“I’m good for a lifetime here, if I want it,” his thoughts would work back to the starting place. “If I knuckle down to it, let him grow to depend on me, it’s as good as settled that I am buried in Tucson!” Hadn’t he heard Marshall himself say that he “didn’t keep a kindergarten—that his office wasn’t a training-school for men!” He wanted his men to stay! That, one of the reasons of the great man’s power; detail rested on the shoulders of his employees. It kept his own brain clear, receptive to big achievements.
“Perhaps as the work unrolls, as I see more of what he wants of me, why he wants me, I may like it, I may get to shout for Tucson!” It was improbable enough to smile over! Child’s work, compared to Mexico. He was never tired—that was his grievance; he had it, now; he was never tired.
The distinction of serving Marshall well certainly had its drawbacks. He wanted to sweep on. Whether he had a definite terminal, a concrete goal, had he ever stopped to think? Specialization had always a fascination for him. It was that which had thrown him out of his instructorship into the fire-box of a western engine. It had governed his course at college—to know one thing well, and then to prove that he knew it well! Contented in the Mexican barrancas, here he was chafing, restive, after a few weeks of Tucson. For what was he getting here? Adding what scrap of experience to the rounding of his profession?
Retrospectively, engineering could hardly be said to be the work of his choice. Rather had it appeared to choose him. From boyhood engineers had always been, to him, the soldiers of modern civilization. To conquer and subdue mountains, to shackle wild rivers, to suspend trestles over dizzy heights, to throw the tracks of an advancing civilization along a newly blazed trail, there would always be a thrill in it for him. It had changed the best quarter-back of his high school into the primmest of students at college. Only for a short time had he let his vanity side-track him, when the honor of teaching what he had learned stopped his own progress. A rut—! He remembered the day when it had burst on him, the realization of the rut he was in. He could see his Lawrence schoolroom, could see yet the face under the red-haired mop belonging to Jerry Matson—queer he remembered the name after all those years! He could picture the look of consternation when he threw down his book, and announced his desertion.
“Casey was off his feed,” he had heard one of the students say as he passed a buzzing group in the hall. “He looks peaked.”
He had handed in his resignation the next day. A month later, and he was shoveling coal on the steep grades of Wyoming.
“Marshall keeps his men with him!” The engineer’s glance traveled around the fleckless office. A stranger to Marshall would get a wrong idea of the man who worked in it! Those precise files, the desk, orderly and polished, the gleaming linoleum—and then the man who made the negro janitor’s life a proud burden! His clothes always crumpled—spots, too, unless his Claudia had had a chance at them! Black string tie askew, all the outward visible signs of the southern gentleman of assured ancestry. Not even a valet would ever keep Tod Marshall up to the standard of that office. What did he have servants for, he had demanded of Rickard, if it were not to jump after him, picking up the loose ends he dropped?
Curious thing, magnetism. That man’s step on the stair, and every man-jack of them would jump to attention, from Ben, the colored janitor, who would not swap his post for a sinecure so long as Tod Marshall’s one lung kept him in Arizona, to Smythe, the stoop-shouldered clerk, who had followed Marshall’s cough from San Francisco. Poor Smythe! as inextricably entangled in the meshes of red tape as was the hapless Lady of Shalott in the web of her own snarled loom. It was said in Arizona—he himself had met the statement in Tucson—that any man who had ever worked for Tod Marshall would rather be warmed by the reflection of his greatness than be given posts of personal distinction.
Rickard found his office the only attractive place in the desert city. Shining and airy, even in the hottest days, its gaily screened windows were far enough above the street to give a charitable perspective. Restive as he was under the inaction of the last few weeks, he could acknowledge a quaintness of foreign suggestion in the mixture of Indian and Mexican influence, hampered, rather than helped, by American aggressiveness. Over the heads of a group of low buildings he could see the roof of the old mission church, now the lounging place for roisterers and sponges. There, the fiery mescal, the terrible tequila, were sending many a white lad to destruction.
Those office buildings across the street, gay with canvas, suggested American enterprise. In the distance were the substantial structures of the lusty western university. Down by the track the new home of the Overland Pacific was nearing completion. In the street below, young girls with their crisp duck skirts and colored waists gave the touch of blossoming. Mexican women wrapped in the inevitable black shawl were jostling one another’s baskets. The scene was full of color and charm, but to the watcher who was eager to be on and doing, it cried teasingly of inertia.