Under Handicap Part 20

Sat.u.r.day morning Greek Conniston pocketed the first money he had ever earned by good, hard work. Brayley handed him three ten-dollar gold pieces--his month's wage. Conniston asked for some change, and for one of the gold pieces received ten silver dollars. He knew that Mr.

Crawford and Argyl had gone into Crawfordsville, so he gave one dollar to Brayley, saying: "Will you hand that to Mr. Crawford for me? I owe it to him for telegraph service on the first day I spent here." And then he made a little roll of the indispensable articles from his suit-case, tied it to the strings behind his saddle, and rode away across the fields toward Rattlesnake Valley.

He was to report immediately at the office of the reclamation work in Valley City. Following the trail he and Argyl had taken the other day, he rode into the depression, or sink, about the middle of that long, low hollow between the southern end and the clutter of uniform square buildings which was planned to grow into a thriving town in the heart of the desert.

Every foot of ground here now had a new personal interest for him. He studied the long, flat sweep of level land with nodding approval, trying to see just where the main ca.n.a.l should run, just how its course could be shaped most rapidly, most cheaply, most advantageously. For the mounds, the ridges where the winds had swept the sand into long winnows, he had a quick frown. After all, he realized suddenly, this desert was not the flat, even floor he had imagined it to be. A mile, two miles to his right as he rode into the "valley" he could see a slow-moving ma.s.s of men and horses, could catch the glint of the sun upon jerking sc.r.a.pers and plows. There the front ranks of Mr. Crawford's little army was pushing the war against the desert. There was where the brunt of Bat Truxton's responsibility lay.

To his left, still several miles away, was Valley City. He swung his horse toward the camp, which as yet was scarcely more than a man's dream of a town, and rode on at a swift gallop. Now more than ever he saw what some of the difficulties were in front of the handful of men scarring the breast of this Western Sahara. For a moment he could see the houses before him, even down to their doorsteps, and a moment later only the roofs peered at him over the crest of a gently swelling rise. Here the water, when it was brought this far, must be swung in a wide sweep to right or left, or else many days, perhaps many weeks, must be sacrificed to the leveling of a great sand-pile. He began to wonder if there was enough water in the mountains for so mammoth a project; if what of the precious fluid could be taken from the creeks and springs would not be drunk up by the thirsty sands as though it had been scattered carelessly by the spoonfuls, as a blotter drinks drops of ink. He even began to wonder uneasily if Lonesome Pete had been right when he had said that another name for such an attempt at reclamation was simple "d.a.m.n foolishness." The water had not come yet; it was still running in its time-worn courses down the mountain-sides; but something else was being drunk up daily by the parched gullet of the dry country. And that something else was Mr. Crawford's money. His fortune was no doubt very large; it must run into many figures before Rattlesnake Valley grew green with fertility.

He came at last into the little town, pa.s.sed the cottage where he had worked with Argyl, and drew up before a four-roomed, rough, unpainted building, with a sign over the door saying, "GENERAL OFFICE CRAWFORD RECLAMATION COMPANY." Swinging down from his horse, which he left with reins upon the ground, he went in at the open door.

Within there were bare walls, bare floor, and three or four cheap chairs. Under the windows looking to the south there ran a long, high table, covered with papers and blue-prints. Another long table ran across the middle of the room. At it, facing him, perched upon a high stool, a young man, a pencil behind each ear, his sleeves rolled up, was working over some papers. In one corner of the same room another young fellow, hardly more than a boy--eighteen or nineteen, perhaps--was ticking away busily at a typewriter.

The man in shirt-sleeves working at the second long table looked up as Conniston came in. He was a pale, not over-strong--looking chap, somewhere about Conniston's own age, his short-cropped yellow hair pushed straight back from a high forehead, his lips and eyes good-humored and at the same time touched vaguely with a tender wistfulness. Conniston imagined immediately that this was Garton, Bat Truxton's helper.

"You're Mr. Garton?" he said, voicing his impression as he came forward.

"No one else," Garton answered him, pleasantly. "Tom Garton at your service. And you're Conniston from the Half Moon?"

He put out his hand without rising. Conniston took it, surprised as he did so at the quick, strong grip of the slender fingers.

"I'm glad to know you, Conniston. Glad you're to be with us. Oh yes, I knew a couple of days ago that you were coming over. Mr. Crawford dropped in on us himself and told us about you. Have a chair."

