The Iron Furrow Part 37

CHAPTER x.x.x

They were waiting in the sheriff's office in the court house in Bartolo. They were waiting for Mr. Menocal. Winship had sent a messenger for him. At one place in the room, handcuffed and tied, sat the evil-eyed Alvarez; at another sat Charlie Menocal, silent and apprehensive and with a sickly pallor showing under his dusky skin; and between them lounged Morgan. The sheriff and Bryant stood across the room conversing of the storm.

"I thought your goose was cooked when that blizzard hit us," Winship was saying.

"Froze, you mean," was Lee's smiling reply. "I thought so myself for a while. We've hammered along, however. To-night the last dirt goes out."

"That was an idea now--powder."

"It was Carrigan's, not mine. It saved us. The old man has forgotten more than I ever knew. Here's the banker now."

The door swung open, admitting Menocal, blinking from the snow's sheen. He bade the sheriff and the engineer good day, glanced sharply at them and then at the others. When his look encountered his son, his eyebrows went up.

"So you're home finally," he addressed him. "After two weeks' time!"

His regard moved about from one to another of the trio. "What does this mean, Charlie? Who is that fellow wearing handcuffs?" He paused, staring steadily at his son. "What have you been doing to bring you into Winship's office?" As Charlie continued to sit silent, he turned to the sheriff.

"I'll explain, Mr. Menocal, but what I have to say won't be pleasant hearing for you," Lee stated, at a nod from Winship. "Take this chair, if you please."

The banker sat down, heavily. He sighed, while his fat cheeks shook with a slight tremble.

"What has he done?" he asked, with his eyes fixed on an ink-well on the sheriff's desk.

Briefly and without temper Bryant related the circ.u.mstance of seeing Alvarez in Kennard one day during the previous summer, when the man appeared to be watching him. Charlie was also in town on that day.

Alvarez was the man who had attempted to make the workmen drunk in camp on Christmas Eve, but he had escaped on that occasion. He had stolen into camp again on the afternoon preceding the blizzard and two hours after sundown had been captured seeking to fire the commissary tent. When made a prisoner, he had been searched. On his person were found several checks for sums ranging from fifty to one hundred dollars. Bryant drew the leather sack from his pocket, extracted the checks, and handed them to the banker.

"You see they are given by your son," said he. "I've questioned this Alvarez and he has finally admitted that he was employed by Charlie and instructed by him what to do. Your son, therefore, is the instigator of the attempted crime, and Alvarez, an ignorant and brutal outlaw from Mexico, was merely his tool. I pa.s.s over the matter of the whisky and the petty inconveniences earlier caused me and my men. But here is an act of a different character, Mr. Menocal. The man's endeavour to fire our camp, had it been successful, would perhaps have resulted in the death of scores of men, as the storm broke shortly after and they would have been without shelter."

Charlie Menocal sprang to his feet.

"Before G.o.d, I didn't know he would choose that night!" he cried, pa.s.sionately. "I meant only to stop their work!"

His father shook his head sadly.

"That makes no difference, my son; you planned a wicked deed," he said, in a barely audible voice.

Morgan pushed the young man back upon his chair and Bryant went on. As he proceeded, he had found it harder and harder to address the parent; and his task was no easier now. The eyes of the father had gone to the slender, sagging figure of his son and seemed to be the eyes of an expiring man; his plump cheeks were working under an excess of emotion; then his head went down suddenly as under the blow of a club.

"Because of the character of the act," Lee said, "it wasn't only a stroke at me but at every animal and man in the entire south camp. I want to make this clear in order to show how black and dastardly the thing was. Whether Charlie understood or intended the destruction of all the lives and property there is no excuse; it was a deed that would have carried terrible results in its train. I don't even let my mind conceive them. All this has followed, Mr. Menocal, from the single fact that your son disliked me in the beginning. To that may be added an idea that I was depriving you of something to which I had no right, namely, the t.i.tle to the Perro Creek ca.n.a.l appropriation.

