The Road Builders Part 12

"Boys," he said, "what's become of the mules that were left here?"

The men looked up. "Don't know, Mr. Carhart," replied the more talkative one. "I ain't seen 'em."

Carhart turned away, and again his eyes roved about over the beaten ground. Very slowly and thoughtfully he began walking around the deserted wagons in widening circles. Those of the men who were back from the river watched him curiously. After a time he stopped and looked at some tracks in the sand, and then, still walking slowly, followed them off to the right. A few of the men, the more observant ones, fell in behind him, but he did not glance around.

The foremost laborer stopped a moment and waited for the man next behind.

"The boss is done up," he said in a low voice.

The other man nodded. "Unsteady in the legs," he replied. "And he's gone white. I see it when we was at the river."

The tracks were distinct enough, but Carhart did not quicken his pace.

He was talking to himself, half aloud: "It'll go on until it's settled,--those things have to, out here. He's a coward, but he'll drink it down every day until the idea gets to running loose in his head."--He staggered a little, then pulled himself up short.

"What's the matter with me, anyway!" he muttered. "This is a pretty spectacle!" And he walked deliberately on.

The trail led him, and the quiet little file of men behind him, over and around a low ridge and a chain of knolls. "This heat keeps a dead rein on you," he said, again speaking half aloud. "Let's see, what was I thinking,--oh, the boys at the camp, they needed water too; I was going to load up and hurry back to help them out."

And then, as he walked on with a solemn precision not unlike that of a drunken man, the scene s.h.i.+fted, and another scene--one which had long ago slipped out of his waking thoughts,--took its place. He was fis.h.i.+ng a trout stream in the Adirondacks. He had found a series of pools in a narrow gorge where the brook came leaping merrily down from one low ledge to another. The underbrush on the steep banks was dark and impenetrable. The pine and hemlock and beech and maple and chestnut trees grew thick on either hand, and so matted their branches overhead that only a little checkered light could sift through. The rocks were dark with moss; the stream was choked at certain points with the debris of the last flood. He was tired after the day's fis.h.i.+ng. A storm came up. It grew very black and ugly in that little ravine. And then, for no reason, a thing happened which had not happened in his steady mind before or since. He fell into a curious horror, in which the tangled wilderness and the gloom and the rus.h.i.+ng rain and the creaking trees and the noise of the falling water and that of the thunder all played some part. He recalled that he had found a hollow in the bank, where a large tree had been uprooted, and had taken s.h.i.+vering refuge there.

The wilderness had always before seemed man's playground. It suddenly became a savage living and breathing thing to which a man was nothing.

And now the desert was showing its teeth, and Carhart knew that he was trembling again on the brink of the horrors. He understood the sort of thing very well. He had seen men grow crafty and cowardly or ugly and murderous out there on the frontier. He had been in Death Valley. And as he had seen the symptoms in other men's faces, so he now felt them coming into his own. He knew how a man's sense of proportion can go awry,--how a mere railroad, with its very important banker-officials in top hats and its very elaborate and impressive organization, could seem a child's toy here in the desert where the wonderful s.p.a.ces and the unearthly atmosphere and the morning and evening colors lie very close to the borders of another realm, and where the eye of G.o.d blazes forever down on the just and the unjust.

None of the little devices of a sophisticated world pa.s.s current in the desert. Carhart knew all this, as I have said, very well. He knew that a man's mind is searched to the bottom out here, that the morbid tone and the yellow streak are inevitably dragged to the surface and displayed to the gaze of all men. But he also knew that where the mind is sound, the trouble may arise from physical exhaustion, and this knowledge saved him. He deliberately recalled the fact that for thirty-six hours he had not slept and that the work he had done and the strain he had been under would have sent many men to the nearest hospital, or, in the desert, to the nearest shallow excavation in the ground. And he walked slowly and steadily on, in that same shaky, determined manner.

On the summit of a knoll he stopped short, and looked down at something on the farther side. The men came up, one by one, and joined him; and they, too, stopped short and looked. And then Carhart raised his eyes and watched their faces steadily, eagerly wondering if they saw what he saw,--a water-hole, fringed with green, and a mule lying at the water's edge and a number of other mules quietly grazing. It was his test of himself. For a full half minute he gazed into those sweaty, drink-bleared faces. And then, at what he saw there, his own tense expression gave way to one of overwhelming relief. The men ran pell-mell down the slope, shouting with delight. And Carhart sat down there on the knoll, and his head fell a little forward over his knees.

"Will you have a little of this, Mr. Carhart?"

A big renegade with the face of a criminal was holding out a flask.

The chief took it, and gulped down a few swallows. "Thank you," he said quietly.

"One of the boys found this here, down among them tin cans, Mr.

Carhart."

It was the crumpled first page of the _Pierrepont Enterprise_. Carhart stiffened up, spread it out on his knees, and read the date line. The paper was only two days old.

"Where's Pierrepont?" he asked.

