“Done, by jiminy by jinks,” he said in his high weak voice.
Cig was puzzled and a little annoyed. How had he ever been fooled into thinking that this inoffensive little specimen was dangerous? It was written on him that he would not hurt a fly.
CHAPTER XV
THE HOMESTEADER SERVES NOTICE
In later years the man who had called himself Tug Jones looked back on the days and nights that followed as a period of unmitigated dejection and horror. The craving for the drug was with him continually. If he had had a supply on hand, he would have yielded a hundred times to the temptation to use it. But he had burned the bridges behind him. There was no way to get the stuff without going in person to a town of some size.
This meant not only a definite surrender of the will, but a promise of relief that could not be fulfilled inside of twenty-four hours at the earliest. Just now this stretch of time was a period of torment as endless as a year.
Somehow he stuck it out, though he spent much of his time in an inferno of feverish desire. He tried to kill the appetite with work. Merrick, moving to and fro with a keen eye on the men, observed that the foreman was sloughing his work and letting it fall on Jones. At the end of the week, Merrick discharged him and raised the former tramp to his place as foreman. Jones accepted the promotion without thanks. He knew he had earned it, but he did not care whether he received it or not.
He grew worn and haggard. Dark shadows emphasized the hollows of the tortured eyes. So irritable was his temper that at a word it flashed to explosion. By disposition he was not one to pass on to subordinates the acerbity that was a residue of the storm that was shaking him. A sense of justice had always been strong in him. Fifty times a day he clamped his teeth to keep back the biting phrase. In general he succeeded, but malingerers found him a hard taskmaster.
They appealed to Merrick and got small comfort from him. The new cement foreman was getting the work done both rapidly and well. That was all the chief engineer asked of him. The details could be arranged by Jones as he pleased.
The nights were the worst. During the day he had the work to occupy his mind, but when darkness fell over the hills its shadows crept over his soul. He could not sleep. Sometimes he borrowed technical books from Merrick and tried to bury himself in study. More often he tramped till physical exhaustion drove him back to his cot to stare up sleeplessly at the canvas roof of his tent.
Suffering wears itself out at last. There came a time when the edge of the craving grew less keen, when its attack was less frequent. In the pure, untempered air of the hills the cement gang foreman came to sounder health. His appetite increased with his physical stamina. One day it struck him with a little shock of surprise that he had not had one of his racking headaches for two weeks. He began to sleep better, though there were still nights when he had to tramp the hills in self-defense.