Labrador.
Chapter VII—The Skandinavia Moves
Bat gazed up at the wooded ridge. They were standing in the marshy bottom of a natural hollow amidst a sparse scattering of pine and attenuated spruce. Beyond the ridge lay the waters of the cove. And to the left the broad waters of the river mouth flowed by. It was a desolate, damp spot, but its significance to the two men studying it was profound.
Skert Lawton, the chief engineer of Sachigo, tall, loose-limbed, raw-boned, watched his superior with somewhat mournful, unsmiling eyes. There was something of deadly earnest in his regard, something anxious. But that was always his way. Bat had once said of him: "Skert Lawton's one hell of a good boy. But I won't get no comfort in the grave if I ain't ever see him grin." There was not the smallest sign of a smile in him now.
"It's one big notion," Bat said, at last. Then he added doubtfully. "It comes mighty nigh being too big."
Lawton emitted a curious sound like a snort. It was mainly, however, an ejaculation of violent impatience. Bat turned with a twinkling grin, surveying the queer figure. His engineer was always a source of the profoundest interest for him. Just now, in his hard, rough clothing, he might have been a lumber-jack, or casual labourer. Anything, in fact, rather than the college-bred, brilliant engineer he really was.
Bat's doubt had been carefully calculated. He knew his man. And just now as he awaited the explosion he looked for, his thoughts went back to a scene he had once had with a half drunken machine-minder whom he had had to pay off. The man had epitomised the chief engineer's qualities and character, as those who encountered his authority understood them, in a few lurid, illuminating phrases. "You know," he had said, "that guy ain't a man. No, sir. He's the mush-fed image of a penitentiary boss. I guess he'd set the grease box of a driving shaft hot with a look. His temper 'ud burn holes in sheet iron. As for work—work? Holy Mackinaw! I've worked hired man to a French Canuk mossback which don't leave a feller the playtime of a nigger slave, but that hell-hired Scotch machine boss sets me yearnin' for that mossback's wage like a bull-pup chasin' offal. I tell you right here if that guy don't quit his notions there'll be murder done. Bloody murder! An' it's a God's sure thing when that happens he'll freeze to death in hell. It don't rile me a thing to be told the things he guesses my mother was. Maybe that's a matter of opinion, and, anyway, she's mixin' with a crop of angels who don't figger to have no truck with Scotch machine bosses. I guess a sight of his flea-bitten features 'ud set 'em seein' things so they wouldn't rec'nise their harps from frypans, and they'd moult feathers till you wouldn't know it from a snowfall on Labrador. But when he mixes his notions of my ma with 'lazy'! Lazy! Lazy! Gee! Why, if I signed in a half hour late from that bum suttler's canteen, I guess it was only the time it took me digestin' two quarts of the gut-wash they hand out there in the hope you won't know it from beer. No, sir, 'lazy son-of-a-bitch' from that guy is the talk no decent citizen with a bunch of guts is goin' to stand for."
Skert Lawton was known for a red-hot "burner," a "nigger driver." No doubt he was all this in addition to his brilliant attainments as an engineer. But the methods he applied to others he applied to himself. And the whole of him, brain and body, was for the enterprise they were all engaged in. Bat had intended to goad the demon of obstinate energy which possessed the man, and he succeeded.