“Lord! MacLean, didn’t you see ‘Ten’s’ face?”
Dimly, MacLean summoned a gaunt heat-seared visage; an unshaven, stubbled face of leering defiance. “He won’t come back again.”
“But he will. He’s got to come back. He can’t get through Yuma. That’s the trick. We have the screw on them. Yuma’s practised. She won’t let a man with a week’s wages in his pockets slip through her talons. They all mean to go. Lord! I see it in each of their faces as they come in here. As I pay them off, their eyes say: ‘I’ve got enough to be quit of you with your hell-hole. You can go to the devil for all the work you’ll get out of me.’ They don’t say it because they’re afraid, not of me, but of Yuma. They’re afraid of Yuma. And when she’s sucked them dry, they slink back here for one more week of it.”
MacLean drew in his lip, frowning at the memory of the stubbled face as it had glared at Rickard.
“You remember Jack, the hobo?”
“Arnica Jack?” In spite of his resolution to be miserable, MacLean laughed. The hobo’s weak ever-turning ankles made him the butt of the hobo camp. A bottle of arnica in his coat pocket, the insidious smell of the stuff which clung to his clothes, had drawn the inevitable sobriquet.
“He didn’t come in to-day. Poor devil! He’s trying to stick it out, and not draw his wages. You run a chance of being put off in the heart of the desert when you ride out on a brake-beam from Yuma. You’ve got to have a little ‘dough’ in your pocket to wheedle a man with a team, or a soft-hearted brakeman. Else it’s death. We’ve got it on them, a dead sure cinch.”
“Why haven’t I seen any of this?” demanded MacLean, sitting up, very red.
“It’s not on the surface. They go out swaggering Sunday; they come back cringing Monday. That’s all there is to it. But the situation with the Indians is more serious. They’re getting liquor in here, some way, the Lord only knows how. Maybe Coronel is right; he declares they are simply gorged with food, dead from their stuffed orgies. Anyway, they’re not fit for burning Monday morning. I’ve just sent them word by Coronel that it’s got to quit, or they do.”
“Suppose they do?” MacLean was startled. Not an Indian could be spared at that stage of the game.