The Road Builders Part 17

Then for a time a series of remarkable scenes took place along the right of way of the Paradise Southern. Men by the hundred, all seemingly bent on destruction, swarmed over the line and tore it to pieces. Trains ran north and west laden with rusty old rails, switches, ancient cross-ties of questionable durability, with everything, as Carhart had ordered, excepting the sand and clay ballast.

"Some poor devils lost their little fortunes in the old P. S." said Tiffany, on the first morning, as the two engineers stood looking at the work of ruin. "I sort of hate to see it go."

Carhart himself went West on the first train, leaving Tiffany to carry the work through. He was satisfied that everything would from now on work smoothly at Paradise and Sherman, and he knew that not a man of those on the work would slip through Tiffany's fingers to bear tales back to civilization of the wild doings on the frontier. At Sherman they said that owing to insufficient business the P. S. trains would be discontinued for a time, and no one was surprised at the news. Far off in New York, in the Broad Street office of Daniel De Reamer, it was some time before they knew anything about it. The little world was rolling on. Men were clasping hands, buying and selling, knifing and shooting. Durfee's plans were marching forward, as his plans had a way of doing. De Reamer's mind was coiling and uncoiling in its subterranean depths. General Carrington was talking about a hunting trip into the mountains with pack-animals and good company and many, many bottles.

Yes, the world was rolling on about as usual; but the Paradise Southern was no more. Forty-five miles of grade, trampled, tie-marked; a few dismantled sheds which had once been known as stations; a lonely row of telegraph poles stretching from one bleak horizon to another; a rickety roundhouse or two: this was all that was left of a railroad: this, and a long memory of disaster, and an excited ranchman at Total Wreck who was telegraphing hotly to his lawyer.

CHAPTER VII

THE SPIRIT OF THE JOB

In order to make plain what was taking place at the main camp during Carhart's absence, we must go back to that evening during which so many things had come up to be disposed of before the chief could leave for Sherman and Crockett and Paradise. To begin with, Dimond came riding in at dusk with a canteen of clear water which he laid on the table about which the engineers were sitting. To Carhart, when he had unscrewed the cap and taken a deep draught, it tasted like Apollinaris. "First rate!" he exclaimed; "first rate!" Then he pa.s.sed it to Old Van, who smacked his lips over it.

"Where did he find this?" Carhart asked.

"Eighteen or twenty miles ahead."

"Plenty of it?"

"He thinks so," he says, "but he's gone on to find more."

"Are the Apaches bothering him?"

"We've had a pop at 'em now and then. He says he hopes to have some beadwork for you when he sees you again. There was one fellow came too near one night, and Mr. Scribner hit him, but the others carried him off before we could get the beads. He sent me back to guide the wagons to the well if you want to send 'em."

"Well," said Carhart, when Dimond had gone, "we have water now, anyway. The next question is about these thieves. You say that five animals were stolen while I was away. When the first roads went through, they had regular troops to guard the work, and I don't know that we can improve on the plan. I'll look the matter up when I get to Sherman."

But an hour later, when he left his division engineer and stepped outside for a last look at "Texas," he found Charlie hanging about near the stable tent. The cook approached him, and made it awkwardly but firmly plain that he had heard a rumor to the effect that Mr.

Carhart was going to Sherman for regular troops, and that, if the rumor were true, he, Charlie, would leave.

No questions were necessary, for Carhart had never thought Jack Flagg the only deserter in camp. He mused a moment; then he looked up thoughtfully at the tall, loose-jointed, but well-set-up figure of the cook. "Do you know anything about military drill and sentry duties?"

he asked abruptly.

Charlie, taken aback, hesitated.

"Never mind answering. We'll say that you do. Now, if I were to put you in charge of the business, give you all the men and rifles you need, could you guarantee to guard this camp?"

Charlie's face wore a curious mixture of expressions.

"Well, speak up."

"I rather guess I could."

"I can depend on you, can I?"

"You won't get the regulars, then?"

"No, I won't get them."

"Then you can depend on me."

"I want you to get about it this morning. Mr. Gus Vandervelt will give you everything you need. Make the watches short and distribute them among a good many of the men, so that n.o.body will be worked too hard."

Carhart pa.s.sed on, and let himself into the covered enclosure where his horse lay sick. It was a quarter of an hour before he returned to the headquarters tent, to find Vandervelt standing in silence at the table. Apparently he had risen to leave, and had paused at the sound of a step outside. Standing for a moment at the tent entrance, Carhart's eyes took on the curious expression which the sight of the elder of the oddly a.s.sorted brothers frequently aroused there. The lamplight threw upward shadows on Old Van's face and deepened the gloom about his eyes. A moment and Carhart, sobering, stepped inside.

Certain memories of Old Van's strange career came floating through his thoughts. It was probably the last time they would be thrown together. Considering everything, he would not again feel like choosing him for an a.s.sistant. Yet he admired Old Van's strong qualities, and--he was sorry, very sorry.

"Van," he said, "I've changed my mind about the troops. I've told Charlie, the cook, to organize an effective system of guards at night, and I've told him, too, that he will take his orders from Gus."

Vandervelt stood motionless, looking at this man who had risen to be his chief, and his color slowly turned from bronze to red.

"From Gus, eh?" he said with a slight huskiness.

"Yes," replied Carhart, steadily, "from Gus. He will represent me while I am gone. It will be only a day or so before he'll be around."

