Rickard spoke of it to Coronel who was his “go-between,” as MacLean, Jr., dubbed him, a valuable interpreter, because he transcribed the spirit of an interview. Coronel’s patois, mongrel and pantomimic, was current coin among all the tribes.
“Like small baby,” hunched the old shoulders. “Happy baby. Pretty soon stop.”
With the next wages went a reprimand, then a warning. Still followed bad Mondays. It was easy to see that no work was to be expected from them on that day, their all-night feasting insufficiently slept off. Rickard then issued a formal warning to all the tribes.
The white men were being held antithetically by their habits of carousal; Rickard, doling out the weekly wage, had been observing the pitiable look of determination on the faces of the volatile hobo. “The look of ‘I can bear no more; I shall move on.’”
“Poor devils!” he exclaimed to MacLean as Number Ten, the hobo without a name, shuffled out, bearing his money in his hand and a farewell leer on his face. His number, bound by a circle, his mark and title, decorated each bridge and pier, so his boast ran, between New Orleans and San Francisco, and then again, New York. He was on his second round, and he had never bought a ticket in his life.
“Poor devils,” he repeated as the desert’s perspective claimed the tramp. “They always think that they are not coming back. It’s a mean trick we play on them.”
“What’s the trick?” queried MacLean absently, who was thinking of Innes Hardin. He had seen her on the river with his chief the evening before; and the flash of betrayal from the eyes of Rickard, the girl’s shy quenched gleam of surrender, had been a shock to him. Until that instant, he had thought she lined up with the rest of the Hardins in hating Rickard. So that was what had been going on under his nose! It looked settled to him; he would not have believed that no word had been spoken.
He had wondered since what variety of fool he had been making of himself. Trying to oust a man like Rickard—a man. That was the particular sting. He was reproaching himself for bloodlessness as he counted out moneys for his chief that afternoon. Surely, had he any spirit, his disappointment would have flared into bitter enmity against the man who had stolen what he was coveting. For Innes Hardin was a queen! He had never seen any one like her. Queer, he could not make himself hate Rickard. Something must be wrong with himself, to be able to sit there in the old familiar way, without bitterness in his heart.
“They think they are free men; free to go and come. And we own them, body and soul. They might as well be slaves for all they can do.”
MacLean frowned. “I don’t think I understand.” He put aside his problem for a while. He would settle that later.