Читать книгу Boulder Dam - Zane Grey - Страница 7

It was early in the evening of a spring night in Las Vegas, Nevada, 1932. The town roared with thousands of workers in from Boulder Dam to buck the tiger and have themselves a good time.

No Western town during the gold rush or the later frontier days could have held a candle to this modern wide-open city, which owed its mushroom growth and boom business to the great government project of damming the Colorado River.

Throngs of men paraded up and down the pavements under the glare of brilliant neon lights that turned night into day along the wide main street. The scene resembled Broadway on New Year’s Eve, except for the horns and hilarity. This Boulder Dam crowd was noisy enough, but grim and hoarse, with the stride of men not easily brushed aside from the intent visible in gleaming eyes and on bronzed faces. A steady stream passed to and fro, congested and blocked every little way before the swinging doors of the gambling palaces.

Lynn Weston, young Californian, stood outside the Monte Palace, indulging in his peculiar penchant for watching the passers-by. This habit had grown in Lynn during his frequent visits in from Boulder Dam. He belonged to this heterogeneous throng, and for the endless year of his toil at the dam he had been actuated by their common weakness for excitement and oblivion, yet in his way he was a lone wolf. The ignominy of the catastrophe that had forced him into the ranks of these raw workers weighed upon him less and less as time went on, and unaccustomed hard labor had begun its mysterious alchemy of change in him. Disappointment at unrealized opportunity for his ambition and bitterness at the misfortune of not completing his engineering course at college both had somewhat lost their sting. College man, famous football player, scion of an old California family whom the depression had reduced to unfamiliar and insupportable straits, and lastly a jilted lover who had welcomed his dismissal but who chafed under the shame of it, Lynn Weston looked on the passing throngs with slowly clarifying eyes, an awakening mind, and a strange sense that the something evermore about to happen to him was due. This mood never troubled him through the strenuous hours of rough labor, nor when he looked upon red liquor and the bright face of the gamblers’ lure.

With a shrug of his broad shoulders Lynn went into the Palace. The glaring hall was full of a blue haze of smoke, the sound of men’s voices, the clink of silver coins and the rattle of roulette wheels. Men stood ten deep around the gambling games. As Lynn elbowed his way back toward the rear his keen sight met the same weathered visages of his fellow workers and the same pale-faced, hard-eyed, thin-lipped parasites he was used to seeing there. In the rear of this long hall he knew where and how to get the bottle that had become a habit and which he despised for the very thing he found in it. Here in the rear lounged men for whom Lynn had no name but whom he always wanted to beat down and throw into the dirt. They were the dregs of humanity, outcasts, criminals, hopheads, men of a type he had taken care not to meet in the dark.

At length Lynn found a vacant chair at one of the poker tables, but the players there were too slick for him, and after dropping ten dollars he quit. He lost at monte too, and the big roulette wheel reduced his month’s wages to a five-dollar bill. Lynn was gambler enough to grow cooler as luck held aloof. But he had another stiff drink.

At the faro table the fickle goddess of fortune smiled upon him. Lynn knew this dealer and that the game was crooked, but with the perversity of a gambler who was winning he kept backing his luck. And it stayed with him until he was far ahead. This was the time to quit. But Lynn was reluctant to turn his back upon a game that owed him much and which he wanted to beat, as much perhaps to get even with the crooked house as to square accounts. So he took another whirl at the game. This time Lynn’s sharp trained eye caught the dealer in a flagrant bit of cheating. Quick as a flash he snatched at the dexterous white hand and with a wrench turned up the cupped palm. The dealer let out a half-stifled cry of pain and anger.

“Caught with the goods, Hevron!” Lynn rasped out piercingly, and he held the trapped hand for players and spectators to see. “There, plain as your hawk nose! This is the second time. If I hadn’t beat your rotten game I’d take a sock at your ugly mug. . . . Here, cash these.”

With lowered face clouded and ashen, Hevron made the exchange with white hands less dexterous than nervous.

“Young fellow, you’re drunk. Better hold your tongue,” he declared threateningly.

“No, I’m not drunk,” returned Lynn. “You pulled a crooked trick. Some of these men saw it. You’re crooked. This joint is the crookedest in Las Vegas. Everybody knows it. I was a sucker to come in here. But I’m even now, and I never will come back.”

