“Lively on the foot!” yelled Flagg. “I’m standing here judging you by the way you break this jam of the jillpokes. Walk over the cowards, you real men! Come on, you bully chaps! Come running! Hi yoop! Underfoot with ’em!”
He swung his cant dog and kept on adjuring.
The real adventurers, the excitement seekers, the scrappers, drove into the press of those who were in the way. The field became a scene of riot. The bullies were called on to qualify under the eyes of the master. There were fisticuffs aplenty because husky men who might not care to enlist with old Eck Flagg were sufficiently muscular and ugly to strike back at attackers who stamped on their feet and drove fists into their backs.
Flagg, on the porch, followed all phases of the scattered conflict, estimated men by the manner in which they went at what he had set them to do, and he surveyed them with favor when they crowded close to the edge of his rostrum, dwelling with particular interest on the faces which especially revealed that they had been up against the real thing in the way of a fight. Behind and around the gladiators who had won to the porch pressed the cordon of malcontents who cursed and threatened.
“Much obliged for favor of prompt reply to mine of day and date,” said Flagg, with his grim humor. He drove his cant-dog point into the floor of the porch and left the tool waggling slowly to and fro. He leaped down among the men. He did not waste time with words. He went among them, gripping their arms to estimate the biceps, holding them off at arm’s length to judge their height and weight. He also looked at their teeth, rolling up their lips, horse-trader fashion. The drive provender did not consist of tender tidbits; a river jack must be able to chew tough meat, and the man in the wilderness with a toothache would have poor grit for work in bone-chilling water after a sleepless night.
Flagg carried a piece of chalk in his right hand. When he accepted a man he autographed the initials “E F” on the back of the fellow’s shirt or jacket, in characteristic handwriting. “Show your back as you go north,” he proclaimed for the benefit of the strangers to his custom. “My initials are good for stage team, tote team, lodging, and meals—the bills are sent to Flagg. The sooner you start the sooner you’ll get to headwaters.”
A big chap followed at Flagg’s back as the despot moved among the men. He was Ben Kyle, Flagg’s drive boss, the first mate of the Flagg ship of state. He was writing down the names of the men as they were hired. Occasionally the master called on the mate to give in an opinion when a candidate ran close to the line between acceptance or rejection.
Flagg began to show good humor beyond his usual wont. He was finding men who suited him. Many of them growled anathema against the Three C’s. They had worked for that corporation. They had been obliged to herd with roughscuff from the city employment agencies, unskilled men who were all the time coming and going and were mostly underfoot when they were on the job. One humorist averred that the Three C’s had three complete sets of crews—one working, one coming in, and one going out.
Kyle began to loosen up and copy some of Flagg’s good humor.
He encouraged the wag who had described the three shifts to say more about the Comas crews; he had some witticisms of his own to offer.