“Sit down,” said Peebles gently, Tom turned and stared at him.
“Sit down. I can’t change that dressing ’less you do.” He pointed at the bandage around Tom’s elbow. It was red, a widening stain, the tattered tissues having parted as the big Georgian bunched his infuriated muscles. He sat down.
“Talkin’ about dumbness,” said Harris calmly, as Peebles went to work, “I was about to say that I got the record. I done the dumbest thing anybody ever did on a machine. You can’t top it.”
“I could,” said Kelly. “Runnin’ a crane dragline once. Put her in boom gear and started to boom her up. Had an eighty-five-foot stick on her. Machine was standing on wooden mats in the middle of a swamp. Heard the motor miss and got out of the saddle to look at the filter-glass. Messed around back there longer than I figured, and the boom went straight up in the air and fell backwards over the cab. Th’ jolt tilted my mats an’ she slid backwards slow and stately as you please, butt-first into the mud. Buried up to the eyeballs, she was.” He laughed quietly. “Looked like a ditching machine!”
“I still say I done the dumbest thing ever, bar none,” said Harris. “It was on a river job, widening a channel. I come back to work from a three-day binge, still rum-dumb. Got up on a dozer an’ was workin’ around on the edge of a twenty-foot cliff. Down at the foot of the cliff was a big hickory tree, an’ growin’ right along the edge was a great big limb. I got the dopey idea I should break it off. I put one track on the limb and the other on the cliff edge and run out away from the trunk. I was about halfway out, an’ the branch saggin’ some, before I thought what would happen if it broke. Just about then it did break. You know hickory—if it breaks at all it breaks altogether. So down we go into thirty feet of water—me an’ the cat. I got out from under somehow. When all them bubbles stopped comin’ up I swum around lookin’ down at it. I was still paddlin’ around when the superintendent came rushin’ up. He wants to know what’s up. I yell at him, ‘Look down there, the way that water is movin’ an’ shiftin’, looks like the cat is workin’ down there.’” He pursed his lips and tsk tsked. “My, that man said some nasty things to me.”
“Where’d you get your next job?” Kelly exploded.
“Oh, he didn’t fire me,” said Harris soberly. “Said he couldn’t afford to fire a man as dumb as that. Said he wanted me around to look at whenever he felt bad.”
Tom said, “Thanks, you guys. That’s as good a way as any of sayin’ that everybody makes mistakes.” He stood up, examining the new dressing, turning his arm in front of his lantern. “You all can think what you please, but I don’t recollect there was any dumbness went on on that mesa this evenin’. That’s finished with, anyway. Do I have to say that Dennis’ idea about it is all wet?”
Harris said one foul word that completely disposed of Dennis and anything he might say.
Peebles said, “It’ll be all right. Dennis an’ his popeyed friend’ll hang together, but they don’t amount to anything. Chub’ll do whatever he’s argued into.”
“So you get ’em all lined up, hey?” Tom shrugged. “In the meantime, are we going to get an airfield built?”
“We’ll get it built,” Peebles said. “Only—Tom, I got no right to give you any advice, but go easy on the rough stuff after this. It does a lot of harm.”
“I will if I can,” said Tom gruffly. They broke up and turned in.
Peebles was right. It did do harm. It made Dennis use the word “murder” when they found, in the morning, that Rivera had died during the night.
The work progressed in spite of everything that had happened. With equipment like that, it’s hard to slow things down. Kelly bit two cubic yards out of the bluff with every swing of the big shovel, and Dumptors are the fastest short haul earth movers yet devised. Dennis kept the service road clean for them with his pan, and Tom and Chub spelled each other on the bulldozer they had detached from its pan to make up for the lack of the Seven, spending their alternate periods with transit and stakes. Peebles was rod-man for the surveys, and in between times worked on setting up his field shop, keeping the water cooler and battery chargers running, and lining up his forge and welding tables. The operators fueled and serviced their own equipment, and there was little delay. The rocks and marl that came out of the growing cavity in the side of the central mesa—a whole third of it had to come out—were spun down to the edge of the swamp, which lay across the lower end of the projected runway, in the hornet-howling dump-tractors, their big driving wheels churning up vast clouds of dust, and were dumped and spread and walked in by the whining two-cycle dozer. When muck began to pile up in front of the fill, it was blasted out of the way with carefully placed charges of sixty percent dynamite and the craters filled with rocks and stone from the ruins, and surfaced with easily compacting marl, run out of a clean deposit by the pan.
