"That entirely duplicates what McLean said just a day or so ago." On any other lips Elliott"s deliberate neatness of phrase might have sounded solemnly funny. "Thoroughly logical, of course,--thoroughly possible. And yet, somehow it doesn"t fit the case. We"ve had the usual Monday morning vacancies, right along, as you know; but the delinquents always turned up before the five o"clock whistle blew, or at least reported Tuesday morning. But this is the end of the week and we"re short right this minute very close to thirty men. They aren"t coming back, Mr. O"Mara; on the contrary, they continue to dribble away, a few every day. And though they appear to do nothing but talk their time away in the saloons in the lower end of the town, they seem to have just as much money to spend, as they did when they were getting their time checks from us."
Steve leaned over and with nice deliberation selected a sandwich.
"What sort of talking?" he wanted to know, suddenly.
Again Elliott smiled in self-deprecation.
"That"s just it," he exclaimed. "Their talk leads nowhere. I went down and attempted to find out what their grievance might be, but they close up like clams whenever I come within earshot. They stare at the ceiling, rub their chins, and laugh when there"s nothing to laugh at.
This morning, however, I finally convinced McLean that something was radically wrong. So he took one of them who had just decided to quit and pinned him up against the embankment--but you know McLean and his methods! He shoved his jaw up within an inch of the other"s nose and invited him to talk, and--well, he found out enough to make him begin to worry, too. Somebody"s been talking to them, Mr. O"Mara; somebody has put the fool notion into their heads that this strip of railroad will mean the end of all lumber operations in this country--the old-time river drives, of course. And some of them are beginning to believe--whoever was responsible for that statement.
"You know and I know how absurd it is. We know that this road will mean work for every riverman in this section, as often as he wants to work. But it isn"t going to help us any if they can"t see it that way.
It isn"t going to replace the men who quit. I"ve been deliberating one point. Don"t you suppose we might import a regular squad of construction men now, before it"s too late?"
"It"s too late now," Steve told him, his words none the less final for all that they were absently quiet. "It was too late the day we began operations. And yesterday at this time I wouldn"t have given much worry to this particular brand of trouble. They"re an odd lot; they"re the hardest working, hardest living crowd of big men that ever failed entirely to grow up." Steve stopped and looked down at the sandwich untouched in his hand, much as though he were surprised to find it there. "But since yesterday--since yesterday--who, did you say, was responsible for that statement, as you call it?"
"I didn"t say." Elliott brushed away a persistent bluebottle fly, a lonesome survivor which the unseasonably warm day had reawakened. The insect"s droning wings as it persisted again and again back to the sandwich plate made the only sound in that big, bare room. "And if I--if I had to guess----" The hand pa.s.sed across his eyes now.
"O"Mara, do you know how deeply Mr. Ainnesley and myself are involved in this prospect?"
After a long search the engineer of the East Coast Company had finally located his pipe.
"I don"t believe I have ever given it much actual thought," he said.
"I never viewed it as any of my affair. But I haven"t forgotten the last time we talked the plans over, that you couldn"t go into it to lose."
Punctiliously Elliott proffered a lighted match for the other"s filled pipe; he lighted a long and thin and very black cigar for himself.
Steve noted then for the first time that the man"s hand was shaking a little.
"Of course," the latter answered quickly. "Of course--of course!" He seemed groping for a fresh beginning, then gave up suddenly all attempt at circuity and blurted it out much as though he had lived with the thought too long to endure it longer alone.
"I"m in up to my last dollar," he stated. "And Ainnesley--why, Ainnesley wouldn"t have a roof over his head if we failed in our obligations! You must know as well as I do why the banking interests took our paper to those amounts which made it possible for us to drive the first spike."
When he failed to go on Steve understood that the last sentence had been a question.
"Mr. Allison, I suppose." His voice became utterly impersonal.
"Without doubt you mean Mr. Allison?"
