XIII The Barbarians
It was some little time after the rock had begun to fly from the cuttings on the western slopes of the mountains that Kenneth, summoned by Ford, made the run from Denver to Saint’s Rest over the standardized Plug Mountain branch and found the engineer-manager living in a twenty-foot caboose car fitted as a hotel and an office-on-wheels.
The occasion of Kenneth’s calling was a right-of-way dispute on the borders of the distant Copah mining district; some half-dozen mining claims having been staked off across the old S.L. & W. survey. The owners, keen to make a killing out of the railroad company, threatened injunctions if the P. S-W. persisted in trespassing upon private property; and Ford, suspecting shrewdly that the mine men were set on by the Transcontinental people to delay the work on the new line, made haste to shift his responsibility to the legal shoulders.
“If I hadn’t known you for a pretty good mountaineer, Kenneth, you would have missed this,” he said, making his guest free of the limited hospitality of the caboose-hotel. “Are you good for a two-hundred-and-eighty-mile cayuse ride, there and back, on the same trail we tramped over a year ago last spring?”
“I’m good for everything on the bill of fare,” was the heartening reply. “How are things going?”
Ford’s rejoinder began with a non-committal shrug. “We’re building a railroad, after a fashion.”
“After a good fashion, I hope?”
Another shrug.
“We’re doing as well as we can with the help we have. But about this right-of-way tangle—” and he plunged his guest into a discussion of the Copah situation which ran on unbroken until bedtime.
They took the westward trail together in the morning, mounted upon wiry little mountain-bred ponies furnished by one Pacheco, the half-breed Mexican who had once earned an easy double-eagle by spying upon two men who were out hunting with an engineer’s transit. For seven weeks Frisbie had been pushing things, and the grade from Saint’s Rest to the summit of the pass was already a practicable wagon road, deserted by the leveling squads and ready for the ties and the steel.
From the summit of the pass westward, down the mountain and through the high-lying upper valley of the Pannikin, the grade work was in full swing. The horse trail, sometimes a rough cart-road, but oftener a mere bridle-path, followed the railroad in its loopings and doublings; and on the mountain sections where the work was heaviest the two riders were never out of sight of the heavily manned grading gangs.
“To a man up a tree you appear to be doing a whole lot, and doing it quickly, Ford,” commented the lawyer, when they had passed camp after camp of the workers. Then he added: “You are not having any trouble with the MacMorroghs, are you?”
“Not what the legal department would call trouble,” answered Ford evasively; and for ten other miles the narrowness of the bridle-path discouraged conversation.
Farther down in the valley of the Pannikin the activities were less thickly sown. On many sections the work was light; no more than the throwing up of an embankment in the park-like intervales, with now and then a rock-or earth-cutting through some jutting spur of the inclosing mountains. Here the men were bunched on the rock work and the fills, though the camp sites were commonly in the park-like interspaces where wood and water, the two sole commodities for which the contractors could make no deductions on the pay-roll, lay conveniently at the doors of the rude sleeping shacks.
Since he was not required to talk, Kenneth had time to be curiously observant of many things in passing. Each camp was the fellow of its neighbor; a chaotic collection of hastily built bunk shanties, a mess tent for those who, shunning the pay-devouring Scylla of the contractors’ “commissary,” fell into the Charybdis of the common table, and always, Kenneth remarked, the camp groggery, with its slab-built bar, its array of ready-filled pocket bottles, and its sad-faced, slouch-hatted, pistol-carrying keeper.
“What is that Bible-saying about the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land?” said Kenneth, as they were passing one of the wilderness bar-rooms buttressing a huge boulder by the trail side. “I should think you’d rule those fellows emphatically and peremptorily out of the game, Ford. They must make a lot of trouble for you, first and last.”
“They do,” was the sober response. “But how would you go about it to rule them out?”
The lawyer laughed. “My writs don’t run this far. But I thought yours did. Why don’t you fire ’em bodily; tell ’em their number is 23—skiddoo! Aren’t you the Sublime Porte—the court of last resort—the big boss—over here?”
Ford pulled his horse down to a walk.
“Kenneth, let me tell you: behind those barkeepers are the contractors; behind the contractors is Mr. North; behind Mr. North, the president. My little lever isn’t long enough to turn the world over.”
“Pshaw!” said Kenneth. “Mr. Colbrith wouldn’t stand for anything like that! Why, he’s a perfect fanatic on the whisky question.”
“That’s all right,” said Ford acidly. “It doesn’t go as far as Mr. Colbrith in the matter of the debauching particulars. It stops in Denver; and Mr. Colbrith approves Denver in the lump—signs the vouchers without looking at them, as Evans would say. I tell you what I believe—what I am compelled to believe. These individual saloon-keepers are supposed to be in here on their own hook, on sufferance. They are not; they are merely the employees of a close corporation. Among the profit sharers you’ll find the MacMorroghs at the top, and Mr. North’s little ring of Denver officials close seconds.”
“Do you honestly believe that, Ford?”
“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 God!” 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, God 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 hell 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.
It was in Grigsby’s town office that Ford saw the ore specimens and the certified assays, and listened not too credulously to Grigsby’s enthusiastic description of the Little Alicia. To be a half-owner in this mine of mines was to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice—when the railroad should come: if one might take Grigsby’s word for it.
It is a curious fever, that which seizes upon the new-comer in an unexploited mining field. Ford was far from being money-mad; but there were times when he could not help contrasting a railroad salary with Miss Adair’s millions. True, he had once said to her, in the fulness of confident belief, that the money of the woman he loved would make no difference—to her or to him. But the point of view, wise or foolish, is not always the same. There were moments when the Adair millions loomed large, and the salary of an assistant to the president—who was in fact little more than a glorified chief of construction—shrank in proportion. He was free of obligation and foot-loose. His twenty thousand dollars invested in P. S-W. stock at twenty-nine and a half had grown with the rising market to sixty-odd. What did it matter to any one if he chose to put ten thousand of the sixty-odd on a turn of the Little Alicia card?
While it was gambling, pure and simple, he did not bet with his eyes shut. Inquiry at the Bank of Copah established Grigsby’s reputation for truth-telling. The specimens and the assay certificates were beyond doubt genuine. More than this, Grigsby had made a number of ore shipments by freighters’ wagon and jack train over the range, and the returns had enabled him to keep a small force of men at work in the mine.
Ford made his bet through the bank. The cashier was willing to take a P. S-W. official’s note of hand, to be canceled when Ford could deposit to the bank’s credit in Denver, and to give Grigsby an open account for his immediate needs. Grigsby accepted joyfully, and the thing was done. Ford’s mess of pottage was a deed of half-ownership in the Little Alicia, executed and recorded in the afternoon of the day of stop-overs, and he was far enough from suspecting that he had exchanged for it all that a man of honor holds dearest. But, as a matter of fact, the birthright had not yet been handed over: that came later.