The Road Builders Part 7

An hour later the mess tent was still lighted. Within, seated on blocks of timber around a cracker-box, four men were playing poker; and pressing about them was a score of laborers--all, in fact, who could crowd into the tent. The air was foul with cheap tobacco and with the hundred odors that cling to working clothes. The eyes of the twenty or more men were fixed feverishly on the greasy cards, and on the heaps of the day's pay-slips. By a simple process of elimination the owners.h.i.+p of these slips had been narrowed down to the present players--Jack Flagg, his a.s.sistant Charlie, Dimond, and a Mexican. The silence carried a sense of strain. The occasional coa.r.s.e jokes and boisterous laughter died down with strange suddenness.

"It's no use," said Flagg, finally, tossing the cards on the box; "they're against us."

The Mexican rose at this, and sullenly left the tent. Dimond, with a conscious laugh, gathered in two-thirds of the slips and pocketed them. It was an achievement to clean out Jack Flagg. The remaining third went to Charlie.

Flagg leaned back, clasped his great knotted hands about one knee, and looked across at Dimond. Six feet and a third tall in his socks, hard as steel rails, he could have lifted any two of the laborers about him clear of the ground, one in each hand. The lower part of his face was half covered with his long, ill-kept mustache and the tuft of hair beneath his under lip. The blue s.h.i.+rt he wore had unmistakably come from a military source, but not a man there, not even Charlie--himself nearly a match for his chief in height and breadth--would have dared ask when he had been in the army, nor why or how he had come to leave it.

"Dimond," said Flagg, "let me have one of those slips a minute."

The nervous light left Dimond's eyes. He threw a suspicious glance across the box; then, after a moment, he complied.

Flagg held the slip near the lantern and examined it.

"Eighty cents," he muttered, "eighty cents--and for how much work?"

"Half a day," a laborer replied.

"Half a day's work, and the poor devil gets eighty cents for it!"

"He gets eighty cents! He gets nothing, you'd better say. Dimond, there, is the man that gets it."

"That's no matter. He lost it in fair play. But look at it--look at it!" The giant cook contemptuously turned the slip over in his hand.

"That devil hounds you like n.i.g.g.e.rs for five hours in the hot sun--he drives you near crazy with thirst--and then he hands you out this pretty piece of paper with 'eighty cents' wrote on it."

"That's a dollar-sixty a day. We was only getting one-fifty the old way--on time."

"You was only getting one-fifty, was you?" There was infinite scorn in Flagg's voice; his masterly eye swept the group. "You was getting one-fifty, and now you're thankful to get ten cents more. Do you know what you are? You're a pack of fools--that's what you are!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Eighty cents,' he muttered, 'and for how much work?'"]

"But look here, Jack, what can we do?"

"What can you do?" Flagg paused, glanced at his vis-a-vis. From the expression of dawning intelligence on Dimond's face it was plain that he was waking to the suggestion. The slips that he had won to-night were worth four hundred dollars to Dimond. Why should not these same bits of paper fetch five hundred or six hundred?

"What can you do?" Flagg repeated. "Oh, but you boys make me weary. It ain't any of my business. I ain't a laborer, and what I do gets well paid for. But when I look around at you poor fools, I can't sit still here and let you go on like this. You ask me what you can do? Well, now, suppose we think it over a little. Here you are, four hundred of you. This man Carhart offers you one-fifty a day to come out here into the desert and dig your own graves. Why did he set that price on your lives? Because he knew you for the fools you are. Do you think for a minute he could get laborers up there in Chicago, where he comes from, for one-fifty? Not a bit of it! Do you think he could get men in Pennsylvania, in New York State, for one-fifty? Not a bit of it! If he was building this line in New York State, he'd be paying you two dollars, two-fifty, maybe three. And he'd be glad to get you at the price. And he'd meet your representative like a gentleman, and step around lively and walk Spanish for you, if you so much as winked."

