XVI The Truthful Altitudes
A low, tremulous shudder was beginning to lift itself, like the distant growling of thunder, upon the tinnient air of the high summit. A moment later a heavy construction engine shot around the final curve in the westward climb, with Michael Gallagher hanging out of the cab window on the engineer’s side.
The two at the summit faced about to watch the approach. The big engine came lumbering and lurching dangerously over the unsurfaced track in a fierce spurt for the mountain-top, its stack vomiting fire, its cylinder-cocks hissing shrilly, and its exhaust ripping the spheral silences like the barking detonations of a machine-gun.
Ford glanced aside at his companion; her expressive face was a study in delighted animation and he decided that he had again misjudged the president’s niece. She was beating time softly with her gloved hands and singing the song of the locomotive:
“‘With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She climb upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah!’”
she quoted; and Ford’s heart went out to her in new and comradely outreachings.
“You read Naught-naught-seven?” he said: “you are one woman in a thousand.”
“Merci!” she countered. “Small favors thankfully received. Brother thinks there is only one person writing, nowadays, and the name of that person is Kipling. I get a little of it by mere attrition.”
The brakes of the big engine were still gripping the wheels when a small man with wicked mustaches and goatee dropped from the gangway. His khaki suit was weather-faded to a dirty green, and he was grimy and perspiring and altogether unpresentable; but he pulled himself together and tried to look pleasant when he saw that his chief had a companion, and that the companion was a lady.
“I’m sorry if I have kept you waiting,” he began. “Gallagher was shifting steel for the track-layers when your wire found me, and the engine couldn’t be spared,”—this, of course, to Ford. Then, with an apologetic side glance for the lady: “Riley’s in hot water again—up to his chin.”
“What’s the matter now?” gritted Ford; and Alicia marked the instant change to masterful command.
“Same old score. The Italians are kicking again at the MacMorrogh Brothers’ commissary—because they have to pay two prices and get chuck that a self-respecting dog wouldn’t eat; and, besides, they say they are quarrying rock—which is true—and getting paid by the MacMorroghs for moving earth. They struck at noon to-day.”
The chief frowned gloomily, and the president’s niece felt intuitively that her presence was a bar to free speech.
“It’s straight enough about the rotten commissary and the graft on the pay-rolls,” said Ford wrathfully. “Is the trouble likely to spread to the camps farther down?”
“I hope not; I don’t think it will—without whisky to help it along,” said Frisbie, with another apologetic side glance for Miss Adair.
“Yes; but the whisky isn’t lacking—there’s Pete Garcia and his stock of battle, murder and sudden death at Paint Rock, a short half-mile from Riley’s,” Ford broke in.
Frisbie’s smile, helped out by the grime and the coal dust, was triumphantly demoniacal.
“Not now there isn’t,” he amended; adding: “Any fire-water at Paint Rock, I mean. When Riley told me what was doing, I made a bee line for Garcia’s wickiup and notified him officially that he’d have to go out of business for the present.”
“Oh, you did?” said Ford. “Of course he was quite willing to oblige you? How much time did he give you to get out of pistol range?”
“Miss Adair, You Must Let Me Introduce My Friend, Mr. Richard Frisbie”
Frisbie actually blushed—in deference to the lady.
“Why—er—it was the other way round. He double-quicked a little side-trip down the gulch while I knocked in the heads of his whisky barrels and wrecked his bar with a striking hammer I had brought along.”
For the first time in the interview the chief’s frown melted and he laughed approvingly.
“Miss Adair, you must let me introduce my friend and first assistant, Mr. Richard Frisbie. He is vastly more picturesque than anything else we have to show you at this end of the Pacific Southwestern. Dick—Miss Alicia Adair, President Colbrith’s niece.”
Frisbie took off his hat, and Miss Alicia gave him her most gracious smile.
“Please go on,” she said. “I’m immensely interested. What became of Mr. Garcia afterward?”
“I don’t know that,” said Frisbie ingenuously. “Only, I guess I shall find out when I go back. He is likely to be a little irritated, I’m afraid. But there are compensations, even in Pete: like most Mexicans, he can neither tell the truth nor shoot straight.” Then again to Ford: “What is to be done about the Riley mix-up?”
“Oh, the same old thing. Go down and tell the Italians that the company will stand between them and the MacMorroghs, and they shall have justice—provided always that every man of them is back on the job again to-morrow morning. Who is Riley’s interpreter now?”