“You’ll never get in my game. Beat it now or I’ll have you thrown out.”

“Is that so?” Lynn queried coolly, and he flashed out a brown hand that fastened in the dealer’s shirt. With one powerful pull Lynn dragged Hevron over the table into the scattering crowd. Then he swung at him. Hevron collided with a bystander, spun around and fell, striking his head hard upon the brass footrail of the bar. He collapsed there, with blood running from a gash over his ear.

“Say, Big Boy, look out how you slam people around,” cut out a crisp voice to silence the noise.

Lynn looked up from Hevron into the cold face of Ben Sneed, lately come into notorious prominence as the boss bootlegger of the Boulder Dam project.

“How do, Sneed,” replied Lynn. “Sorry he jostled you. But I wasn’t looking at the backfield.”

“What’d you sock him for?”

“Cheating. Then he threatened to throw me out. The other players will confirm my stand. . . . What’s it to you?” Lynn replied curtly.

“Excuse me, Weston. It’s none of my mix. I was beefing because he nearly upset me.”

Lynn broke through the circle of spectators and hurried down the hall to go out the back door. He crossed the open plot of ground to the police station and entered. Logan, the night sheriff, a burly Texan with strong brown face and shrewd eyes, sat talking to several men. Lynn was relieved to find Logan, with whom he had some acquaintance.

“Howdy, Weston. What’s it all aboot?” drawled the sheriff.

“I just socked Bat Hevron,” Lynn returned hurriedly. “Caught him cheating, Sheriff—the second time. I was ahead of the game—and if he hadn’t got sore nothing would have happened. But he was ugly—said I was drunk and threatened to throw me out.”

“Wal, thet’s too bad,” Logan replied slowly, stroking his square chin. “I reckon you had it on him.”

“Yes. I’m sure I can prove it. . . . The punch I gave him wouldn’t have hurt much, but he fell and cut his head. For all I know he might have fractured his skull. He was out, all right.”

“What you want me to do, son? Lock you up?”

“I should say not. I just wanted you to have my story first.”

“Weston, you go back to Boulder and stay there till this blows over,” advised Logan. “Shore, I wouldn’t pinch you—not on Hevron’s say-so, or the house either. But thet’s a bad outfit, son. As a matter of fact the Monte is the crookedest joint in Las Vegas. Most of the gambling halls here give you an honest run for your money. But there are big shots behind the Monte. We couldn’t shut them up if we wanted to. There’s been some tough fights. I’ve been beat up bad a dozen times.”

“How come, Sam?” asked one of his companions. “That’s funny, from you.”

“I don’t reckon it’s funny. You see, my town bosses won’t let me use a gun. I had hell not long ago for shootin’ a hombre’s laig off. I had to. He pulled a knife on me. But the fact is every time we have to make an arrest an’ get into a jam we have to use our fists. How’s thet for as wild a burg as Tombstone or Ely or Tonopah ever was?”

“If I don’t miss my guess you’ll not live long here,” the other rejoined tersely.

“Sheriff,” spoke up Lynn, “when I let Hevron have it he upset Ben Sneed. And Sneed called me pretty sharp. Could he have any interest in the Monte joint?”

“He could, shore, but I reckon not. Sneed is the squarest bootlegger that we’ve had heah. Fact is he’s a good chap. I like him. Says he buys an’ sells booze. Thet’s all. Runs a swell night club oot at his ranch. But no gamblin’. . . . I’ll tell you, Weston, you’ve made an enemy in Hevron. He came heah from Chicago. He’s a bad egg. An’ his dealin’ faro is just a blind. He could hire one of thet lousy ootfit at his hangoot to slit yore throat for a dime an’ get back some change. You beat it back to Boulder City an’ stay there.”

