Conniston

“ You can't help by going—and you are the only man who has got to keep his head clear, who has got to stay here and direct the new forces which our good fortune has given to us."
For a moment Conniston stood staring incredulously. Then he turned, and his frowning eyes ran out toward the north, across the far-stretching solitudes of the desert. Somewhere out there, a mile away, ten miles away, twenty miles away, alone, perhaps tortured with thirst, perhaps famishing, perhaps—He shuddered and groaned aloud as he tried in vain to shut out the pictures which his leaping imagination drew for him. ”

“ As the men moved back and forth, many of them staggered perceptibly. Conniston saw one of them pitch forward and lie helpless. A man passed by him, swaying and lurching, and in the pale light there was something fiendish in the fellow's leering face, his open mouth, his wide, staring eyes. Off yonder he heard two men quarreling, their voices raised in windy gusts of snapping oaths; saw one of them lift his hand and strike, not as a man strikes with his bare fist, but as a man strikes with a knife ”

“ His voice was deep with sincerity, alive with an intensity of feeling which drove a warm flush into Conniston's tanned face.
"As you say, I did only what a man must do were he not a scoundrel. But, too, as you say, it means a great deal. It means that when you will have paid me my wages I shall have not another cent in the world. And being virtually penniless, still my chief purpose in coming to you this evening has been to tell you that I love Argyl, and that I want your consent to ask her to marry me." ”

“ You are going to make a bluff at getting work done until the last minute, and then you are going to have nothing done. You are going to throw him into my hands like I would throw a sick pup into a ditch."
"Am I?" asked Conniston, coolly, mastering the sudden desire to take this little fat man into his two hands and choke him. "You know a great deal about what I intend to do, Mr. Swinnerton. And now, if you are not through talking your infernal nonsense, I am through listening to it. There is room to turn right here. Understand?" ”

“ Conniston?"
"You have proven yourself a scoundrel!" burst out Conniston, angrily. "A fair fight in the open is one thing. Such cowardly means as you take to gain your ends is another. And if you will turn your horses and drive back off of Crawford territory I'll be glad to see the back of you."
For a moment Swinnerton stared at him in stupefaction. And then he broke into a delighted giggle which drove the tears into his eyes. Jimmie Kent looked from one to the other, and then, whistling softly to himself and saying no word, rode on down the road. ”

“ They were a degree higher than the horses which they mastered, the cattle which they drove to market. And now their sons, inheriting the limited natures of their sires, have grown like weeds in the environment in which fate put them, with no knowledge of the other things. I think that it is answer enough when I say that I am the son of William Conniston."
He did not mean to boast. He merely stated a simple fact simply. And the scorn leaping up in her eyes, ringing in her clear voice as she answered him, startled him.
"We know a man by his hands, not by his name!" ”

“ Conniston put out his hand for the bread and caught a gleam of sparkling amusement in Lonesome Pete's eyes from across the table. "And maybe after you tell me who you are I might answer you."
"Me!" thundered the big man, lurching one step nearer, his under jaw thrust still farther out. "Me! I'm Brayley, that's who I am! An' I'm the foreman of this here outfit."
"Thank you, Brayley." Conniston's anger was pounding in his temples, but he strove to keep it back. "I'm Conniston. I was told to report here by Mr. Crawford to go to work in the morning. I suppose I report to you?" ”

“ All right, Conniston. Now who happened to tell you to slap yourself down in that there chair, huh?"
"Nobody," returned Conniston, calmly. "I didn't suppose that I was to stand up and eat."
Lonesome Pete's grin overran his eyes, and the ends [78] of his fiery mustache curved upward. Two or three men laughed outright. Brayley's brows twitched into a scowling frown.
"Nobody's askin' you to git funny, little rooster! You git out 'n that chair an' git out 'n it fas'. Sabe?"
Calm-blooded by nature and by long habit, Conniston had mastered the flood of blood to his brain and grown perfectly cool. ”

