But it was no time to speculate, with a load of lumber grinding into his sore shoulder, so Bruce hurried on across the slippery foot-log and up a steep pitch to see the carpenter charging through the brush brandishing a saw as if it was a sabre.
“I want my ‘time,’” he shouted when he saw Bruce. “Him or me has got to quit. I won’t work with that feller—I won’t take orders from the likes o’ him! I never saw a man from Oregon yit that was worth the powder to blow him up! Half-baked, no-account fakirs, the whole lot of ’em—allus a hirin’ for somethin’ they cain’t do! Middle West renegades! Poor white trash! Oregon is the New Jersey of the Pacific coast; it’s the Missoury of the West. It ought to be throwed into some other state and its name wiped off the map. That there Jennings has got the ear-marks of Oregon printed on him like a governmint stamp. Every time I see that putterin’ web-foot’s tracks in the dust it makes me hot. He don’t know how to put up this plant no mor’n I do and you’ll find it out. If an Oregonian’d be offered a job teachin’ dead languages in a college he’d make a bluff at doin’ it if he couldn’t write his own name. Why them ‘web-feet’—”
“Just what in particular is the matter?” Bruce asked, as the carpenter paused, not for want of verbal ammunition but because he was out of breath.
“Matter!” panted Woods, “he’s got us strainin’ our life out puttin’ up them green four-by-eight’s when they’s no need. They’d carry a ocean cable, them cross-arms would. Four-by-fives is big enough for all the wire that’ll be strung here. John Johnson jest fell out’n a tree a liftin’ and like to broke a lung.”
“Do you feel sure that four-by-five’s are strong enough?”
“Try it—that’s all I ask.”
“You’d better come back to work.”
The carpenter hesitated.
“I don’t like to quit when you need me, but,” he waved the rip-saw in a significant gesture, “if that Oregonian gives me any more back-talk I aims to cut him up in chunks.”
It was the first time Bruce had countermanded one of Jennings’s orders but now he backed Woods up. He had shared the carpenter’s opinion that four-by-five’s were strong enough but he had said nothing, supposing that Jennings was following precedent and knew what he was about. Woods, too, had voiced a suspicion which kept rising in his mind as to whether Jennings did know how to put up the machines. Was it possible that the unimportant detail work which Jennings insisted upon doing personally in order that it might be exactly right, was only a subterfuge to put off as long as possible the day when the showdown must come? Was it in his mind to draw his generous wages as long as he safely might then invent some plausible excuse to quit?