“As well put sentinels a few miles from prison, and leave the jail doors open!” This was Wooster’s gibe. All saw the Colorado as a marauder at large. “And a little heap of sand stacked up to scare it off! It’s a scream!”
Mrs. Hardin found it difficult to meet with diplomacy the confidences which inevitably came her way. As Hardin’s wife, she was expected to enjoy the universal censure the new man was acquiring. Gerty’s light touches, too slight for championship, passed as a sweet charity. Her own position those days was trying. She did not yet know her diplomatic lesson.
Apparently unaware of the talk, Rickard spent the greater part of his time superintending the levee. He could trust no one else to do it, no one unless it were Estrada, who was rushing his steel rails through to the front, and was needed there.
Things were moving under his constant goading. The extra pay was showing results. He should be at the Heading now, he kept telling himself, but he was convinced that the instant he turned his back, the work on the levee would stop; and all the reasons excellent! Some emergency would be cooked up to warrant the withdrawal of the hands. Chafe as he might at the situation, it was to be guerrilla warfare. Not a fight in the open, he knew how to meet that, but this baffling resistance, the polite silence of the office when he entered,—“Well, they’ll be doing my way pretty soon, or my name isn’t Rickard. That’s flat.”
He was fretting to be at work, to start the wheels of the O. P., its vast machinery toward his problem. He knew that that organization, like well-drilled militia, was ready for his call. The call lagged, not that he did not need men, but there was no place ready for them. The camp, that was another rub. There was no camp! It was not equipped for a sudden inflation of men. The inefficiency of the projectors of this desert scheme had never seemed so criminal as when he had surveyed the equipment at the intake. “Get ready first; your tools, your stoves, your beds.” That was the training of the good executive, of men like Marshall and MacLean. Nothing to be left to chance; to foresee emergencies, not to be taken by them unaware. The reason of Hardin’s downfall was his slipshod habits. How could he be a good officer who had never drilled as a soldier? There was the gap at the intake, Hardin’s grotesque folly, widened from one hundred feet to ten times the original cut; widening every day, with neither equipment nor camp adequate to push through a work of half the original magnitude. Cutting away, moreover, was the island, Disaster Island; it had received apt christening by the engineers, its baptismal water the Colorado. The last floods had played with it as though it were a bar of sugar. There was no rock at hand; no rock on the way, no rock ordered. Could any one piece together such recklessness?
Rickard knew where he would get his rock. Already he had requisitioned the entire output of the Tacna and Patagonia quarries. He had ordered steam shovels to be installed at the quarry back of old Hamlin’s. That rock pit would be his first crutch, and the gravel bed,—that was a find! As he paced the levee west of the towns, he was planning his campaign. Porter was scouring Zacatecas for men; he himself had offered, as bait, free transportation; the O. P. he knew would back him. He was going to throw out a spur-track from the Heading, touching at the quarry and gravel pit, on to the main road at Yuma. Double track most of the way; sidings every three miles. Rock must be rushed; the trains must be pushed through. He itched to begin. It never occurred to him that, like Hardin, he might fail.
“Though it’s no pink tea,” he told himself, “it’s no picnic.” At Tucson, he knew that the situation was a grave one, but his talk with Brandon, who knew his river signs as does a good Indian, made the year a significant, eventful one. Matt Hamlin, too, whose shrewd eyes had grown river-wise, he, too, had had tales to tell of the tricky river. Maldonado, the half-breed, had confirmed their portents while they sat together under his oleander, famous throughout that section of the country. And powerfully had Cor’nel, the Indian who had piloted Estrada’s party across the desert, whom Rickard had met at the Crossing, deeply had he impressed him. The river grew into a malevolent, mocking personality; he could see it a dragon of yellow waters, dragging its slow sluggish length across the baked desert sands; deceiving men by its inertness; luring the explorer by a mild mood, to rise suddenly with its wild fellow, the Gila, sending boat and boatmen to their swift doom.
Rickard was thinking of the half-breed, Maldonado, as he inspected the new stretch of levee between the towns. He had heard from others besides Estrada of the river knowledge of this descendant of trapper and squaw, and had thought it worth while to ride the twenty miles from down the river to talk with him. The man’s suavity, his narrow slits of eyes, the lips thin and facile, deep lines of cruelty falling from them, had repelled his visitor. The mystery of the place followed him. Why the ’dobe wall which completely surrounded the small low dwellings? Why the cautious admittance, the atmosphere of suspicion? Rickard had seen the wife, a frightened shadow of a woman; had seen her flinch when the brute called her. He had questioned Cor’nel about the half-breed. He was remembering the wrinkles of contempt on the old Indian’s face as he delivered himself of an oracular grunt.
“White man? No. Indian? No! Coyote!”
Though he suspected Maldonado would lie on principle, though it might be that two-thirds of his glib tissue were false, yet a thread of truth coincident with the others, Brandon and Hamlin and Cor’nel, might be pulled out of his romantic fabric.