They had shaken hands across the table. Now, as Conniston moved across the room to the chair at which Garton waved, the latter swung about on his high stool toward the boy at the typewriter.

"Hey there, Billy!" he called. "Come and meet Mr. Conniston. He's going to be one of us. Mr. Conniston, meet Mr. Jordan--Billy Jordan--the one man living who can take down dictation as fast as you can sling it at him, type it as you shoot it in, and play a tune on his typewriter at the same time!"

Stepping about the table to meet the boy who had got to his feet, Conniston received a shock which for a second made him forget to take young Jordan's proffered hand. For the first time now he saw Garton's body, which had been hidden by the table; saw that Garton had had both legs taken off six inches above the knees. He remembered himself, and tried to hide his surprise under some light remark to Billy Jordan.

But Garton had seen it, and laughed lightly, although with a slight flush creeping up into his pale cheeks.

"Hadn't heard about my having slept with Procrustes? Well, you'll get used to having half a man around after a while. The rest do. I've gotten used to it myself. Now sit down. Have a smoke?" He pushed a box of cigarettes along the table. "And tell us what's the news on Broadway."

"You're a New-Yorker?"

"Oh, I've galloped up and down the Big Thoroughfare a good many times in the days of my youth," grinned Carton, helping himself to a cigarette. "I'm an Easterner, all right; or, rather, I was an Easterner. I guess I belong to this man's country now."

"What school?"

"Yale. '05."

"Why, that's my school! I was a '06 man."

"I know it." Garton nodded over the match he was touching to his cigarette. "You're Greek Conniston, son of the big Conniston who does things on the Street. But we didn't happen to travel in the same cla.s.s. I was shy on the money end of it. Oh, I remember you, all right. I saw that record run of yours around left end to a touchdown.

Gad, that was a great day! I went crazy then with a thousand other fellows. I remember," with an amused chuckle, "jumping up and down on a fat man's toes, yelling into his face until I must have split his ear-drum! Oh yes, I had two pegs in those days. The fat man got mad, the piker, and knocked me as flat as a pancake! I guess he never went to Yale."

For ten minutes they chatted about old college days, games lost and won, men and women they both had known in the East. And then, naturally, conversation switched to the work being done in Rattlesnake Valley. Garton's face lighted up with eagerness, his eyes grew very bright, he spoke swiftly. It was easy to see that the man was full of his work, p.r.i.c.ked with the fever of it, alive with enthusiasm.

"You seem to be mightily interested in the work," Conniston smiled.

"I am. I am in love with it! A man can't live here ten days and be a part of it without loving it or hating it. It's the greatest work in the world; it's big--bigger than we can see with our noses jammed up against it! It's a man's work. And thank G.o.d we've got the right man at the head of it!"

"Meaning Truxton?"

"Meaning the man who is the brain of it and the brawn of it; the heart and soul and glorious spirit of it; yes, and the pocket-book of it!

That's John Crawford, a big man--the biggest man I ever knew. Who else would have the nerve to tackle a thing like this, to tackle it lone-handed? And to hold on to it in the face of opposition which would crush another man, and with the risk of utter financial ruin looming as big as a house, like a glorious, grim old bulldog! Oh, you don't know what it means yet; you can't know. Wait until you've been here a week, seeing every day of it a thousand dollars poured into the sand, a few square yards of sand leveled, a few yards of ca.n.a.l dug, and you'll begin to understand. Why, the whole thing as it stands is as dangerous as a dynamite bomb--and John Crawford is as cool about it as an anarchist!"

"You speak of opposition. I didn't know--"

Garton rumpled his upstanding yellow hair and laughed softly.

"I guess none of us know a great deal about it excepting John Crawford. And John Crawford doesn't talk much. Oh, you will learn fast enough all that we know about it. And now I suppose you'll be wanting to know where you fit into the machine. Bring any things with you--any personal effects?"

"A tooth-brush and an extra suit," Conniston laughed. "They're tied to my saddle outside."

"You can bring 'em in here. I have a room in the back of this shack.

You're to share it with me, if you care to. You'll find a shed in the back yard where you can leave your horse. There's a barrel of water out there, too. And, by the way, you might as well learn right now not to throw away a drop of the stuff; it's worth gold out here. When you get back I'll go over things with you. Your first day's work, the better part of it, will be to listen while I talk."

