Foulk hurried off in one direction, Charlie walked away in another; Old Van disappeared within the tent in order to complete his very simple toilet; Young Van stood alone, looking after one and another of the retreating figures with an expression of something like dismay. He had spoken with more vigor and authority than he could suppose; but even such as it was, his momentary grip on the situation relaxed while he stood there. The work was not going to stop, he knew that, yet this complicated mechanism, the job, seemed to be running on without any mainspring. Speaking for himself, there was no one of the many tasks Carhart had left in his hands which he was not competent to perform, yet, viewing them in mass, they bewildered him. There would be bickerings, sliding on from bad to worse. The work would be undertaken each day in a dogged spirit, and it would have an ugly side which had not before shown itself. Earlier in the course of the undertaking there had been moments when he had thought, looking out from his own mountain range of details, that Carhart’s work was not so trying as it seemed; that he had time to ride up and down the line, chatting with engineers and foremen; that he could relax almost as he chose,—run down to Sherman now and then, or even slip off for a day’s shooting. Now he saw it differently. And his forebodings were realized. Everybody in authority felt the unfortunate drift of the work, and everybody felt helpless to check this drift. Attempts made now and then by individuals were worse—because they merely succeeded in drawing attention to it—than the general failure. That evening, when Scribner came back and they all tried to be jolly, was the gloomiest time in a gloomy week. Men took to deserting their work. On one occasion thirty-odd of them left in a body to join an outfit which halted overnight near the main camp—that was when they were living on “mile forty-five.” Fights grew more frequent. Accidents seemed to be almost a part of the week’s routine.
One day, Young Van, chancing to pass near the track-laying work, heard his brother swearing at the rider of the snap-mule that drew the rail-truck back and forth between the material train and the work. The rider was a boy of twelve. Young Van recalled, as he listened, a scene of a fortnight earlier (it seemed a year), when the boy, then new to it, had been found by Carhart, quietly sobbing on his horse. “What’s the trouble, son?” the chief had inquired good-humoredly. “I’m afraid,” was the lad’s reply. Whereupon the chief had lifted him down, swung himself into the saddle, and, with a twinkle in his eye, had ridden a few trips in order to show the boy how to manage it safely.
At length a man was killed, one of pile-driver crew No. 1, on Old Van’s division. Other men had been killed earlier in the work, but this death struck the workmen as bearing greater significance. In the other cases Carhart himself had done all that man could do; the last time he had driven the body twenty miles to a priest and decent burial. But Old Van sent out a few nerve-shaken laborers to dig a grave, and told them to waste no time about it, beyond seeing that it was well filled after—afterward.
For several nights after the trouble with Foulk Charlie did not sleep at all. But even a frontiersman is subject to Nature’s laws, and the time came when he was overcome, shortly after midnight, while sitting on a box before his tent, and he rolled over and slept like a child.
They woke him at daybreak, and, without a word, handed him this rough placard:—
Tell Mr. Carhart he’d better be carrying a gun after this. He’ll need it.
Jack Flagg.
“It was stuck up on the telegraph pole,” explained a sleepy-eyed sentinel.
“Where?”
“Here in camp.”