Читать книгу The Fight on the Standing Stone - Lynde Francis - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Owing to the deep shadowing of the inclosing mountains the dusk falls in the Travois while yet the peaks and shoulderings of the main range lie bathed in an upper ambience shot through and through with the afterglow of the sunset. The locomotives in the yard had blown the shift-changing signal, and down the steep incline leading from the Buckskin gash and the tunnel's mouth a string of mine-cars was descending, cable lowered, and laden with the men of the off-shift. In the construction yard the masthead electrics were twinkling on by twos and threes, as the cut-ins were made on the different circuits from the small power plant at the dam on the upper Standing Stone; and along the grade from the loop, Gallagher's day-shift of steel men and shovelers was straggling into camp.

Stannard, returning from a brittle little conference with Bailey, his yard-master, in the lower yard, heard the whistle of the bear-hunters' special as the train shrilled around the curve of approach. He had been giving Bailey the order for the placing of the private cars, and directing with malice aforethought that they be shunted in ahead of a half-dozen empty steel flats on the siding farthest removed from the camp and his own headquarters.

Determined to regard the "picnic party," as he was still calling it, in the light of an interference, he did not go down the yard to welcome Mr. Westervelt and his guests when the two-car train halted at the "limits" switch to let Bailey climb to the engine cab. Nevertheless, he had a passing glimpse of the train as it went rocketing up to the western switches from whence it was to be kicked in on the riverbank siding. The private car was a heavy hotel-Pullman, with a deeply recessed observation platform at the rear. By the light of the nearest masthead, Stannard saw that the platform was well-filled, and that there were women in the group—four or five of them. Also, through the lighted windows of the spacious central compartment, he saw two white-jacketed waiters laying the table for dinner.

The young engineer had a sharp return of the grouch when he faced about to climb to his headquarters office on the mesa bench above the camp. Bear-hunting in a Pullman palace car was all very modern and luxurious—and incongruous; most incongruous with the hunting halt made in a railroad construction camp. The Broad Street money lord should have known better than to project a junketing party, with women in it, into a working camp where it could only be in the way and serve as a stumbling-block to discipline and the speeding-up of the job. Stannard had the men of his own staff in mind when he swore that he would put the screws on and work them so hard that they wouldn't have time to kill time with any of the picnicking young women; and since Black Sam had not yet drubbed out the mess supper call on his Chinese gong, the young chief turned aside into the empty working-room and squared himself at his desk to plan for the disciplinary activities.

Under such conditions, and with the virus of acute ill-humor working in his blood, the athletic young Missourian was not very good company for anybody when he took his place at the head of the engineers' mess table a little later. Roddy, having had his pointer, held his tongue; but Markley, the snappy, red-headed young man-driver who had charge of the tunnel boring on the other side of the mountain, was of those who rush in blindly.

"They tell me you've invited a bunch of your New York friends out here to see us do the great act, Stannard," was the way the red-headed one broke in. "I want to get my picture in the Kodaks, and I'm going to hit you for a transfer to this side of the Buckskin."

Bartley Pearson, big, black-whiskered, and as good-natured at heart as he was saturnine in appearance, grunted his appreciation. Driving the eastern drift of the great bore, Pearson had but one ambition in life, namely, to make two feet of advance to Markley's one; and anything which promised to make the red-headed little hustler careless of hard-rock results was to be welcomed.

Stannard, who had been conspicuously silent, took his face out of his plate long enough to read the riot act.

"You'll get a transfer to the location work on the Kicking Deer if you let that private-car party mix and mingle with your job, Markley," he said. Then he went on to clear the situation definitely and once for all. "Mr. Silas Westervelt, who is one of our directors, has seen fit to bring a party of his friends out here on a bear-hunting expedition. Why in the name of common sense he wanted to dump his bunch of play-people down here in the middle of a hot construction fight is more than I know; but I want to say this: The job goes on just the same as if that private car wasn't here." "Oho! keep off the grass, eh?" murmured Markley, helping himself to another plateful of Roddy's trout; and Patterson, the purple-faced giant who was manhandling the grade and track men on the approach loop in the Standing Stone canyon, chuckled hoarsely, while Eddie Brant, boyish, fair-haired and cherubic—the staff's draftsman and map-maker—looked up to inquire innocently, "Didn't I hear somebody say that there are ladies with the party?"

"Feed your face, Eddie-boy, and never mind what you heard," laughed Pearson. "Stannard says they're play-people, so the ladies, if there are any, are only play-ladies, you know."

A sense of humor is a precious gift, and Stannard smiled good-naturedly when he saw the grin spreading upon the faces of the five who in any real need would have gone through fire and water to prove their loyalty to him and to the job.

