George C. Shedd

“ Beside the latter stood Menocal's house, with its smooth green lawn and its beds of poppies, its trees, its fence massed with sweet peas, and its vine-covered veranda, where the engineer had a glimpse of a corpulent figure in a hammock. The only sound from the place was the musical gurgle of water in a little irrigation ditch bordering the lawn.
Inside the long store Bryant aroused the only man in sight, a Mexican who slept on the counter with his head pillowed on a pile of overalls.
"Go tell Menocal there's a man here to see him on business," Lee said. ”

“ Weir walked up on the hillside when Martinez had ridden away and there sat down on a rock. It was a rift, though but a faint rift, that this news made in the blank dark wall he had to confront; and he wished to think. Proof as well as knowledge of what had happened in his father’s case was what he must have. Acting on intuition he had been able to put fear into the hearts of the four men responsible for making his father’s life a hell, but proof of their guilt was necessary to make them suffer in a similar fashion, to reveal their crime to the world, to destroy them. ”

“ There the cooks were peeling potatoes and mixing great pans of biscuit dough and exchanging jests, while here in the shack a fight was going on for a life.
Bryant saw again that unshaven, heavy-faced workman, with the terribly mangled arm, whom he had brought hither. Poor devil! Some oversight, some carelessness, some mistake on the part of himself or another; and if not a dead man, then one-armed for the rest of his days. He, Bryant, could not consider these accidents with Pat Carrigan's philosophic calm—a calm acquired from decades of camp tragedies and disasters. ”

“ The night seemed for Weir as peaceful as ever, the earth bathed in moonlight, the camp at rest. Only before him there was the sputter of the two fuses, one at the right, one at the left, as the trains of fire burned towards the holes in the canisters. He watched these calculatingly. His cigar no longer of service had been cast aside.
All at once he rose erect again. A few men were starting along the wall to climb the hillside, but the greater number were gathered about Burkhardt and the Mexican leader. Now Weir glanced at them and now at the fuses. ”

“ Bryant's eyes blazed suddenly.
"Great God, you talk as if she were to marry the canal!" he exclaimed. He glowered for a time. "I see now what you mean. You believe she would marry me if I win out with the ditch. Being practical, she would accept money as a substitute for love. That reminds me: she herself once declared that if circumstances necessitated she could take a rich man for his riches." Bryant uttered a harsh laugh. "My Lord, I was frightened lest in a fit of anguish at losing my love she should go to the devil!" Again he yielded to an outburst of laughter that made Imogene shudder. ”

“ Yes, the fight was on. The fight to secure and keep horses, to get and hold workmen, to feed and use them both mercilessly, to press them ahead like a shaft of steel, to drive them forward under lash, mile by mile, rod by rod, foot by foot, forcing a channel through the resistant earth and across the mesa—a fight to outwit frost, to outstrip time, to outreach and overcome the impossible.
Bryant himself was everywhere, now at the dam, now with the carpenters, now at Perro Creek. Morgan, in charge of the north camp, succumbed to Bryant's own restless energy and matched it. ”

“ In some mysterious manner knowledge that Burkhardt and not Weir was the prisoner in the jail, together with news of Judge Gordon’s suicide and Vorse’s death, had spread from mouth to mouth. Amazement and incredulity had been followed by an aroused feeling of anger, for to the Mexicans it appeared that the crushing blow dealt the leaders of the town was the arbitrary act of the man they believed a lawless gun-man. Were not Weir’s foremen and engineers guarding the jail? Men who were strangers, not even citizens of the county? ”

“ When I look at a man like Charlie Menocal, I see the Mexican strain uppermost even if his mother was white; and I think what strange, savage, unguessed traits may lurk in his blood from a long time back; and I shiver. One dare not say they have ceased. There may be forces at work in his soul that are inherited from the very tribesmen who dwelt in that pueblo ages ago, whose ruins he and Ruth have gone to see. ”

“ Standing there before the low office building he watched Magney depart. He, Steele Weir, had now taken over full charge of the camp and assumed full responsibility for the project’s failure or success. His eye passed beyond the distant automobile to the town of San Mateo––a new town for him, but a town like many he had seen in the southwest and in Mexico. And aside from its connection with the construction work, it held a fascinating interest, a profound interest for the man, the interest that any spot would which has at a distance cast a black and sinister shadow over one’s life. ”

“ He would not kill an unresisting man, even Sorenson, his worst enemy. Sorenson in his place probably would not have hesitated to do so, for he had no fine scruples in such matters; but for Steele Weir the thing was no more possible than striking a woman or a child.
It was not a question of nerve, as the other had stated. It was a test of brutality and consciencelessness. To shoot a man while escaping is one thing; to kill him while a prisoner, however contemptuous and brazen, was another. But there are means other than bullets for handling obstinate prisoners. ”