Conniston unsaddled and tied his horse in the little shed, coming back into the office with his roll of clothes. Garton swung about upon his stool and pointed out the room at the back of the house which was to serve for the present as the sleeping-room for both men. There were two cots along opposite walls, a chair, and no other furniture.

Conniston threw down his things upon the cot which Garton called to him was to be his, and came back into the office. Pulling a stool up to the table alongside of Garton, he began his first day's work for the reclamation project.

CHAPTER XII

Tommy Garton spoke swiftly, clearly, concisely, explaining those essentials of the work in hand which Conniston must grasp at the beginning. Filled with an ardor no whit less than Mr. Crawford's, there seemed to be no single detail which he did not have at his fingers' ends.

Taking from the drawer of his table a map which bore his own name in the corner, he pointed out just where their source of water was, and just how it was to be brought down from the mountains into the "valley." He indicated where the work was being pushed now. He showed where the big dam had already been thrown across a steep-walled, rocky canon; how, when the time came, a second dam (this purely a diversion weir) was to be constructed across a neighboring canon, higher up in the mountains, deflecting the waters which poured down through it into the lower dam, and from it turning them into the main ca.n.a.l at the upper end of Rattlesnake Valley. He pointed out, five miles to the north of these two big dams, the place where a third was to be flung across yet another canon, imprisoning a smaller creek and turning it toward the southwest to join the overflow of the others in the main ca.n.a.l. He ran over blue-print after blue-print, to show the type of construction work being done. He explained where there was leveling called for, where the ca.n.a.l must be turned aside.

"We'd bring her straight through, and d--n the little knolls," he cried, banging his fist down upon his table in sudden vehemence, "but there is a time-limit on this thing, Conniston. And we've got to get water here, right here in Valley City, when the last day is up. Not twenty-four hours late, either. No, not twenty-four minutes!"

He ran the back of his hand across his moist forehead, and sat staring out of the window as though he had forgotten Conniston's presence.

"What sort of a time-limit? I thought that Mr. Crawford was alone in this thing, that he had the rest of his lifetime to finish it in if he wanted to take that long."

Garton snorted.

"He's got until just exactly twelve o'clock, noon, on the first day of October. If he is five minutes late--yes, five minutes!--there'll be men right here holding stop-watches on the thing like it was a blooming foot-race!--he'll be busted, ruined, smashed, and the whole project a miserable abortion!" He paused a moment, biting the end of his pencil. And before he went on he had turned his eyes steadily upon Conniston's face, studying him. "If you're going to work with us, to get into it with your sleeves rolled up like Bat Truxton and Billy there and me and a few others of us, you might as well know in the beginning what's what in this sc.r.a.p. For it is a sc.r.a.p--the biggest sc.r.a.p you ever saw, a fight to the finish, with one man lined up against--do you have any idea what John Crawford is bucking?"

Conniston shook his head. "I know virtually nothing of this thing, Garton."

"Well, I'll tell you. Single-handed that man is fighting the desert!

And he'd beat it back, too, and conquer it and muzzle it and make it eat out of his hand if they'd only let him alone. But they won't, the cold-blooded highway robbers! He's got them to fight with his left hand while he hammers away at the face of the desert with his right!

Who are 'they'? 'They' are a syndicate; organized capital. 'They'

spell many millions of dollars ready to be spent to defeat John Crawford."

He stopped suddenly, frowning and gnawing at his pencil. Conniston was about to ask a question when Garton went on rapidly, such hot indignation in his tones that Billy Jordan dropped his hands from the keys of his machine to listen to what he had heard many a time before.

"You know already how Mr. Crawford built the town which is named after him? He made that town just as a man takes clay into his hands and makes a modeled figure out of it. And when the job was done he went to the Pacific Central & Western and showed them why it would pay them to build a narrow-gage railroad from Bolton, on the other side of the ridge, thirty miles through mountainous country. He had that planned out long before the first shack was put up in Crawfordsville. And he knew what he was doing. The P. C. & W. built the road and have run an accommodation train back and forth daily ever since. And they have made money at it hauling freight, merchandise from the main line, building-material, farming implements--everything which had to go into Crawfordsville; hauling farm produce from the new settlement back into Bolton.