“Thanks, Sheriff. I’ll do that little thing,” Lynn replied soberly, and went out. Cutting across the block he reached a side street and went on to the corner. There he halted a moment. It was nothing for Weston to slug a man. He had done it often, but he feared that he might have done it once too often. Sheriff Logan had been outspoken, and concerned, which was enough to give Lynn a case of the jitters. Just what had Logan meant by Hevron dealing faro as a blind, and who were the men that would slit a throat for a dime and give back some change? All kinds of rackets had grown up like weeds since the great influx of workers to the Dam. Bootlegging was carried on open and aboveboard. But Lynn had heard rumors of rackets that cast bootlegging in the shade. There was a tough gang from Oklahoma that hung out in the hills above the Pass some twenty miles from Las Vegas and just out of the Boulder Dam Reservation. This gang was suspected of holding up laborers on their way to town. A number of men had been found dead along the roadside, apparently having been struck by a speeding car when they were going back to camp drunk. There was a Montana outfit of wild cowboys somewhere in the district. Least known of all was a bunch of Chicago gangsters who worked at the dam and operated in Las Vegas. Rumor had it their women were with them.

Lynn thought about those elements, now that he had allowed his temper to get the better of him. And he made up his mind to keep a keen eye about him and pass up the bright lights for a while.

On his way down the main street, when he got beyond the crowd and near the side street where he had parked his car he felt he was being followed by two men. Crossing the street he went back uptown. No doubt some of the thugs at the Monte had seen him win the several hundred dollars and were bent on relieving him of it. Lynn did not relish the idea of being bumped off for some ill-earned money. Before he got to the center of town he made sure he was being followed. This caused a slow fire to burn out the cold constriction in his veins. He ought to have a gun, but he did not dare risk going into a store. Instead he ducked into the crowded Blue Eagle and got out the back way before his shadowers had time to enter at the front. Then he ran up the alley to the next side street. By the time Lynn had gotten back to the main thoroughfare he was sore. This running from a couple of footpads did not strike him pleasantly at all. He had had just enough whisky to be easily roused.

Whereupon he strolled along under the flaring lights, keeping to the outside of the stream of noisy men. His cap afforded poor concealment for his eyes, so he went into a store and bought a sombrero. Resuming his walk he went on down to the Monte. Here Lynn stood back in the shadow of a projecting corner of wall.

He had been there scarcely a moment when three hard-looking customers hurriedly came out of the Monte, followed by Ben Sneed, his keen face dark as a thundercloud.

“If Ben Bellew gets that girl I’ll scramble you saps all over the place,” Sneed hissed into their ears.

“Aw, Ben, you shouldn’t have left thet dame,” returned one, with the fear of death in his hoarse voice.

“Hell! She was naked, wasn’t she? I had to buy her some clothes. And I locked her in, didn’t I?”

“Bellew must have trailed her.”

“Scram! Get the car, you. . .”

The quartet passed on out of hearing. Lynn, his ears ringing, leaned there shot through with curiosity and speculation. He was always seeing or hearing something to stir his feelings. In this instance he had to fight a strong impulse to follow Sneed. There was deviltry afoot every dark hour of this raw Las Vegas night. But he had his own risk to think of. Lynn watched vigilantly for the men he had caught dogging his footsteps, and he was not at all sure that he could recognize them.

After a goodly wait, during which his anger and alarm eased, he hurried down the street. At every cross street he turned to look back. When he was four blocks down he decided he had given them the slip, and he reached the outskirts of town without renewed alarm.

Lynn turned off at the last side street to find his car. There were no lights near, which was the reason he had chosen this dark place to park. Cars had a habit of disappearing around Las Vegas. He walked clear out into the desert without locating the antiquated automobile that he called his own. Turning back he concluded he had missed the street. Perhaps in the darkness he had gotten turned around. He went clear to the electric light which marked the corner where he had turned off. As his brain was a little befogged he could not be sure of direction.

As he nearly reached the corner a big car whirled up and stopped with a roar. Three men leaped out. One ran across under the light to disappear up the side street. The other two halted to peer in Lynn’s direction.

“She went this way.”

“I saw her run under the light. She had a blanket round her.”

“Not down that street,” came a sharp voice from the car. “She went across here. Hurry!”

Lynn had halted under a tree. He knew he could be seen if they looked in his direction, and he did not want to be caught in a suspicious position, so he walked boldly out.

“Wait! Someone comin’,” whispered the nearest of the two men.

“Halt! Who’re you?”

Lynn found himself confronted by two men whose faces he could not see distinctly under their wide-brimmed hats. His quick eye detected the menacing right hand of one thrust into his coat pocket, which protruded ominously. There was a gun there in the grip of a man with murder in his heart.

“What’s this—a holdup?” asked Lynn.