And there, I think, responsibility for his course touches you."

He paused to gaze at the Mexican, whose face had become drained of colour.

"Mr. Menocal, the water is mine," he continued, "and to-night some time it will be mine beyond all dispute, for then the ditch will be finished. So much for that. Some days ago we had a talk that, I believe, led us each to a better opinion of the other. I think that as a leader here in Bartolo and around about you're a force for good; you believe in law, order, and education; and I know, from what I've learned, that you carry many of the people on store accounts for long periods when crops are bad or when they are distressed by sickness.

I'm confident you're endeavouring to elevate them so far as possible; and I admit frankly that I've modified very greatly my first estimation of you. That weighs in the scale against Charlie's actions.

"Then there's one kindness Charlie himself has done me, though he may not be aware of the fact. I'll not say what it is; let it suffice that it is the case. A very great kindness it was, indeed! I count that likewise in the opposite scale. And then there are other things to consider, one among them that after all no harm has come to me. The enmity he's held for me has simply recoiled upon his own head. All he has to show for it after months of hating and contriving is his position here in this room to-day--and a dead dog. Surely it must make plain to him that his course has been not only futile but foolish."

The engineer glanced at the young fellow. He sat in an att.i.tude of despair that almost equalled his father's.

"Well, that brings me to the point," Bryant said. "You've been too indulgent with Charlie, Mr. Menocal, as you once acknowledged to me.

You've given him too much money, too much admiration, too much head, and it has led him up against the bars of the state prison. The question is whether or not I shall open the gate and push him in, as at first I determined to do on securing the proof in this leather sack. If I thought he would keep on along his present line, I should say yes, merely as a matter of public policy, but I've had several days to think the thing over and have come to the conclusion he'll soon realize his folly, if he doesn't now. And another restraint should be the good name and the happiness of his father. I'm not vindictive, Mr. Menocal, and less on this day than I've ever been. I don't believe in causing people misery merely for the pleasure of inflicting it or because I happen to have the power. We all have enough to contend with, as it is. I don't propose to ruin your position here, and end your influence, and blast your life, by sending your son to the penitentiary. That would make me no happier, and would make a number of people infinitely wretched, while perhaps starting Charlie on the road to h.e.l.l. Very likely so. I much prefer to see everyone cheerful and at work. Suppose we ship this fellow yonder back to Mexico--Winship can arrange that--and destroy the checks, and tear up this sheet of Charlie's record, so to speak. Only one or two persons besides ourselves know of the matter and I'll ask them to forget it."

Lee struck a match and ignited the checks, holding them while they burned until at last he dropped them on the floor, where they blazed, curled up in strips of black ash, and were no more. He glanced about at the others. Winship was picking his teeth with a quill toothpick, with his mind apparently far away on other matters. Morgan stolidly chewed tobacco and kept a wary eye on the bandit, Alvarez. Charlie sat pale, limp, gazing at nothing. The elder Menocal had lifted his eyes to Bryant, at whom he looked mistily; he appeared to have aged astonishingly, his cheeks having gone flabby, slack, and gray, while a slight tremour shook his head.

"That's all, I guess," Bryant said, briskly. "We'll just consider our relations established on the same footing they were before this occurrence."

He put out a hand, smiling. The banker struggled to his feet and clasped it in both of his.

"They shall not be on the same footing, but on a better one, Mr.

Bryant, if it's in my power to make them so," he exclaimed, in a choked voice.

"That suits me right down to the ground, Mr. Menocal."

The Mexican was silent. His lips parted, quivered, and shut again. His hold on the engineer's hand tightened.

"I--I can't talk now, can't say what I wish to say," he said, mastered by feeling. "When I'm more myself, when I can talk--another time----"

He ceased, but presently finished, "Another time I'll tell the grat.i.tude in my heart. Now my shame for my son and for myself----Come, Charlie, take me home."

