Rickard seemed pleased when MacLean made the announcement a few hours later. “Good! Now, we have something to work on.”
“You are losing the work of five hundred men for one day a week,” urged MacLean, observing him as curiously as though he were a stranger.
“We had already lost them. They have not given us a day’s work on Mondays for weeks past, and we’ve had to give them a full week’s pay. You can’t deduct for lazy work, not unless you’ve an overseer for each man.” His secretary was weighing him. “What do you intend to do about it?”
“Call their bluff,” grinned Casey, showing teeth tobacco had not had a chance to spoil. “Boycott them.” He was at his table, already, writing. He had forgotten to remove his duster or his hat. He was unconscious of his secretary’s new appraisement.
“But you can’t afford to take the chance—” began MacLean, forcing a tepid hostility.
“Oh, can’t I?” His tone suggested, “You’re playing on the track, kid.”
Reddening, the boy persisted. “But the others—the engineers, can you afford to? Suppose you lose?”
Rickard threw down his pen. “I’ve got to have workers, not dabbers! If I’m to lose the Indians, the sooner I know it the better. I don’t want to know what the others think. I’ve got to go straight ahead. Don’t think I’ve not seen their faces. Take this note to Wooster. Tell him to take Coronel and see Forestier.”
On his way, MacLean felt like the match that is to set off a charge of dynamite. Wooster would go straight up in the air. Those Hardin men would make an uproar that would be heard at Yuma!
He found Wooster at the river-bank, with Tom Hardin. The two men were watching a pile-driver set a rebellious pile for the new trestles. Two new trestles were to supplement the one which had been bent out of line by the weight of settling drift. The pile-driver had no Sabbath, now. The piles must be placed before rock could be poured between. Marshall’s plan was being followed, though jeered at by Reclamation men and the engineers of the D. R. Company.