Irish brought the news of the Parrish horror. The opened vein of tragedy stained the day. The double tragedy, the three sharp deaths sobered the camp, preparing for its coup.
“War!” summed up Rickard. “Our army marches over dead bodies.”
The day badly begun, piled up with vexations. By evening, Rickard’s temper, slow to rouse, was on the rampage. His men got out of his way. The river flotsam was piling up against the gate and making a kink in the trestle. There was a nasty bend. Rickard spent his afternoon on the by-pass, jumping from boats to rafts, directing the pile-drivers, driving the stolid bucks. By sundown, he was wet to the skin, and mad, he told MacLean, Jr., as a sick Arizona cat.
In this jaundiced juncture, MacLean, Jr., brought down his despatches to the river.
“Anything important?” cried Casey from the raft. “Read them to me. I can hear.”
MacLean read of the burning of a trainload of railroad ties in a nasty wreck on the way to the break; just out of Galveston. To purge his mood, Rickard swore.
“If that isn’t the darndest.” He had “luck” on his tongue. His mood had been paralleling, disagreeably to his consciousness, Tom Hardin’s manner. He withheld the word.
“Anything else pleasant?”
“A letter from the governor—from dad. Nothing important.” MacLean had that instant decided to leave that letter on the desk where Rickard might find it by himself.
“Fire away,” cried Rickard, stretching the cramp from his shoulders.