“Lanciotto.”
“Well, look out for him: he is getting a side-cut from the MacMorroghs and is likely to translate you crooked, if it suits his purposes. Check him by having our man Luigi present when he does the talking act. Any word from Major Benson?”
“He was at the tie-camp on Ute Creek, yesterday. Jack Benson and Brissac are lining the grade for the steel on M’Grath’s section, and the bridge men are well up to the last crossing of Horse Creek.”
“That’s encouraging. How about the grade work on the detour—your new line into Copah?”
It was the assistant’s turn to frown, but the brow-wrinkling was of puzzlement.
“There’s something a bit curious about that—you don’t mind our talking shop like a pair of floor-walkers, do you, Miss Adair? You know we expected the MacMorroghs would kick on the change of route and the loss of the big rock-cut in the canyon. There wasn’t a word of protest. If I hadn’t known better, I should have said that old Brian MacMorrogh knew all about it in advance. All he said was: ’Sure, ’tis your railroad, and we’ll be buildin’ it anywheres you say, Misther Frisbie.’ And the very next day he had a little army of men on that detour, throwing dirt to beat the band. It’ll be ready for the steel by the time we can get to it with the track-layers.”
Ford nodded approvingly. “Speed is what we are paying for, and we’re thankful to get it whenever, and wherever, we can. Is the bridge timber coming down all right now?”
“Yes; and we are getting plenty of ties since the major put on his war-paint and went after the MacMorrogh subs in the tie-camps. It is the rock work that is holding us back.”
Ford nodded again. Then he tried a little shot in the dark.
“The president’s car is just below—at the basin switch. He wants to have it taken to the front, and I have been trying to dissuade him. Is the track safe for it?”
Frisbie guessed what kind of answer was desired, and stretched the truth a little.
“I should say not. It’s something fierce, even for the construction trains.”
Miss Alicia’s smile was seraphic.
“You two gentlemen needn’t tell fibs for the possible effect on me,” she said, with charming frankness. “Nothing I could say would carry any weight with Uncle Sidney.”
“Stung!” said Frisbie, half to himself; and the two men laughed shamefacedly.
“Will it disarrange things so very much if the Nadia is taken to the ‘front’?” asked Miss Adair.
“Well, rather,” said Frisbie bluntly. Then he tried to excuse himself and made a mess of it.
“Just why?” she persisted. “Forget the conventions, Mr. Frisbie, and talk to me as you have been talking to Mr. Ford. Is there any good reason, apart from the inconvenience, why our little pleasure party shouldn’t see your new railroad? I am appealing to you because Mr. Ford won’t tell me the truth.”
Ford stood aloof and let Frisbie worry with it alone.
“There are a dozen reasons, Miss Adair; the track is fearfully rough—really, you know, it isn’t safe for a big car like the Nadia. There are only a few sidings, and what there are, are filled up with construction stuff and camp cars, and—”
She was shaking her head and laughing at his strivings.
“Never mind,” she said; “you can’t tell the truth, either, with Mr. Ford looking on. But I shall find it out.”
Frisbie looked horrified.
“You—you certainly will, Miss Adair; if Mr. Colbrith insists upon having his car dragged over the range.” Then, being quite willing to make his escape, he turned to his chief. “Is there anything else? If not, I’ll be getting back to the Riley mix-up before the trouble has time to grow any bigger.”
Ford shook his head, and Frisbie lifted his hat to Miss Adair and turned to climb to his engine cab. But at the moment of brake-releasings Ford halted him.
“One minute,” he said; and turning to his charge: “I’ll borrow Dick’s engine and take you down to the Nadia’s siding, if you’d rather ride than walk.”
“Oh, will you? That would be fine! But oughtn’t Mr. Frisbie to get back to his work?”
“Y-yes,” Ford admitted. “Time is rather important, just now.”
“Then we’ll walk,” she said with great decision.
“That’s all, Dick,” Ford called. “Keep an eye open for Garcia. He might make a fluke and shoot straight, for once in a way.”
They stood in silence on the wind-swept summit until the curving down-rush of the western grade had swallowed the retreating engine. Miss Alicia was the first to speak when the iron clamor was distance-drowned.
“I like your Mr. Frisbie,” she said reflectively. “Isn’t he the kind of man who would have taken the message to the other Garcia?”
“He is the kind of man who would stop a bullet for his friend, and think nothing of it—if the bullet should happen to leave him anything to think with,” he returned warmly. And then he added, half absently: “He saved my life four years ago last summer.”