They went out. Winship came to life and crossing the room dragged the outlaw Mexican to his feet, then pushed him over the floor and into the hall on his way to the cells in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Morgan pulled on his hat. Bryant glanced at the paper ashes on the floor, then did likewise. It was time to get back to camp.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

The first snowflakes of another storm were beginning to flutter down by the time the two men reached camp, and dusk had set in. On the drifted road from Bartolo, over which but few wagons had pa.s.sed, travel was slow and they had consumed an hour and a half on their return. The torches were burning along the ca.n.a.l, appearing at a distance like winter fireflies, but the crews of workmen had gone to supper. Bryant and Morgan, when they drove down the street in camp, could hear them at their meal in the glowing mess tents--a subdued hubbub of plates and knives and voices.

Half an hour later they were pouring forth toward the horse tents, while the engineers were making their way along the torch-lit path to the stretch of undug ca.n.a.l.

"We'll allow fifteen minutes for them to get the teams out, then shoot," Carrigan said to Lee, as they moved along. "All the shots are in and double-fused. Doesn't appear to be any wind behind this snow."

The air, though cold, was still. The flakes were not yet falling heavily and they lay on the hard crust of snow as light as silk fluff.

What might be coming down in another hour from the darkness overhead, however, could not be foretold, while if both a gale and a great fall of snow occurred the labour of the night would be increased a hundred-fold.

Bryant's anxiety was no longer on account of the time limit fixed by the Land and Water Board. He knew that since the revelations made in the sheriff's office the claimant Rodriguez would never press his case, even were the ca.n.a.l never completed. But he had the keen desire of a tired man to clean up the job and be done, and a pride in keeping faith with himself in accomplishing what he had sworn he should do, build the project in ninety days. He would never have it said by any one that he had failed in that. By Gretzinger, for example. Ruth in particular! She believed that he had already failed when she wrote her letter.

By the end of the quarter of an hour prescribed by Carrigan teams and workmen were coming along the snowy road in a long line. From the north camp also a string of animals in pairs was advancing by light of the torches. A warning shout sounded from the ditch section. Men retreated. Then a roaring boom burst upon the night, with other thunderous reports following in rapid succession, until it seemed that the mined earth cascading upward in the darkness was the bombardment of scores of cannon. The flames of the torches and the falling snow tossed and whirled at the percussion of air. Showers of clay rained upon the earth. Vibrations jarred the ground.

Then the companies of horses and men, fastening upon sc.r.a.pers, hastened into the trench. The remaining strip that joined the two sections of ca.n.a.l had been blown out and now this was the final, culminating a.s.sault. When this two hundred and fifty yards of ditch line had been widened and deepened to correspond to the rest, water would flow of summers in a small river from the dam down to the broad acres of Perro Creek ranch.

Hour after hour the steady labour proceeded--plows ran; flat sc.r.a.pers and wheeled fresnos followed, scooped up the earth, bore it to the banks above; horses tugged and strained; men toiled, pausing only to thaw their feet and hands at fires burning by the ditch or to drain great tin-cups of the scalding coffee that the cooks dipped from cans.

And steadily the excavation widened and deepened hour by hour, the slope of the sides becoming apparent, the banks rising higher and the ditch a.s.suming its desired shape and size. At eleven o'clock the cooks wheeled immense canisters of sliced beef and bread among the workmen, who seized the food and ate it as they worked. At midnight the plows were cutting near the bottom, and the work was going faster, as the frost did not strike this deep into the soil. At one o'clock in the morning, amid thickening snow, the last sc.r.a.perfuls of dirt were going out, while the engineers, with their long rules, were checking depths and slopes.

"By golly, she's about done!" exclaimed Dave, who had been permitted to remain up on this eventful night and who had been moving about, here, there, and everywhere, in a great state of excitement. "By golly, she is, Lee!"