under Buckskin whereby eighty miles of distance and a thousand feet of grades could be eliminated; how the young Missourian had fought his idea up through the various official threshings and winnowings and had finally been permitted to lay his plan before the board of directors in New York; and how, after many bucketings of cold water from an over-cautious minority, the vote for a bond issue had carried, and Stannard, with his commission as chief engineer of the project in his pocket, had come back to the Standing Stone country to translate the great idea into steel-rail and hard-rock facts.

There had been difficulties from the outset. With an eager demand for labor on other and less isolated projects, the grade contractors had been able to secure only the sweepings of the market-place. With orders booked far in advance at the mills the deliveries of steel and other material had been exasperatingly delayed, and the newly promoted chief of construction had literally fought for every day's progress over the forty-five miles of sage-brush desert lying between Yellow Medicine and the Dogtooth Hills.

In the hills, and with the tunnel workings begun at both ends, a new obstacle had developed. In order to obtain the grade for the eastern tunnel approach, Stannard had carried his line in a great hair-pin loop up one side of the canyon of the Standing Stone and back on the other; the canyon being a precipitous gulch intersecting the Travois basin at right angles from the south, and lying between the western cliffs of the Dogtooth and the eastern shoulders of the Buckskin range.

With the first shatterings of the dynamite on the ten-mile loop in the canyon the new trouble began. An old survey of the Overland Northern, the Great Lakes & Pacific's chief competitor, ran through the Standing Stone canyon, and a formal notice, which was in effect a mandatory warning to "keep off the grass," had been promptly served upon the G. L. & P.

Stannard, acting under advice which he had fairly bullied out of his own company's lawyers, had ignored the notice to quit; was still ignoring it in spite of the fact that the Overland people were rushing a branch line across the desert from Lodge Butte with the avowed intention of occupying the canyon on the old survey, and of passing through it to a tapping of the rich mining district served by the G. L. & P. main line in the southern Buckskins. This rapid-fire advance of the enemy was the common gossip of the Travois camp, and Roddy's tone was gruffly sympathetic when he pushed his inquiry a little farther.

"Westervelt is also a heavy stockholder in Overland Northern, isn't he?" he queried.

"He is said to be, though nobody seems to know definitely," Stannard returned. "But there is one thing sure; he fought this Cut-off scheme of mine from start to finish in the various meetings of the board, and gave up only when he was outvoted two to one. I don't like this hunting-party interference a little bit, Jackson, coming at this particular minute."

By this time the two men had dodged between the shifting trains in the yard and were crossing to the double log cabin which served as the staff headquarters.

"Meaning that we are likely to go up against a situation in which the innocent bystander might be in the way?" queried Roddy.

"Just that. I don't know how far the Overland Northern people will carry their bluff for a right-of-way which doesn't belong to them any more than it does to the Dalai Lama of Lhasa. Greer is their chief of construction, and they say he's a scrapper. I've been looking for their locating squad to come through here any day, and when that happens there'll be blood on the moon. Nice, pleasant prospect for Mr. Westervelt and his carload of 'ladies'!"

Roddy captured a water boy and sent him around to the cook house with the creel of fish before he followed his chief into the big working-room of the headquarters cabin. He was perched on a high stool in front of one of the mapping trestles when he began again on the sore subject.

"Four-fifteen out of Yellow Medicine; that will bring them here about supper time. You'd ought to 've let me catch another mess of trout, Claiborne."

"Not much! We'll give 'em track room because we've got to, but we don't feed 'em on delicacies. Tell you what I'd do, Jackson, if it wasn't for the women; I'd shove that blamed private car out on the Standing Stone spur at the mouth of the canyon where it would get a liberal dusting of rocks now and then from the blasting in the big cut. I've a good mind to do it anyway. I haven't much use for Mr. Silas Westervelt, or for any kind of a crowd he'd pick out to bring with him."

At this the assistant with the baby-blue eyes and the bad jaw began to scent animosities other than those which had been advertised by the gossip of the camp.

"Merely because he opposed your scheme?" he suggested, with the subtlety of an elephant trying to pick up a pin.

"No; that part of it was straight business, and he didn't see the thing as I did. I don't know as I've told you, but a number of the board meetings last summer were held in the library of Mr. Westervelt's country house out on the Sound shore. Mr. Westervelt went out of his way to rub it into me that I was only a paid servant of the railroad company."

"Oh!" said Roddy, with a leer which went better with the bad jaw than with the child-like eyes. "So there was a girl mixed up in it, eh?"