"They would have laughed at us," the older man came back instantly.
"And what is more, they did! They wouldn"t touch the proposition, until Allison came in with us. And then--but you know what Dexter Allison has done already in this country. I don"t know what he started with. I do know that all that Ainnesley and I had sc.r.a.ped up between us looked like a shoe-string to him.
"We couldn"t move until he, of his own accord, expressed his enthusiasm for the plan and asked for a share in the holdings. You know, perhaps, how he can laugh, too. Well, he laughed that way and confessed that we had just beaten him to it. He said it would tap a gold mine--this "strip of steel," as he called it. He even told us that he"d parallel our road with a compet.i.tor, jokingly to be sure, if we hadn"t tied up the only available and practicable right of way.
"He came in. He opened up, merely through his own name and all there is behind it, loan possibilities for which we might have struggled uselessly the rest of our lives without his help. Between us Mr.
Ainnesley and I just managed to hold the balance of stock control and--and that"s how deep we are in, Mr. O"Mara."
Both men sat and smoked, each avoiding, elaborately, the other"s eyes.
After a long pause, Elliott cleared his throat, laboriously.
"This morning," he continued slowly, "this morning I am in receipt of a communication from Mr. Ainnesley himself, advising me that another right of way has been applied for, for a single track road here in the north. The gossip which chanced to come his way was rather obscure.
Little could be learned about the whole affair save that it was being put forward with a view to tapping the ore and timber lands all the way to and beyond the border. But as nearly as he could ascertain the southern terminus of such a road would seem to be about--about at the mouth of that valley southernmost in the Reserve Company"s timber holdings. Rather a remarkable choice for a railroad terminus, Mr.
O"Mara--wouldn"t you say so?"
Steve leaned toward him.
"Do you mean that they"ve thrown out your earlier application for just such a grant?"
"That would be a rather harshly definite way of putting it," Elliott smiled wryly. "Ours is apparently just tabled--oh, tabled pending certain immaterial changes in the form! You asked me a moment ago--or did I offer to guess who might be responsible for the report which is costing us our men? I wonder if I need to tell you who controls this new northern route?"
"Maybe you"ve been telling me," Steve came back coolly. "You have already mentioned----"
"Wickersham!" Hardwick Elliott corrected. "Wickersham--that is, through allied interests which he represents or controls. O"Mara, I doubt if I would even insinuate this to anyone else; I haven"t even intimated it to Ainnesley as yet. Wickersham is reputed to represent huge moneyed foreign interests. But have you ever stopped to wonder whether he might not represent big local interests as well?"
The tanned face opposite him was so gravely blank that Elliott once more laughed nervously, deprecatingly.
"Doubt of any man"s loyalty such as that query would imply is not one of my characteristics. I would rather have left this thing unattempted than to have undertaken it in partnership with any man whom I felt I had to watch. But I just thought that I"d better put it all on the table for you to consider. I"d like to ask you--what do you think?"
The man in blue flannel and corduroy tapped the sodden heel from his pipe and loaded it afresh.
"Yesterday," he answered, "yesterday--Well I couldn"t guarantee just what I might have thought, twenty-four hours back. But doesn"t one fact remain unchanged still, no matter what we think? Suppose we admit that some one else does want this stretch of track we"re laying?
Suppose somebody is figuring on picking it up cheap, at a bankruptcy price, if we forfeit to the Reserve Company? You know yourself that you would never have begun it simply for the profit there will be in moving the Reserve logs and the millions on millions of feet of lumber both to the east and west, which can"t be touched at anything but a prohibitive figure, without this road. We were going through to the border, too. And if some one else is betting that we don"t; if some one else is betting that we can"t yank a trainload of logs down to this end of the line, before the first of May, that doesn"t alter our case any, does it? Even though we suspect that some man is playing us to lose, do we have to know exactly who he is?"
Slowly but very surely the older man"s face began to smooth.
