The Man from the Bitter Roots Part 34

She threw herself on Jennings emitting sounds like forty catamounts tied in a bag. The flying crew jammed in the doorway, burst through and never stopped to look behind until they were well outside.

"Hy-sterics," said the carpenter who was married--"she's took a fit."

"Hydrophoby--she must a bit herself!" Porcupine Jim was vigorously ma.s.saging his neck.

The bride was sitting on the floor beating her heels, when Bruce put his head in the door cautiously:

"If there's anything I can do--"

Bertha renewed her screams at sight of him.

"They is--" she shrieked--"Git out!"

"You don't want to go near 'em when they're in a tantrum," advised the carpenter in an experienced tone. "But that's about the hardest one I ever see."

Jennings, staggering manfully under his burden, bore the hysterical Amazon to her tent and it remained for Bruce to do her work.

"That's a devil of a job for a General Manager," commented John Johnson sympathetically, as he stood in the doorway watching Bruce, with his sleeves rolled up, sc.r.a.ping a.s.siduously at the bottom of a frying-pan.

Bruce smiled grimly but made no reply. He had been thinking the same thing himself.

Bruce often had watched an ant trying to move a bread-crumb many times its size, pushing with all its feet braced, rushing it with its head, backing off and considering and going at it again. Failing, running frantically around in front to drag and pull and tug. Trying it this way and that, stopping to rest for an instant then tackling it in fresh frenzy--and getting nowhere, until, out of pity, he gave it a lift.

Bruce felt that this power-plant was his bread-crumb, and tug and push and struggle as he would he could not make it budge. The thought, too, was becoming a conviction that Jennings, who should have helped him push, was riding on the other side.

"I wouldn't even mind his riding," Bruce said to himself ironically, "if he wouldn't drag his feet."

He was hoping with all his heart that the much discussed cross-arms would hold, for when the wires were up and stretched across the river he would feel that the bread-crumb had at least _moved_.

When Bruce crossed to the work the next morning, the "come-along" was clamped to the transmission wire and hooked to the block-and-tackle.

Naturally Jennings had charge of the stretching of the wire and he selected Smaltz as his a.s.sistant.

All the crew, intensely interested in the test, stood around as Jennings, taciturn and sour and addressing no one but Smaltz, puttered about his preparations.

Finally he cried:

"Ready-O!"

The wire tightened and the slack disappeared under Smaltz's steady pull.

The carpenter and the crew watched the cross-arm anxiously as the strain came upon it under the taut wire. Their faces brightened as it held.

Smaltz looked at Jennings quizzically.

"More?"

"You ain't heard me tell you yet to stop," was the snarling answer.

"Here goes, then." Smaltz's face wore an expressive grin as he put his strength on the rope of the block-and-tackle, which gave him the pull of a four-horse team.

Bruce heard the cross-arm splinter as he came up the trail through the brush.

Jennings turned to Woods and said offensively:

"Old as you are, I guess I kin learn you somethin' yet."

The carpenter's face had turned white. With a gesture Bruce stopped his belligerent advance.

"Try the next one, Jennings," he said quietly.

Once more the slack was taken up and the wire grew taut--so taut it would have tw.a.n.ged like a fiddle-string if it had been struck. Jennings did not give Smaltz the sign to stop even when the cross-arm cracked.

Without a word of protest Bruce watched the stout four-by-five splinter and drop off.

"There--you see--I told you so! I knowed!" Jennings looked triumphantly at the carpenter as he spoke. Then, turning to the crew: "Knock 'em off--every one. _Now_ I'll do it right!"

Not a man moved and for an instant Bruce dared not trust himself to speak. When he did speak it was in a tone that made Jennings look up startled:

"You'll come across the river and get your time." His surprise was genuine as Bruce went on--"Do you imagine," he asked savagely, trying to steady his voice, "that I haven't intelligence enough to know that you've got to allow for the swaying of the trees in the wind, for the contraction and expansion of heat and cold, for the weight of snow and sleet? Do you think I haven't brains enough to see when you're deliberately destroying another man's work? I've been trying to make myself believe in you--believe that in spite of your faults you were honest. Now I know that you've been drawing pay for months for work you don't know how to do. I can't see any difference between you and any common thief who takes what doesn't belong to him. Right here you quit!

