“A safe suggests money, valuables—the Indians!” murmured Ogilvie.
“I’ll give you a gun.” Rickard was enjoying himself. The fellow was a driveling coward. MacLean’s word fitted him like a glove: woozling!
That afternoon Rickard was not too busy to order a tent stretched on the rise back of the schoolhouse. It was not all mischief! The office building might go! A safe was lugged across town. Ogilvie dismally bossed the proceedings. The platform must be tight; he mentioned snakes. He wanted a spider, but there was neither lumber nor men to spare; he spoke of wind-storms. He wanted double doors, one of screen wire; he had a good deal to say about flies.
Toward evening an iron bed was hauled to the tent which the younger engineers, fresh from their day’s rest, had spied and already christened the White Refuge. Ogilvie showed the two impassive Mexicans why it should be placed so that his feet pointed north; he explained thoroughly about magnetic currents. There, they left him, with his papers.
The disappointed tenant of the White Refuge sat down on the foot of his bed, and dismally reviewed the situation. The hurried platform of the tent was creaking ominously. The canvas walls sagged and strained against the wind. He rehearsed the situation.
The burning of San Francisco had flooded the southern part of the state with clerks and accountants; to Los Angeles they had come in droves. He could not leave the towns, defying Rickard, and expect to find another place with the Overland Pacific Company. He wished, in deep gloom, that he had not bought those hundred shares in the smaller organization. It had appeared to him as a crowning bit of diplomacy, and put him, he thought, on the same basis as the directors, Hardin, Gifford and the others. But it had left him strapped. He had had to borrow to make up the hundred shares. He had only just paid that debt. The Desert Bank held less than fifty dollars to his credit. That sum between him and poverty! He decided to brave it out, though physical discomfort hurt him like pain.
He listened to the rising of the wind. The worst storm, old-timers had told him, in fifteen years.
“What was that?” He bounced up from his bed. Hardin’s cannonading shook his frail tent. He sat down again. He remembered a performance given by Edwin Booth in Boston. Lear, it was. He had insisted that the storm scene was grotesquely exaggerated. He could not hear the actors’ voices over the storm! Now, he revised his criticism. The man who had staged that play had been in the desert; that desert. It was a fearful night.
He decided that it was not safe to undress, so he threw himself across his painted bed. Every few minutes the deep detonations of Hardin’s charges up at Fassett’s ranch jarred the platform.
Down at the levee, the night-shifts were piling brush, dragging it to threatened points where the lapping waves broke over the levee; sacking sand, piling it in heaps. On the other side of the gorge, Rickard was blowing out the west channel to let the increasing flood waters through. Up the gorge, but below Fassett’s ranch now, following the retreating platoons of the river, Hardin was toiling, directing his men. He had refused to listen to Blinn. Sleep, with the river cutting back like that, hazarding the valley? Rest? He couldn’t rest with that noise in his ears. Why, man, this spells ruin!