“Oke, you guessed right,” came the rough reply, and the man poked the concealed gun against Lynn’s abdomen. “Look him over, Gip.”

The second ruffian leaned close to scrutinize Lynn’s features.

“Never seen him before,” he said.

“Talk!” ordered the other, punching Lynn with the gun.

“Well, I’m a little—nervous to talk—if I knew anything to say,” replied Lynn. And the fact was that he could scarcely restrain from hitting out with all his might. On the instant, then, the man in the car leaned out, bareheaded, his face in the light. Lynn recognized Ben Sneed.

“Did you see a girl runnin’ along here?”

“No,” replied Lynn.

“We’re losing time,” called Sneed from the car. “Jump in. We’ll follow Ring.”

In another moment Lynn found himself watching the red tail-lights of the car vanishing in the direction the man called Ring had taken.

“Well, what do you know about this?” he muttered. “If I ever meet that bozo again I’ll know him, and will I sock him? I’m telling you. . . . Whew! A gun shoved in your belly doesn’t feel so hot.”

Lynn watched for the car to come back. He heard it for a moment longer. Then the hum ceased. He wondered if Sneed had caught the girl in the blanket.

“A naked girl running away in a blanket!” he muttered, perplexed and wondering. “By gum! That’s the white-slave stuff! But Sneed didn’t strike me as low-down as that.”

He waited there for a little while, watching and conjecturing. Several cars passed, traveling in both directions. At length Lynn decided he had better find his own car if he didn’t want to walk half the night to get home to his cabin. A search down the side street in the direction Sneed had taken failed to locate the car. He began to fear it had been stolen. The loss of the ramshackle vehicle would not concern him, but he wanted to get home. Then he retraced his steps down the street he had first searched, but on the opposite side, and found his car against a background of brush that had made it difficult to distinguish in the dark. Hopping in, he was soon on the move and turned on the road toward Boulder Dam.

Lynn had not noticed the cold until he got going, but with the desert wind whipping in at both sides of his car he became chilled through. He had a comfortable warm sensation, however, where the bulging pocket full of silver dollars sagged heavily against him.

Excitement lingered with him, despite his relief. It had been rather a momentous evening, and no doubt that augmented his thrilling sense of the desert. The bare windiness stretched vague under the stars to the black mountains on the horizon. The dry sweet tang of sage and greasewood stung his cold nose. Far ahead two bright eyes of a car pierced the darkness, and still farther on twinkled a couple of pinpoints. Five miles or more out the red-gold lights of Ben Sneed’s ranch burned against the white-walled hacienda with its dark arches. Lynn had dropped in at the resort several times, but not to stay long. Sneed did not run games of chance.

“I’m curious about that guy,” he mused, as he passed the notorious night club. “Wonder if he got the girl with the blanket? Some life round this Boulder Dam diggings!”

The tremendousness of that engineering project and the magnificence of its setting in the Black Canyon of the Colorado had struck Lynn with staggering force at his very first sight and conception of them. They had changed the direction of his life; they had set him at a man’s job; they had been responsible for the gradual development of his character; they had at length replaced the bitterness of failure and drifting to some vague dream of finding himself on the ladder to success.

It was the desert then that had taken intangible and subtle hold of Lynn Weston. Looking backward he could realize how by imperceptible degrees he had learned to love the lonely and desolate wasteland of rock that the torture of hard labor had blinded him to at first. There seemed to be something permanent for him out here in this Nevada. He conceived the idea right there—why not let this large sum of money he had won be a nucleus to a stake which he could add to during the years Boulder Dam would be in building? Then he could buy a ranch, or start a gold mine, or develop some business on the big inland lake which the dam would flood back into the canyon and basin and which in time would become a sportsman’s paradise. And suddenly he recalled what he had long forgotten—the scorn with which Helen Pritchard had ended their engagement and the more grievous fact of his family evidently having shared her conviction of his hopelessness. But she was wrong, thought Lynn, strangely finding himself free of the old pain; and his family might yet be embarrassingly forced to change their minds, if they did not actually receive help from him.

How this old desert brought home to a man the things that counted—endurance and strength and guts to make life possible and worth living!

Lynn slowed down at the government inspection post, where record was kept of all workers going and coming. He had a cheery word for the guard who passed him.

“Back early, Weston,” was the grinning reply. “Sober an’ broke, I’ll bet.”