“ If you are not in a hurry to go right on?"
"We have all the time in the world!" Conniston hastened to assure her. And Hapgood of the aching muscles added fervently, "If it's more than a mile to Crawfordsville, I've got to rest awhile!"
"It is something more than that." She rose and moved toward the house. "Through the short cut straight back into the mountains it's twenty."
Lonesome Pete was turning to drive toward a gap in the encircling trees when the girl called to him to take Conniston's horse. And then the three went to the house. ”

“ Conniston was sorry to be separated from Lonesome Pete, the only man of the outfit with whom he spoke a dozen words a day, the only man who did not treat him as a rank outsider and an alien. But, on the other hand, he was glad that he was to be given a respite from the blistering wires of the cross-fence, that he was to be given change of work. And when he learned what the work was he was doubly glad. The three men were to ride twenty miles from the bunk-house to the lower corrals of the Lone Dog to gather up a herd of steers there and drive them across to the Sunk Hole. ”

“ Conniston hesitated, frowning, before he answered. "He has been irritable," he finally admitted, with slow reluctance. "But the reason is not far to seek and does not discredit him. He is heart and soul in this work, Miss Crawford. Like all of us—you, [200] your father, Tommy Garton, me—I think that he feels his responsibility heavily, very heavily. And when day after day rushes by and finds the work far from being finished, and he has to have more men, and the men don't come—good heavens! isn't it enough to make a man restive?" ”

“ Conniston repeated.
"I gotta be hittin' the trail back to the Half Moon real soon. I wanted to ask you a question firs'." Again he hesitated, again broke out suddenly: "I take it a lady ain't the same in no particulars as a man. Huh, Con?"
Conniston, thinking of Argyl, said "No," fervently.
"If a man likes you real well you can tell every time, can't you? An' if he ain't got no use for you, you can tell that, too, can't you?"
Conniston nodded, thinking that he began to guess Pete's troubles.
"Don't you know—can't you tell—how Miss Jocelyn feels toward you, Pete? Is that it?" ”

“ That life, as he saw it, was an existence without responsibility, without fatigue, even tinged with something of exhilaration as one galloped up and down over wide grassy meadows. To-day he began to learn that a gay-colored picture may hide quite as much as it shows.
They left the Half Moon corrals at a gentle canter, Conniston swinging along beside the other men, actually enjoying himself. He wondered at the deliberate slowness with which Rawhide Jones and Toothy began their errand. ”

“ Here Conniston counted forty-nine teams and forty-nine drivers. One man—it was the big Englishman with the scarred lip and cheek and the unsheathed knife—was standing ten feet away from the edge of the ditch, his great bare arms folded, watching.
"That's one of your foremen," Truxton said, his eyes following Conniston's. "Ben, his name is. He knows his business, too. He'll take care of this gang for you while you come along with me. ”

“ Conniston stood eying him, and slowly the smile passed from his face, to be followed by a serious frown.
"I thought you'd kick in for the sport of it," he said, after a moment, his voice quiet and a trifle cold. "You don't have to if you feel like that about it. You still have your ticket to San Francisco. You can have half of that twenty-seven dollars. You can sell your horse if we win the brutes."
Hapgood had been thinking about that before Conniston spoke. And his thoughts had gone further. It would not be long, he told himself shrewdly, before Conniston Senior softened. ”

“ And you will have to oversee the work of seven hundred men then; you will have to drive this ditch night and day; you will have to complete two big dams. And you will have to do that before the first day of October. It is a big job, Conniston. Can you do it?"
Conniston wet his dry lips and hesitated.
"Mr. Crawford, it is a big job. I do not even know that the thing is possible. I believe that it is. [221] I do not know, I cannot know, if I can do it. I believe that I can. If you have a better man, if in Denver or anywhere else you can find a better man, put him in Truxton's place. ”