"About a day's journey down the river, sir."

Again the chief's eyes ran over the sheet. Suddenly they lighted up.

Here is what he saw:--

GOSSIP OF THE RAILROADS

Commodore Durfee Gets the "Shaky & Windy"

Mr. De Reamer and Mr.

Chambers in contempt of Court--Durfee and Carrington directors allied at last against De Reamer--It is said that Durfee already has a majority--Meeting to be held nex will be decid De Rea

The rest of it was torn off, but he read these headings three times.

Then he lowered his knees, with the paper still lying across them, and looked over it at the little group of men and mules about the water-hole. "Can that be true, or can't it?" he asked himself. "And what am I going to do about it? I don't believe it; it's another war of injunctions, that's what it is, and it isn't likely to be settled short of the Supreme Court. We can start back in an hour or so, and as soon as we reach camp I'll take the five-spot"--Carhart's two engines happened to bear the numbers five and six--"the five-spot and the private car and see if Bill Cunningham can't make a record run toward Sherman. It's a little puzzling, but I'm inclined to think it's a mighty good thing that I found this paper."

He tossed it away, and then, catching sight for the first time of the other side, he took it up again. The second page was nearly covered with crude designs, made with a blue pencil. There were long rows of scallops, and others of those aimless markings a man will make when pencil and paper are before him. And in the middle, surrounded by a sort of decorative border, was printed out "MR. CARHART," then a blank s.p.a.ce and the name "JACK FLAGG."

Carhart rose to his feet, folded the paper, put it in his hip pocket, and looked cheerfully around. "So, Mr. Flagg, it's you I'm indebted to for this information. I'm sure I'm greatly obliged." Then he waved to the men. "Come on, boys," he shouted. "Bring those animals back to the wagons. We'll fill the barrels here."

Slowly and not without difficulty he walked back. But the unsteadiness in his legs no longer disturbed him. The panic was over,--and something else was over too.

CHAPTER VI

THE ROAD TO TOTAL WRECK

"How's my pony?" said Young Van. "You haven't told me."

"I shot him."

"Not yours too? Didn't I see you riding Texas this morning? I--I'm a little hazy about what I have and haven't seen these days."

"Yes; Texas pulled through. He's. .h.i.tched on just behind us."

The wagon train, with every barrel full, was drawing slowly toward Mr.

Carhart's camp. Young Van and Carhart were riding on the leading wagon, and the former was gazing off dejectedly to the horizon, where he could see a few moving black specks and the gray-yellow line of the grade. "I don't know what you'll think of me, Mr. Carhart," he said, after a time. "I don't seem to be good for much when it comes to real work."

"Better forget about it, Gus," the chief replied. "I'm going to. This isn't railroad building."

The long line of wagons wound into camp, and Carhart made it his first business to get his a.s.sistant undressed and comfortably settled on his cot. It would be a day or so before the young man would be able to resume his work. Then Carhart stepped out, walked part way down the knoll, and looked about him, and became conscious of an unusual stir about the job. Peering out through dusty spectacles, he saw that a party of strangers were coming up the slope toward him.

At the head walked Old Van, in boiled s.h.i.+rt and city clothes, with a tall man in frock coat and top hat whom Carhart recognized as Vice-president Chambers. After them came a party of ladies and one or two young men to whom Tiffany was explaining the methods of construction. It seemed that Mr. Chambers had thought it worth while to adopt Tiffany's suggestion that the vast quant.i.ties of dry bones in the desert be gathered up and s.h.i.+pped eastward to be ground up into fertilizer.

Carhart was presented to Mrs. Chambers and to the two Misses Chambers and the other young women. He took them in with a glance, then looked down over his own outrageously attired person and restrained a smile.

Tiffany was the one he wished to see, and he told him so with a barely perceptible motion of the head.

Tiffany caught the signal, made his excuses, and walked off with this dusty, inconspicuous man on whose shoulders rested the welfare of the whole Sherman and Western system. He had observed that the young women drew instinctively away from the dingy figure, and his smile was not restrained. He was thinking of his first meeting with Paul Carhart, in Chicago,--it was at the farewell dinner to the Dutch engineers,--and of his distinguished appearance as he rose to speak, and of his delightfully humorous enumeration of the qualities required in an American engineer. Thinking of these things he almost spoke aloud: "And they never knew the difference,--not a blessed one of 'em! Even Mrs. Chambers don't know a gentleman without he's tagged. Ain't it funny!" And the chief engineer of the S. & W., being a blunt, and not at all a subtle man, wisely gave up the eternal question.

"Look here, Tiffany," Carhart began, "something's going to happen to this man Peet."

Tiffany plucked a straw from a convenient bale, and began meditatively to chew it. "I haven't got a word to say, Carhart. You've got a clear case against us, and I guess I can't object if you take it out of me."

"No; I understand the thing pretty well, Tiffany. You're doing what you can, but Peet isn't."

"Are you sure about that?"