“Ribbons, instead of shoe-laces!” carped the human machine that must ever write letters which other men sign. “And a blue pin to match his tie! I call that going some!”
It would never have occurred to Rickard, had he thought about it at all that morning as he knotted his tie of dark, brilliant blue silk, that the selection of his lapis pin was a choice; it was an inevitable result, an instinctive discretion of his fingers. It warped, however, the suspended judgment of Marshall’s men who had never seen him shoveling coal, disfigured by a denim jumper. They did not know that they themselves were slovens; ruined by the climate that dulls vanity and wilts collars.
“Give him a year to change some of his fine habits!” wagered Smythe, the stoop-shouldered clerk, as the door of the inner office closed.
“To change his habits less!” amended the office wit. And then they fell to speculating what Marshall was going to do with him. What pawn was he in the game that every one in Tucson followed with eager self-interested concern? Marshall’s was the controlling hand in Arizona politics; the maker of governors, the arbiter of big corporations; president of a half-dozen railroads. Not a move of his on the board that escaped notice.
On the other side of the door, Rickard was echoing the office question. This play job, where did it lead to? He had liked his work, under Stratton. There had been some pretty problems to meet—what did Marshall mean to do with him?
The note had set the appointment for nine. Rickard glanced at his watch, and took out his Engineering Review. It would be ten before that door opened on Tod Marshall!
He knew that, on the road, Marshall’s work began at dawn. “A man won’t break from overwork, or rust from underwork, if he follows the example of the sun,” Rickard had often heard him expound his favorite theory. “It is only the players, the sybarites, who can afford to pervert the arrangement nature intended for us.” But in Tucson, controlled by the wifely solicitude of his Claudia, he was coerced into a regular perversion. His office never saw him until the morning was half gone.
A half-hour later, Rickard finished reading a report on the diversion of a great western river. The name of Thomas Hardin had sent him off on a tangent of memory. The Thomas Hardin whose efforts to bring water to the desert of the Colorado had been so spectacularly unsuccessful was the Tom Hardin he had known! The sister had told him so, the girl with the odd bronze eyes; opal matrix they were, with glints of gold, or was it green? She herself was as unlike the raw boor of his memory as a mountain lily is like the coarse rock of its background. Even a half-sister to Hardin, as Marshall, their host at dinner the week before, had explained it,—no, even that did not explain it. That any of the Hardin blood should be shared by the veins of that girl, why it was incredible! The name “Hardin” suggested crudity, loud-mouthed bragging; conceit. He could understand the failure of the river project since the sister had assured him that it was the same Tom Hardin who had gone to college at Lawrence; had married Gerty Holmes. Queer business, life, that he should cross, even so remotely, their orbits again. That was a chapter he liked to skip.
He walked over to the windows, shielded by bright awnings, and looked down on the city where the next few years of his life might be caught. Comforting to reflect that an engineer is like a soldier, never can be certain about to-morrow. Time enough to know that to-morrow meant Tucson! What was that threadbare proverb in the Overland Pacific that Tod Marshall always keeps his men until they lose their teeth? That defined the men who made themselves necessary!
His eyes were resting on the banalities of the modern city that had robbed “old town” of its flavor. Were it not for the beauty of the distant hills, the jar and rumble of the trains whose roar called to near-by pleasure cities, twinkling lights and crowded theaters, stretches of parks and recreation grounds, he, who loved the thrill and confinement of an engine, who had found enticement in a desert, a chapter of adventure in the barrancas of Mexico, would stifle in Tucson! American progress was as yet too thin a veneer on Mexican indifference to make the place endurable; as a city. Were it a village of ten thousand people, then he’d not be scolding at his hotel, The Rosales. He could find the limitations picturesque, even. The census it was that accused those dusty unswept floors, the stained cuspidors, the careless linen, and The Rosales the best place in town! One has a right to expect comforts in a city.