Vamoose!" Bruce made a sweeping gesture--"You go up that hill as quick as the Lord will let you."

XXIII

"GOOD ENOUGH"

"Alf" Banule, the electrical genius for whom Jennings had sent to help him rewind an armature and who therefore had taken Jennings's place as constructing engineer, had the distinction of being the only person Bruce had ever seen who could remove his socks without taking off his shoes. He accomplished the feat with ease for the reason that there were never any toes in the aforesaid shoes. As he himself said, he would have been a tall man if there had not been so much of him turned up at the end.

The only way he was able to wear shoes at all, save those made to order, was to cut out the toes; the same applied to his socks, and the exposed portion of his bare feet had not that dimpled pinkness which moves poets to song. From the rear, Banule's shoes looked like two bobsleds going down hill, and from the front the effect of the loose soles was that of two great mouths opening and closing. Yet he skimmed the river boulders at amazing speed, seeming to find no inconvenience in the flap-flapping of the loose leather as he leaped from rock to rock.

In contrast to his yawning shoes and a pair of trousers the original shade of which was a matter of uncertainty, together with a black satine shirt whose color made change unnecessary, was a stylish Tyrolese hat--green felt--with a b.u.t.terfly bow perched jauntily on one side. And underneath this stylishness there was a prematurely bald head covered with smudges of machine grease which it could readily be believed were souvenirs of his apprentice days in the machine shop. If indifference to appearance be a mark of genius it would be impossible to deny Banule's claim to the t.i.tle.

He was the direct ant.i.thesis of Jennings, harnessed lightning in clothes, working early and late. He flew at the machinery like a madman, yelling for wrenches, and rivets and bolts, chiselling, and soldering, and oiling, until the fly-wheel was on its shaft in the power-house, and the dynamos, dragged at top speed from the river-bank, no longer looked like a pile of junk. The switchboard went up, and the pressure gauge, and the wiring for the power-house light. But for all Bruce's relief at seeing things moving, he had a feeling of uneasiness lest there was too much haste. "Good enough--that's good enough!" were the words oftenest on Banule's lips. They filled Bruce with vague forebodings, misgivings, and he came to feel a flash of irritation each time the genius said airily: "Oh, that's good enough."

Bruce warned him often--"Don't slight your work--do it right if it takes twice as long."

Banule always made the same cheering answer: "Don't worry, everything is going fine; in less than a month we'll be generating 'juice'." And Bruce tried to find comfort in the a.s.surance.

When Bruce pulled the lever which opened the valve, and heard the hiss of the water when it shot from the nozzle and hit the wheel, and watched the belt, and shaft, and big fly-wheel speed up until the spokes were a blur and the breeze it created lifted his hair, it was the happiest moment of his life. When he saw the thread of carbon filament in the gla.s.s bulb turn red and grow to a bright, white light, he had something of the feeling of ecstasy that he imagined a mother must have when she looks at her first-born--a mixture of wonder and joy.

He had an odd, intimate feeling--a strong feeling of affection--for every piece of machinery in the power-house. He liked to hear the squeak of the belting and the steady chug-chug of the water-wheels; the purr of the dynamos was music, and he kept the commutators free from dust with loving care.

But these moments alone in the power-house were high-lights in a world of shadows. His periods of elation were brief, for so many things went wrong, and so often, that sometimes he wondered if it was the way some guardian angel had of warning him, of trying to prevent him from keeping on and making a big mistake bigger; or was it only the tests that the Fates have a way of putting humans through and, failing to break their hearts, sometimes let them win?

Important as the power-house was it was only a small portion of the whole. There was still the 10-inch pump in the pump-house with its 75 horse-power motor and the donkey engine with the 50 horse-power motor to get to working right, not to mention the flume and sluice-boxes, with their variety of riffles and every practicable device for trapping the elusive fine gold. And not the least of Bruce's increasing anxieties was "Alf" Banule with his constant "good enough."

It was well toward the end of October and Bruce, hurrying over the trail with sheets of mica for Banule, who was working on the submerged motor which had to be rewound, noticed that the willows were turning black.