"How the devil did you know that?" growled the modest giant, tilting in the only chair the field office could boast.

"Guessed it," said the assistant shortly. "It's a safe bet. When it isn't business, it's just naturally bound to be a girl."

"You've hit it," admitted the giant morosely. "There was a house party going on at the Westervelt mansion, and one of the guests was Miss Anitra Westervelt—Banker Silas's niece. I didn't see that the fact of my being there on business barred me from saying good-morning or good-evening to Miss Anitra, but Mr. Westervelt seemed to think it did."

"Suffering Scott!" breathed Roddy, with well simulated astonishment; "did he have the nerve to say that to a man of your size?"

"Oh, no; not in so many words, of course. But I got the gist of his meaning one morning after I had been down to the beach with the crowd to give Miss Anitra a swimming lesson. The members of the Securities committee happened to come out on an earlier train that morning, and what Mr. Westervelt said about my not being on hand will keep until I have a chance to pass it back to him."

Roddy chuckled. "Any little old ordinary prophet could foretell that you're due to have the time of your life, Clay," he said. "I wouldn't be in your shoes for a deed-of-gift to the pick of the half-dozen Ozark apple orchards you are said to own."

"Blame the apple orchards!" growled Stannard, with sour irrelevance. "That was the way Mr. Westervelt introduced me to Miss Anitra and a bunch of her friends—as 'the well-known young apple king of the Ozarks.' Wouldn't that jar your back teeth loose?"

"Well, you are, aren't you?" said Roddy maliciously; "or you were until you got the engineering bee in your bonnet, and came out here to wear the brass collar of a soulless corporation."

"The apples were Dad's," said the Missourian, half moodily. "He spent a few thousand barrels of them, more or less, to give me the kind of an education I wanted. Good old Daddy. I wish he were alive now to enjoy the trees that he set out with his own hands when I was a barefooted young cub. God forgive me, Jackson, but for one little minute when Mr. Westervelt was rubbing them in I was ashamed of the apple-trees and of the old, big-knuckled hands that had set them out! Then I felt like going away somewhere and kicking myself."

This time Jackson Roddy's chuckle was completely sympathetic. "And the girl—how did she take it?"

Stannard was silent for a full minute, and when he spoke again it was to say, "Miss Anitra Westervelt is a law unto herself, Jackson. She says—and does—the first thing that comes into the back part of her mighty pretty little head. Sometimes that first thing is conventional, but a heap of other times it's—well, let's call it original; original enough to make your blood run cold—or warm, as you happen to be constituted. No, I didn't fall in love with her, if that's what you're wriggling your ugly jaw about, but I guess the only reason was because I'm not enough of an acrobat to fall in seventeen different directions at once."

Roddy was stuffing his short pipe with a rubbed up handful of cut plug. "We're dodging," he objected, as he felt in his pocket for a match. "You're mighty whistling right about the awkwardness of this butt-in of the bear hunters, or whatever they are. It's coming at the wrong time, good and plenty. Do you know what I did last night after the hard-rock gophers gave me their ultimatum? I wired a good friend of mine in Denver to buy up a few cases of Winchesters quietly, and gave him shipping directions to Yellow Medicine. I have pretty good assurances that we can depend upon the Irish track-layers if it comes to a free fight to keep the rock gophers from blowing up our tunnel, and I didn't want to be caught with my hands in the dough."

"And you did this on your own responsibility?" snapped the chief.

"I did. You couldn't afford to be mixed up in anything as brash as that, and I wanted you to be able to swear out a clean bill of health for yourself in case anything serious came of it."

Stannard shot a quick look at the percher from beneath his heavy black brows.

"As a dust-thrower you are not a very remarkable success, Jackson," he said quietly. "Do you suppose I am thick-headed enough to fall for anything as child-like as that story about the hard-rock men? I know very well what you want those guns for."

"Name it," said the assistant between gentle little puffs at the short pipe.

"Gallagher, that new steel foreman you imported from Arizona, named it for me this morning when I was coming down the canyon. I saw two of his men climbing up the back of the Stone and I wanted to know what they were doing. He said they were wiring the flash-light signal as you had ordered them to. What do you know—more than I do—Jackson?"

"I know this: I worked under Judson Greer, your Overland Northern fighting man, for the better part of three years, and I savvy him up one side and down the other," said the blue-eyed assistant slowly. "As I said a minute ago, we're not going to be caught with our hands in the dough. As the big boss on this job, Clay, that's all you need to know; I guess maybe it's more than you ought to know."