“ Only an insignificant stream of water ran, one day, in the stony creek bed that meandered out upon the mesa, and it appeared under the hot July sun and among the hot stones for all the world like a rivulet of liquid glass. That was all the mesa had to show, only its endless gray sagebrush and the creek bed almost dry—unless one should reckon the three parched cottonwood trees beside the stream, a little way down from the cañon, and the flat-roofed adobe house near by, and the empty corral behind built of aspen poles. ”

“ Let the iron bars and stone walls kill them. I hope they live for twenty years to gnaw out their hearts every day and every night behind steel doors. That wouldn’t half pay what they owe. But if they finish in prison, knowing there’s no hope, knowing I’ve put them there for what they did to my father and Jim Dent, knowing that all the money and cattle they stole had slipped through their fingers, that they’ve lost all they gained and more, that their curses and crimes are crushing their own heads, why, that will help. ”

“ To-day the camps were to hurl themselves at that short remaining strip of earth and tear it out; the furrow so long pressed ahead through the iron ground was to be brought to an end; the enemy, frost, was to be conquered at last. When he thought of the inexorable labour done under heart-breaking conditions, in spite of cold and wind and snow, and with sufferings and deprivations little considered. Bryant felt for the workmen, rough though they were, a strong affection. They had done the bitter work.
"Out goes the chunk to-day," was Pat's greeting that morning. ”

“ The construction camp rested on one of the hillsides above the dam. And here one summer afternoon a man stepped forth from the long low tar-papered shack that served as headquarters, directing his gaze down the road across the mesa at a departing automobile. He was Steele Weir, the new chief, a tall, strong, tanned man of thirty-five, with lean smooth-shaven face, a straight heavy nose, mouth that by habit was set in grim lines, and heavy brows under which ruled cold, level, insistent, gray eyes. ”

“ A spirit of eagerness, almost of enthusiasm, pervaded the crews that first went forth in the cold to work at the drills. It was the final attack, and they went from their steaming breakfast with jests and laughter that rang back over the snow. Sixteen below zero, and they laughed! Bryant had a sudden conviction that nothing could stop such men—neither weather, nor elements, nor fate itself. They were heroes not to be daunted. They swung the hammer of Thor against the earth and were worthy of an epic. ”

“ A surge of terror swept Janet. Next thing she knew she was out of the car and running down the hillside among the stones and the stalks of sagebrush, frantic to reach him, to pull him out of view of the men beneath. Only a single one of them had to cast a glance upward and to raise his gun and fire, then he would die. He should not die! She should fling herself as a protection before him rather than that he should be slain!
On a sudden a hand reached up from a rock and seized her arm, stopping her with a jerk. Then she was roughly pulled down beside it. The man was Madden, the sheriff. ”

“ There's no limit to her selfishness and miserable hypocrisy. Our efforts and consideration haven't restrained her a particle, and she will tread the road she chooses irrespective of our desires or feelings. What fools we've been! You and I, Imogene Martin, aren't going to chase a will-o'-the-wisp any longer. We've wasted enough time on this delusion of saving Ruth Gardner; if she's to be saved, she must save herself—and if she will not do that, then the whole world together is of no avail. ”

“ A curiosity, a sort of detached suspense, rooted them to the spot.
“Ah, he’s snapped them on!” Janet said, almost with relief.
The powerful beam of the headlights had suddenly blazed forth. Either feeling that he was safe from Weir’s gun or realizing that he was on the verge of a graver danger, Sorenson had chosen to make the light. He was going at headlong speed; even where they watched, Steele and Janet perceived that,––and only his fear of the peril behind which made him heedless of the difficulties in front could account for that reckless pace. ”

“ Two minutes later Gretzinger's car was gone with a swirl of the headlights as it circled and with a sudden roar of its exhaust. Lee extinguished the light and closed the cabin. To him that little house seemed poignant with tragedy; and he knew, whatever came, his foot would never be set in it again.
He found Imogene sitting beside her sheet-iron stove, wrapped in a quilt and coughing.
"I heard your car come after his; I knew it was you," she greeted him.
Lee regarded her closely.
"You're sick," he said. "You ought to be in bed. ”

