“Hang the company! The claim agents are a pack of thieves,” cried Sinclair. “Look here, McCloud, what’s a pay check to a man that’s sick, compared with a bottle of good wine?”
“When one of your men is sick and needs wine, let me know,” returned McCloud; “I’ll see that he gets it. Your men don’t wear silk dresses, do they?” he asked, pointing to another case of goods 14 under the driver’s seat. “Have that stuff all hauled back and loaded into a box car on track.”
“Not by a damned sight!” exclaimed Sinclair. He turned to his ranch driver, Barney Rebstock. “You haul that stuff where you were told to haul it, Barney.” Then, “you and I may as well have an understanding right here,” he said, as McCloud walked to the head of the mules.
“By all means, and I’ll begin by countermanding that order right now. Take your load straight back to that car,” directed McCloud, pointing up the track. Barney, a ranch hand with a cigarette face looked surlily at McCloud.
Sinclair raised a finger at the boy. “You drive straight ahead where I told you to drive. I don’t propose to have my affairs interfered with by you or anybody else, Mr. McCloud. You and I can settle this thing ourselves,” he added, walking straight toward the superintendent.
“Get away from those mules!” yelled Barney at the same moment, cracking his whip.
McCloud’s dull eyes hardly lightened as he looked at the driver. “Don’t swing your whip this way, my boy,” he said, laying hold quietly of the near bridle.
“Drop that bridle!” roared Sinclair.
“I’ll drop your mules in their tracks if they move one foot forward. Dancing, unhook those 15 traces,” said McCloud peremptorily. “Dump the wine out of that wagon-box, Young.” Then he turned to Sinclair and pointed to the wreck. “Get back to your work.”
The sun marked the five men rooted for an instant on the hillside. Dancing jumped at the traces, Reed Young clambered over the wheel, and Sinclair, livid, faced McCloud. With a bitter denunciation of interlopers, claim agents, and “fresh” railroad men generally, Sinclair swore he would not go back to work, and a case of wine crashing to the ground infuriated him. He turned on his heel and started for the wreck. “Call off the men!” he yelled to Karg at the derrick. The foreman passed the word. The derrickmen, dropping their hooks and chains in some surprise, moved out of the wreckage. The axemen and laborers gathered around the foreman and followed him toward Sinclair.