"Once or twice," he stated, "I"ve thought to antic.i.p.ate you, perhaps because I have it on you a little, as they say, in the matter of years.
I"m not going to attempt it any more. For I thought that this conversation would be at least a surprise to you. You sit there and take it very quietly, for a man who has been badly startled."
"Fat Joe has been preaching it for a month." Oddly enough, Stephen O"Mara chose that point at which to laugh, softly. "And I, for a month, have been ridiculing him. That"s one of Fat Joe"s pet diversions, you know. When all other excitement fails Joe invariably falls back upon an imagination too totally vivid to be wasted on technical things. I laughed at him, until last night. Do you--but of course you know Garry Devereau?" he finished.
"Knew his father," Elliott answered succinctly. "Know him well! Good blood--good brains--big hearts! Why?"
And then, for the second time that day, Steve related the salient points of that episode which had opened with the trio of owls along the trail and ended with the first gray streaks of returning day. During the recital the expressions which chased across Elliot"s face were as varied as they were full of concern.
"Then I wasn"t merely hysterical, was I?" he brooded after Steve had finished. "Who--who did you say you thought might be behind the man who would have had your plans, had it not been for Mr. Devereau?"
"I didn"t say," replied Steve, and for the first time since his entrance there was mirth in the unison of their laughter.
"It all brings us back to the point from which we started," the younger man went on when they were grave again. "It"s a plain enough issue, so far as we are concerned. We"ve got to be at the mouth of that lower valley by May. We"re going to be! And as I see it, wasting time and energy in--shall we call it sleuthing, Mr. Elliott?--won"t help us much. We thought that lack of time and the general nature of this country were going to be handicap enough. But now your money is in and I--I never did like to be beaten. Can"t we let it stand like that, at least until some one else makes a plainer move? We know the cards we hold. If others care to sit in, perhaps we"ll all come to a show-down, next spring at Thirty Mile. It"ll be easy enough to explain just how we did it. Alibis based on veiled opposition wouldn"t interest the Reserve people much, if we left their timber there to rot. . . . And I"m trying not to overlook any bets, Mr. Elliott."
Hastily the iron-gray man thrust his hat back from his forehead. He came to his feet and crossed and clapped one hand upon Steve"s shoulder.
"Next May!" he barked. "O"Mara, I"m glad you came down this morning.
I"ve been carrying a lot of those ideas around in my head until they had become nightmarish. But I"m through now. You won"t hear me croak again. I staked what I had on you, months ago; I"d do it again this minute. What"s the odds, after all, who it is that"s playing us to lose. It"s only the fact that somebody may be fighting us that needs to occupy our attention. I"m done worrying, do you hear? But what about those men who are quitting us? You are sure it would be unwise to import labor? It"s cheaper, you know."
Steve, too, had risen.
"We"d have the prettiest kind of a sc.r.a.p on our hands, the first day we tried to use them," he explained. "It would be dear enough before we got through. I guess I"d better run right out and have a talk with McLean. He knows these men even better than I do, and I"m almost one of them, you know. And I"ll get a line on some of these delinquents who are crying calamity for the countryside. I"d better, because we"ll need them. They simply haven"t become thoroughly interested yet, that"s all. It will take something to jolt them; something to set them on fire. And then--then just watch my plaid-shirted boys go! They"ll eat up your sledge-swingers!"
Something of that promised fire was reflected now in Hardwick Elliott"s eyes.
"By Gad," he exclaimed, "by Gad, if it wasn"t for Ainnesley I"d say the thing was worth it, win or lose, just for the game itself. You go ahead and see McLean. I"ll be out there later, myself. I promised Allison that I"d show the works to some of the young folks up there on the hill. His daughter--but I keep forgetting that you"ve known her longer than I have. There"s quite a party of them. She announced her engagement to Mr. Wickersham last night, I believe. Heard that this morning--was too busy to go up last night myself. Maybe you"ll find time to help me play the host."