“ He thoughtfully watched the car, a black spot in a haze of dust, speeding towards the New Mexican town of San Mateo, on the Burntwood River two miles below camp, its cluster of brown adobe houses showing indistinctly through the cottonwoods that embowered the place. For Magney he felt a certain amount of sympathy, for the engineer was leaving with a recognition of defeat; he was a likeable man, as Steele Weir had discovered during their brief acquaintance, a good theoretical engineer, but lacking in the prime quality of a successful chief––fighting spirit and an indomitable will. ”

“ In a land where men saddle a mount to ride a few hundred yards, the singular coincidence excited their curiosity. They wondered why the fellow walked, as doubtless he was wondering the same thing of them. But as they drew nearer they perceived the pedestrian to be not a man but a woman; and when they met Bryant recognized in her the girl who had sat by Charlie Menocal in his automobile at the ford. ”

“ Sorenson’s lips became compressed. He glanced down at his bleeding hand, shook the blood from his fingers.
“I stay here,” said he.
Weir went a step nearer and thrust his face forward, jaw set, eyes smoldering.
290
“Go on, I say,” he exclaimed.
But the other did not retreat before him or indeed move at all. A sneer lifted his gray mustache.
“You have a gun; you’re a killer; here I am unarmed and in your power,” he said. “You intend to take me in; I propose to stay here. If I go to San Mateo, it will be as a dead man. ”

“ With hatred in his heart and a wicked glitter in his eyes, Charlie Menocal went down the steps to his automobile, feeling the need of a victim, preferably the engineer. Bryant had insulted him at the ford; he was attempting to rob him and his father; he had insolently threatened the elder Menocal; he stopped at nothing; and now he was intruding here and deceiving Louise with his arrogant pretentions. He came on Dave, standing beside the car and examining the latch of a door. ”

“ From the main road leading to Bowenville Weir saw the car’s trail turn aside into a mesa track pointing obliquely for Terry Creek canyon; and he suspected that Sorenson was making a long drive northward, skirting the mountain range and working away from the railroad-tapped region.
Once he thought he caught a flash of light far ahead of him, but knew this was an illusion. Through this rainy darkness no car’s beam, however powerful, would show half a mile. ”

“ Nothing stirred on its one long street, lined with scarcely a break on either side by mud-plastered houses that made a continuous brown wall, marked at intervals by a door or pierced by a window; nothing stirred, neither in front of Menocal's large frame store at the upper end of it, with the little bank adjoining, nor before the small courthouse grounds across the way, where the huge old cottonwoods spread their shade, nor along the entire length of the beaten street down to Gomez's blacksmith shop and Martinez's saloon across from each other at the lower end ”

“ You didn’t look much like a banker reaching for your gun; you just looked like a killer then, a plain bar-room killer––but I beat you to the draw. You’ve got fat and slow, haven’t you, since early days when you use to put lead into poor devils whose stuff you wanted. And you didn’t look like a banker to me, either, trying to bulldoze Janet when I came in; you looked like the big dirty coward you are. Aha, here’s the doctor! Now just tell him how it comes you can order me out of his house, and why you were threatening Janet and making her scream. ”

“ The crews of the north camp, being fewer, got away first; and thither Bryant plowed through the snow with them to see all made safe. When he returned, Carrigan was just herding the last man and team toward the main camp. Together the contractor and the engineer extinguished the torches, then made their way, carrying a flare with them, toward the glow showing at the edge of the camp, where an oil-soaked bale of hay burned as a guide. At their backs the wind and snow blew with gradually increasing strength. ”

“ Meanwhile the throng had grown until it filled all the space about the rear of the court house and formed a mass of human bodies on which the checkered moonlight played reaching to within half a dozen paces of the jail. A shot rang out and a bullet struck the jail. It was like a match lighted near powder, that if allowed to burn would set off an explosion. One shot would lead to others from reckless spirits, to a volley and in the end to an onslaught. ”

“ The man by the stove glared at the seated contractor during the prolonged period of study as if he hoped his look would consume him.
"How much?" he questioned a second time, impatiently.
Pat looked up at Gretzinger from under his bushy eyebrows with a steely glint showing. The lines of his weather-beaten face had hardened.
"I don't like you," he stated. "I don't like you at all. When I work for people I don't like, it costs them money. I like you less and less all the time. If I go ahead and finish the ditch, I'll be liking you so little that I'll be hating myself. ”

“ A solitary and joyless boyhood, overhung by he knew not what danger, haunted by a parent’s lurking fear and anguish, had made him a silent, cold, ever watchful man, never entirely free from the expectation that his father’s sealed past at some instant would open and confront him with the terrible facts. For that reason he felt that the success he had gained as an engineer, a success won by relentless toil and solid ability, rested on a quicksand. ”