“ Moon had stated. But, being much taller than his friend, he looked rather uncomfortable, and indeed had hidden the shortcomings of the garments under a gorgeous dressing-gown, a relic of Dick's 'Varsity days. But Conniston had procured through Durham several suits of Gore's clothes which had been left behind at the Hall when he was turned away by his grandfather. These he had brought with him, and Bernard was glad enough to get into comfortably-fitting garments. These, and the society of Conniston, a good dinner and the super-excellent port made him feel a new man. ”

“ And Conniston, after a brief moment of hesitation in which he began to see that he had been acting rather foolishly, galloped up to her side.
"I am afraid I have been boorish, Miss Crawford. You must forgive me."
"In three weeks you have learned a great deal, but there is still a great deal which you do not seem to have assimilated."
"I have learned—" There was a question in his unfinished sentence.
"You have learned to ride as a man must who is to do his day's work of twelve, maybe fifteen, hours in the saddle. Surely that is something. You have learned to rope a steer on the dead run. ”

“ For each man of them, from Brayley to the ditch-diggers, was laboring not only for the company, but for himself. Each and every man had been promised a bonus for every day between the time when water was poured down into the sunken Valley and the coming of high noon upon October the first. And Conniston still held to his determination to have everything in readiness by the twenty-fifth of September.
Upon the evening of the twenty-fourth of September Conniston called upon Mr. Crawford at his cottage in Valley City. He found his employer smoking upon the little porch alone. ”

“ When noon came they ate with the men. And at one o'clock Truxton called Ben and the Lark aside and told them shortly that Conniston was the new engineer and that they were to take orders from him. Whereupon Conniston took upon himself the responsibility of "bossing" a hundred men, the biggest responsibility which he had ever taken upon his care-free shoulders. ”

“ I say, Conniston. Remember me to Miss Argyl, will you? She's a glorious girl. I never saw her match. She's got the same capability for doing big things that her father has. I said the other day that he was the whole brain and brawn of this war for reclamation. I ought to have been kicked. Do you know that the whole project, from its inception, has been as much hers as his? Why, that girl has ridden over every foot of this valley, knows it like a book. Dam Number Three, that auxiliary dam, is her idea. ”

“ It was only when it began to grow dusk and the boy brought Garton's supper that Conniston got up and went down the street to his own solitary evening meal at the lunch-counter.
It was after nine o'clock, and Conniston was lying on his cot in the little rear room of the office-building listening to Tommy Garton talk about reclamation—it seemed the only thing in the world he cared to [170] talk about during working-hours or after—when the outside door was flung open and a man's heavy tread came through the office and to their sleeping-room. ”

“ Things are going dead against us these days. Do you know what that means?" He squared his shoulders, and for a moment his lips came together in a straight line. Then he smiled again.
"Are you never—afraid of the outcome?" asked Conniston.
"I believe in God, Mr. Conniston. I believe in my work. I believe in myself. We are not going to fail."
In that one brief, fleeting second Conniston had a view of John Crawford he had never glimpsed before. He made no reply. For a moment there was complete silence, broken after a little by Hapgood's voice from the dining-room. Mr. ”

“ Conniston knew that Hapgood had stayed with the Crawfords two or three days, resting up, as he [101] overheard Brayley say with a fine scorn, and that then he had gone on into Crawfordsville. Conniston supposed that by now he had borrowed money and, if not again in New York, was on his way thither. Of all else of the doings in the big house he was as ignorant as though he had never crossed the desert lands between the Half Moon and Indian Creek.
Conniston most of all men working for Mr. Crawford felt that he could not go to the house. ”

“ Everywhere he went the Lark dogged his heels, listening intently to the orders which his superior gave him.
"The main thing," Conniston told him, when he had outlined the work as well as he could, "is to keep your men working! Don't lose any time. I'll be back as soon as I can make it, some time to-morrow, and if you don't know how to handle anything that comes up put your men on something else. The dam has got to be made, the flume has got to be built, the cut has to be dug, a lot of trees and boulders have to come out. You will have enough to keep you busy." ”