Old Van might have answered roughly; instead he dropped his eyes. But Carhart's unpleasant duty was not yet done.

"One thing more, Van," he said, looking quietly at the older man, but unable to conceal a certain tension in his speech, "are you carrying a gun?"

There was a long silence. Every one of the faint evening camp sounds fell loud on their ears. A puff of wind shook the tent flaps and stirred the papers on the table. The lamp flickered. Very slowly, without looking up, Old Van reached back to his hip pocket, drew out a revolver, laid it on the table,--laid it, oddly enough, on a copy of the Book of Common Prayer which was acting as a paperweight, and left the tent and went off down the grade. And for some time after his footfalls had died away Carhart sat with elbows on table, chin on hands, looking at the weapon.

Paul Carhart was gone. It would probably be a week to ten days before he would be able to get back to the track-end. And with him had gone the spirit of the work, the vitality and dash which had worked out at moments through the a.s.sistants and the men in a stirring sense of achievement, which had given to each young engineer and engineer's a.s.sistant a touch of the glow of creating something, which had made this ugly scene almost beautiful. That steam-leaking locomotive and that rattle-trap of a "private car," bearing the chief away into the dawn, left a sense of depression behind it. By noon of the following day, Old Van was growing noticeably morose. By mid-afternoon every man of the thousand felt the difference. Before supper time the heat, the gloom, the loneliness of the desert, the sense of a dead pull on the work, the queer thought that there was no such place as Red Hills anywhere on the map, and that even if there were, the western extension of the Shaky and Windy would never reach it, these thoughts were preying on them, particularly on Young Van, who was up and at work soon after noon.

Through the second day it was worse. Young Van made stout efforts to throw more energy into his work, and then, in looking back on these efforts, recognized in them a confession of weakness. Paul Carhart never seemed to drive as he had been driving,--his work was always the same. In this frame of mind the young man, at evening, mounted a hummock to survey what had been accomplished during the day. But to his altered eyes the track was no longer a link in the world's girdle; it was only a thin line of dirt and wood and steel, on which a thousand dispirited men had been toiling.

Later he saw Charlie bringing the wagons into corral. He heard his brother ordering the cook sharply about, and he noted how doggedly the orders were obeyed. Then, finally, having laid out the details of the morrow's work and smoked an unresponsive cigarette or two, he went to sleep.

Old Van sat up later. And Charlie sat up later still, nearly all night in fact. He found a comfortable lounging place near Dimond's post, in the shadow of the empty train. The grade was here slightly elevated, and, lying on one elbow, he could survey the camp. Now and then he made the rounds, looking after the half-dozen sentries whom he had posted on knolls outside the wide circle of tents and wagons, making sure that there was no drinking and that his men were advised as to their duties and responsibilities. Between trips he lay back, surrounded by a number of wide-awake laborers, and listened while Dimond recited the prowess of their chief. It was very comfortable there, stretched out upon the newly turned earth. The camp was very quiet. Only a few lights twinkled here and there, and it was not very late when these went out, one by one.

"I heard Mr. Scribner telling, the other day," said Dimond, "how the boss run up against a farmer with a shotgun when he was running the line for the M. T. S. Mr. Scribner was a boy then, carrying stakes for him. There was quite a bunch of 'em, but n.o.body had a gun. They come out of a piece of woods on to the road, and there they see the farmer standing just inside his stump fence with the two barrels of his shotgun resting on the top of one of the stumps. Mr. Scribner says the old fellow was that excited he hollered so they could 'a' heard 'im half a mile off. 'Don't you dare cross the line of my property!' he yells. 'The first man that crosses the line of my property's a dead man!' They all stopped, Mr. Scribner says, for they didn't any of 'em feel particularly like taking in a barrel or so of buckshot. But Mr.

Carhart wasn't ever very easy to stop. He just looked at the fellow a minute, and then he went right for him. 'Look out!' the man yells.

'You cross the line of my property and you're a dead man!' But Mr.

Carhart went right on over the fence. 'That's all right,' says he, 'but you can't get away with more'n one or two of us, and there'll be enough left to hang you up to that tree over there.' And the next thing they knew, Mr. Scribner says, Mr. Carhart had took the shotgun right out of the farmer's hands."

Dimond had other stories. "I guess there ain't n.o.body ever found it easy to get around him. Once when he was a kid surveyor, before he went North, they sent him over into southern Texas to look up an old piece of property. There was a fellow claimed a lot of land that really run over on to this property. Mr. Carhart figured it out that the fellow was lying, but he knew it was going to be hard to prove it.

The old marks of the corners were all gone--there wasn't a soul living who had ever seen 'em. It was an old Spanish grant, Mr. Scribner says, and the Spanish surveyors had just blazed trees to mark the lines.

Well, sir, would you believe it, Mr. Carhart worked out the place where this corner ought 'o be, cut down an old cedar tree that stood there, sawed it up into lengths before witnesses, found the blaze mark all grown over with bark, and took the piece of log right into court and proved it. No, I guess it wouldn't be so infernal easy to get ahead o' Mr. Carhart."

"That's all right," observed one of the laborers, "if you're working for Mr. Carhart. But s'pose you ain't--s'pose you're workin' for Mr.

Vandervelt?"

"Oh, well, of course," Dimond replied, "Mr. Vandervelt's different. He ain't nowhere near the man Mr. Carhart is."