There was genuine human interest in her voice when she said gently:
“Would you mind telling me about it?”
“It was up in the Minnesota pineries, where we were building a branch railroad through the corner of an Indian reservation. A half-breed pot-hunter for the game companies had a right-of-way quarrel with the railroad people, and he pitched upon me as the proper person to kill. It was a knife rush in the moonlight; and Dick might have shot him, only he was too tender-hearted. So he got between us.”
“Well?” she prompted, when it became evident that Ford thought he had finished.
“That was all; except that it was touch and go with poor Dick for the next six weeks, with no surgeon worthy of the name nearer than St. Paul.”
Miss Alicia was more deeply impressed by the little story than she cared to have her companion suspect. Her world was a world of the commonplace conventions, with New York as its starting point and homing place; and she thought she knew something of humankind. But it came to her suddenly that the men she knew best were not at all like these two.
“Shall we go back now?” she asked; and they were half-way down to the siding and the private car before she spoke again. It took some little time to compass sufficient humility to make amends, and even then the admission came to no more than four words.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ford.”
“What for?” he asked, knowing only that he was coming to love her more blindly with every added minute of their companionship.
“For—for trying to be hateful.” It was a humbler thing than any she had ever said to a man, but the raw sincerity of time and place and association was beginning to get into her blood.
“If it comes to that, there were two of us,” he rejoined, matching her frankness. “And, as you remarked a while back, I was certainly the aggressor. Shall we call it a truce for the present?”
“If you will be generous enough.”
“Oh, I am generosity itself, under ordinary conditions; but just now I’ll admit that I am fearfully and wonderfully inhospitable. I can’t help wishing most fervently that something had happened to prevent your uncle’s coming.”
“Is it uncle who is in the way?—or the pleasure party?”
“Both.”
“We are negligible,” she said, meaning the pleasurers.
“No, you are not; and neither is your Uncle Sidney.”
“Is he still formidable to you?” she laughed.
“He is, indeed. But, worse than that, he is likely to prove a very considerable disturbing element if I can’t keep him from plunging in upon us.”
She let half of the remaining distance to the end of the steep grade go underfoot before she said: “I like to help people, sometimes; but I don’t like to do it in the dark.”
He would have explained instantly to a man for the sake of gaining an ally. But he could not bring himself to the point of telling her the story of graft and misrule in which the MacMorroghs were the principals, and North—and her uncle, by implication—the backers.
So he said: “It is rather a long story, and you would scarcely understand it. We have been having constant trouble with the MacMorroghs, the contractors, and there is a bad state of affairs in the grading camps. It has come to a point where I shall have to fight the MacMorroghs to some sort of a finish, and—well, to put it very baldly, I don’t want to have to fight the MacMorroghs and the president in the same round.”
“Why should Uncle Sidney take the part of these men, if they are bad men, Mr. Ford?”
“Because he has always distrusted my judgment, and because he is loyal to Mr. North, whom he has made my superior. Mr. North tells him that I am to blame.”
“But it must be a very dreadful condition of things, if what Mr. Frisbie said is all true.”
“Frisbie spoke of only one little incident. Trouble like this we’re having to-day is constantly arising. No money-making graft is too petty or too immoral for the MacMorroghs to connive at. They rob and starve their laborers, and cheat the company with bad work. I’ve got to have a free hand in dealing with them, or—”
He stopped abruptly, realizing that he was talking to her as he might have talked to a specialist in his own profession. Hence he was not disappointed when she said:
“You go too fast for me. But I think I understand now why our coming is inopportune. And it’s comforting to know that the reason is a business reason.”
He put shame to the wall and blurted out suddenly: “It is only one of the reasons, Miss Adair. The—the camps are no fit place for a party with women. You—you’ll have to be blind and deaf if your uncle persists in taking you with him.”
It was said, and he was glad of it, though he was wiping the perspiration from his face when the thing was done. She was silent until they were standing at the steps of the side-tracked private car.
“Thank you,” she said simply. “Of course, I’ll do what I can to keep Uncle Sidney from going—and taking us. What shall you say to him?”
“I am going to tell him that our track isn’t safe for the Nadia—which is true enough.”
“Very well. I’ll tell Aunt Hetty and Mrs. Van Bruce—which may be more to the point. But don’t be encouraged by that. I have reason to believe that Uncle Sidney will have his way in spite of any or all of us.”