“Frank Porter?” sneered Hardin, “that—murderer?”
“His brother,” Rickard answered pleasantly. “Jim furnishes the men for the big mines in Sonora and Sinaloa. He’ll send us all the labor we want, the best for our purpose. When it gets red-hot, there’s no one like a peon or an Indian.”
“You’ll be infringing on the international contract law,” suggested MacLean.
“No. The camp is on the Mexican side,” laughed Casey. “I’d thought of that. We’ll have them shipped to the nearest Mexican point, and then brought to the border. Mr. Estrada will help us.”
The meeting had already adjourned. They were standing around the flat-top desk. Estrada invited them all to lunch with him, in the car on the siding. MacLean said that he had to get back to Los Angeles. Mr. Babcock was going to take him out to Grant’s Heading in the machine. He had never been there. They had breakfasted late. He looked very much the colonel to Rickard, his full broad chest and stiff carriage made more military by his trim uniform of khaki-colored cloth.
“May I speak to you about your boy, Mr. MacLean?”
Hardin caught a slight that was not intended. He pushed past the group at the door without civility or ceremony.
The steady grave eyes of the big frame looked at Rickard inquiringly.
“He wants to stay out another year. I hope you will let him. It’s not disinterested. I shall have to take a stenographer to the Heading this summer. There is a girl here; I couldn’t take her, and then, too, I’m old-fashioned; I don’t like women in offices. My position promises to be a peculiar one. I’d like to have your son to rely on for emergencies a stenographer could not cover.”
MacLean’s grave features relaxed as he looked down on the engineer, who was no small man himself, and suggested that his son was not very well up in stenography.