"You fellows can have your joke, if you'll only take it out on me," he told the five. "When Yellow Medicine wired this afternoon that this private-car crowd was coming here to camp down on us, I was hot. We don't need any distractions just now, with matters in their present shape, and you all know what I mean when I say that. Any day in the week we are liable to have to do something that wouldn't listen very well if Mr. Westervelt should get up in a directors' meeting in New York and tell about it—not to mention what he might try to say or do right here on the ground."

"That being the case?"—cut in Patterson.

"That being the case, I shall do everything I can think of to discourage the bear-hunters, and I am banking on you fellows to back me up. If anybody should ask you, you've never seen or heard of any bears in the Buckskin country. Are you with me?"

"Why not?" mumbled Pearson, with his mouth full. "Capital's business is to put up the money and then go away and let things alone. If it wasn't for the women, we could mighty soon run a bunch of New York dickie-gentlemen out o' camp."

Stannard nodded. "If Mr. Westervelt had any special object in landing down on us with the intention of staying and getting himself well used while he does stay, you'd call it a pretty foxy move—bringing the women along. Just the same, I don't despair of discouraging him. He'll be sending for me pretty soon, I expect, and when I get a whack at him I'll tell him a few of the things he ought to know without the telling."

"Like fits you will," Pearson chuckled, the retort showing how little Stannard's discipline hampered the pure man-to-man relations. And then: "Can't you ring us in some way? There ain't a man of us who wouldn't walk a mile in a blizzard to see you set a multi-millionaire back an inch or two."

"Clay'll give him his orders," snapped Markley; then, imitating and grossly exaggerating Stannard's tempered Missouri drawl: "'Misto' Westervelt, yo' take yo' foot in yo' hand and pile out o' here!' I think I hear you saying it, just like that—not!"

The young chief's grin was only half appreciative when he said: "That's all right. Go on and have your fun out of it, you bullies; but don't let me catch the first man of you giving that mob any encouragement to stay here—just salt that down and keep it to chew on."

"You hear that, Eddie?" said Patterson, turning upon the curly-haired map-maker. "That means you. You're the only man in the gang that'll be likely to get a second look-in at the ladies."

Eddie Brant took his medicine patiently. It was the prescription that the outdoor men had been administering in liberal doses from the first. "I know," he returned, striking back in the only way that occurred to him; "it's a terrible handicap for a man to be as pretty as I am. I'm doing my level best to live it down, Jamie."

"Score one for Eddie-boy," chanted Roddy, breaking into the joking give-and-take for the first time. Then he switched the talk abruptly. "Heard anything more from the hard-rock men, Pearson?"

"Same old song," grumbled the east-end tunnel boss.

"'We'll work like min eight hours a day,

And all we want is a little more pay.'

There'll be nothing doing till the next pay-day drunk, and by that time I'll have found the ring-leaders, if I have to sift the lot of 'em through a wire sand-screen."

"There's something curious about this kick," Stannard put in. "Our gophers are getting better pay and working under better conditions than have ever been given on a job like this, and they know it. Sometimes I've been tempted to wonder if the Overland Northern hasn't sent us a few trouble makers."

"There's more in that than might appear on the surface of the puddle," Markley put in. "I've got my eye on two or three fellows over on my end of the job, and if I get a pinch on 'em, you'll hear something drop."

"Fire 'em!" said Stannard crisply. "And that applies to you, too, Pearson. I'm looking to you two fellows to spot the right men. When you find 'em, cut 'em out, and I'll see to it that they don't hang around very long in the Travois."

"You won't have any trouble with my contingent," Markley qualified, with a ferocious grin. "There's a good bit of tall timber over on my side of the range, and that's what they'll take to after I get through with 'em."

By this time the mess-table squad was comfortably forgetting the private-car party marooned on the opposite side of the construction yard. But now a reminder, in the shape of a natty young negro in uniform with a gold-lettered "Egeria" on his cap, intruded itself.

"Take off that cap!" roared Stannard, before the negro was well within the open door of the mess shack, and the negro went a shade lighter in color and obeyed.

"Y-y-yas, suh," he stammered. "I—I's lookin' for de boss-man. Misteh Weste'velt, he say,—"

"We're all bosses here," said the chief gruffly. "Out with it; what do you want?"

"Misteh Weste'velt, he say fo' Misteh Stanna'd please come oveh to de cyah."

Because the message had the savor of a mandatory order from a superior to an underling, a grin went around the mess table; and in deference to the grin Stannard scowled at the messenger and said: "Tell Mr. Westervelt I'm busy now; I'll be over after a while." And to make the small defiance good, he left the table and crossed to the working-room to put in a full hour over the blue-prints on his desk before he rose and struggled into his coat and went to obey the great man's summons.