“Wrong both ways, Dan. . . . How many cars ahead of me the last hour?”

“Two, I reckon. A truck, an’ a Ford full of micks.”

“So long. I won’t be seeing you for a spell.”

A few miles farther on Lynn clattered up a grade to the pass. That was a gateway to the rough brakes of the canyon country. Back from the road from benches and in coves between the hills gleamed the lights of the camps of the riffraff drawn from all over the United States. It was not a safe place to pass late at night. But Lynn drove slowly because he did not want to hit some murdered workman or outcast whose body might be tumbled from behind rock or brush out upon the road. Where the pass opened wide beyond the black hills he sped by Rankin’s Palace, a huge rambling structure gaudy with its many different-colored lights. Music came on the cold wind. If law had any jurisdiction over Rankin’s resort it had never been called upon. Money could buy anything there. But the laborers had learned to give it a wide berth. Visitors, tourists, adventurers, gamblers, rich men’s sons and society women out for a kick furnished Rankin with his pickings.

Beyond this no man’s land Lynn entered the government reserve and approached the broad plateau where a model town, Boulder City, was in the course of construction.

Lynn turned off the smooth asphalt thoroughfare into a gravel road that headed down into the huge desert basin back of Boulder Dam. Here he entered the canyon country. The road was lighted, but the lamps appeared only to accentuate the lonely desert. For miles downgrade there were no buildings, no works of any land, until he crossed the railroad track which had been built twelve miles down into the basin. This railroad forked below the crossing, the right-hand branch running down to the river and along the shore into the canyon to be dammed; and the left branch turned off into the basin toward the gravel pits from which millions of tons of sand and gravel were to be transported to the site of the dam.

Sand and gravel were Lynn’s job, but he did not think of them then. As always, and especially at night, he felt the call of that wonderful country. The hills along which he drove would soon be submerged under the largest body of water ever artificially made by labor of man, but Lynn did not think of that, either. He caught glimpses of the Colorado, gleaming palely under the bright stars and mirroring the great walls. Lynn did not trust that swirling, sullen, muddy river. He had worked along it for a year now. He had seen it once in flood. He questioned the effrontery of man’s egotism. The Rio Colorado had a voice, a low sullen murmur of unrestraint. In Lynn’s secret opinion only the elemental forces that had given birth to this strange river could ever change its course or dam it permanently.

On the Arizona side the black walls stood up ragged and bold, and beyond them, touching the stars, lifted the stark and ghastly mountains. The basin on Lynn’s left opened out into dim and obscure space, bounded by the distant Nevada hills. Across it the cold wind whipped, carrying alkali dust and grains of sand to sting Lynn’s face. He used to gaze out upon that lonely vague gloom as if it were his future. But that thought had gone, he didn’t remember when, and when he looked now it was to feel something vital and compelling to which he could give no name.

The night gravel train went puffing and rattling by, carrying its thousands of tons down to the mixing mill above the site of the dam. A bend in the road brought Lynn into a zone of electric lights that shone upon the gravel mounds, like gray foothills under the huge iron structures. At the moment a swinging car from high on the bridge tumbled its load with a thunderous roar. Out of the darkness and peace of the desert Lynn had come upon the inferno of man’s creation—yellow light and glare, roar of machinery, ceaseless action of men at work. No moment of cessation of continuous labor on the building of Boulder Dam! The big dormitory appeared to shine with a hundred window eyes, and the camp beyond further attested to the fact that there was no darkness or rest here.

Lynn drove by the camp to his rude cabin. He had preferred this shack of boards to a tent, in which he had sweltered and frozen by turns.

“Once again, old Tincan!” he said, as he brought his car to a jolting halt. Then as he got out he heard a moan. “Hello! Have I got them?” Listening a moment he was amazed and transfixed by a low sound, like a sobbing intake of breath. It came from the back of his car, and it galvanized him into action.

He peered over the door. There was something on the floor—an indistinct shape, mostly dark, but lighter toward him.

“For the love of Mike!” Lynn whispered incredulously. And he thrust a swift hand over the door. It came into contact with curly soft hair on a small round head. An unaccountable thrill checked him for an instant. He bent over, trying to see, feeling farther. His forceful hand encountered a fold of woolen blanket that fell back to let him touch the outline of a woman’s body.