Dimond's eyes were flas.h.i.+ng with excitement, though he kept them lowered to the cards. His face was flushed. Flagg saw that the seed he had planted was growing, and he swept on, working up the situation with considerable art.

"Think it over, boys, think it over. This man Carhart finds he can't drive you fast enough at one-fifty, so what does he do? He gets up his pay-slip scheme so's you will kill yourselves for the chance of making ten cents more. And you stand around and let him do it--never a peep from you! Now, what's the situation? Here's this man, five hundred miles from nowhere; he's got to rush the job. We know that, don't we?"

"Yes," muttered Dimond, with a quick breath, "we know that, all right."

"Well, now, what about it?" Flagg looked deliberately about the eager group. "What about it? There's the situation. Here he is, and here you are. He's in a hurry. If he was to find out, all of a sudden, that he couldn't drive you poor devils any farther; if he was to find out that you had just laid down and said you wouldn't do another stroke of work on these terms, what about it? What could he do?" Flagg paused again, to let the suggestion find its mark.

"But he ain't worrying any. He knows you for the low-spirited lot you are. So what does he do? He sends out a bunch of you and makes you ride three days to get water, and then he stacks the barrels around his tent, where he and his gang can get all they want, and tells you to go off and suck your thumbs. Much he cares about you."

Dimond raised his eyes. "Talk plain, Jack," he said in a low voice.

"What is it? What's the game?"

Flagg gave him a pitying glance. "You're still asking what's the game," he replied, and went on half absently, "Let's see. How much is he paying the iron squad--how much was that, now?"

"Two dollars," cried a voice.

"Two dollars--yes, that was it; that was it. He is paying them two dollars a day, and he has set them to digging and grading along with you boys that only gets one-sixty. I happened to notice that to-day, when I was a-walking up that way. Those iron-squad boys was out with picks and shovels, a-doing the same work as the rest of you, only they was doing it for forty cents more. They ain't common laborers, you see. There's a difference. You couldn't expect them to swing a pick for one-sixty a day. It would be beneath 'em. They're sort o' swells, you see--"

He paused. There was a long silence.

"Boys,"--it was Dimond speaking,--"boys, Jack Flagg is right. If it costs Carhart two per for the iron squad, it's got to cost him the same for us!"

Carhart was turning the delay to some account by shutting himself up with his maps and plans and reports and figures. At ten o'clock on the following morning he heard a step without the tent, and, looking up, saw Young Vandervelt before him.

"There's trouble up ahead, Mr. Carhart."

"What is it?"

"The laborers have quit. They demand an increase of ten per cent in their pay."

"All right, let them have it."

"I'll tell my brother. He said no, we shouldn't give in an inch."

"You tell him I say to let them have what they ask."

Young Van hurried back with the order. Carhart quietly resumed the problems before him.

Old Van, when he received the chief's message, swore roundly.

"What's Paul thinking of!" he growled. "He ought to know that this is only the tip of the wedge. They'll come up another ten per cent before the week's out."

But Old Van failed to do justice to the promptness of Jack Flagg. At three in the afternoon the demand came; and for the second time that day the sc.r.a.pers lay idle, and the mules wagged their ears in lazy comfort.

"Well!" cried Old Van, sharply. "Well! It's what I told you, isn't it!

Now, I suppose you still believe in running to Paul with the story."

"Yes," replied the younger brother, firmly, "of course. He's the boss."

"All right, sir! All right, sir!" The veteran engineer turned away in disgust as his brother started rapidly back to the camp. The laborers, meanwhile, covered with sweat and dust, tantalized by the infrequent sips of water doled out to them, lay panting in a long, irregular line on the newly turned earth.

"Well, Gus," said Carhart, with a wry smile, at sight of the dusty figure before the tent, "are they at it again?"

"They certainly are."

"They don't mean to lose any time, do they? How much is it now?"

"Ten per cent more. What shall we do?"

"Give it to them."