And when he had his shop set up, Peebles went up the hill to get the Seven. When he got it he just stood there for a moment scratching his head, and then, shaking his head, he ambled back down the hill and went for Tom.
“Been looking at the Seven,” he said, when he had flagged the moaning two-cycle and Tom had climbed off.
“What’d you find?”
Peebles held out an arm. “A list as long as that.” He shook his head. “Tom, what really happened up there?”
“Governor went haywire and she run away,” Tom said promptly, deadpan.
“Yeah, but—” For a long moment he held Tom’s eyes. Then he sighed. “O.K., Tom. Anyway, I can’t do a thing up there. We’ll have to bring her back and I’ll have to have this tractor to tow her down. And first I have to have some help—the track idler adjustment bolt’s busted and the right track is off the track rollers.”
“Oh-h-h. So that’s why she couldn’t get to the kid, running on the starting motor. Track would hardly turn, hey?”
“It’s a miracle she ran as far as she did. That track is really jammed up. Riding right up on the roller flanges. And that ain’t the half of it. The head’s gone, like Harris said, and Lord only knows what I’ll find when I open her up.”
“Why bother?”
“What?”
“We can get along without that dozer,” said Tom suddenly. “Leave her where she is. There’s lots more for you to do.”
“But what for?”
“Well, there’s no call to go to all that trouble.”
Peebles scratched the side of his nose and said, “I got a new head, track master pins—even a spare starting motor. I got tools to make what I don’t stock.” He pointed at the long row of dumps left by the hurtling dump-tractors while they had been talking. “You got a pan tied up because you’re using this machine to doze with, and you can’t tell me you can’t use another one. You’re gonna have to shut down one or two o’ those Dumptors if you go on like this.”
“I had all that figured out as soon as I opened my mouth,” Tom said sullenly. “Let’s go.”
They climbed on the tractor and took off, stopping for a moment at the beach outcropping to pick up a cable and some tools.
Daisy Etta sat at the edge of the mesa, glowering out of her stilted headlights at the soft sward which still bore the impression of a young body and the tramplings of the stretcher-bearers. Her general aspect was woebegone—there were scratches on her olive-drab paint and the bright metal of the scratches was already dulled red by the earliest powder-rust. And though the ground was level, she was not, for her right track was off its lower rollers, and she stood slightly canted, like a man who has had a broken hip. And whatever passed for consciousness within her mulled over that paradox of the bulldozer that every operator must go through while he is learning his own machine.
It is the most difficult thing of all for the beginner to understand, that paradox. A bulldozer is a crawling powerhouse, a behemoth of noise and toughness, the nearest thing to the famous irresistible force. The beginner, awed and with the pictures of unconquerable Army tanks printed on his mind from the newsreels, takes all
in his stride and with a sense of limitless power treats all obstacles alike, not knowing the fragility of a cast-iron radiator core, the mortality of tempered manganese, the friability of over-heated babbitt, and most of all, the ease with which a tractor can bury itself in mud. Climbing off to stare at a machine which he has reduced in twenty seconds to a useless hulk, or which was running a half-minute before on ground where it now has its tracks out of sight, he has that sense of guilty disappointment which overcomes any man on having made an error in judgment.
So, as she stood, Daisy Etta was broken and useless. These soft persistent bipeds had built her, and if they were like any other race that built machines, they could care for them. The ability to reverse the tension of a spring, or twist a control rod, or reduce to zero the friction in a nut and lock-washer, was not enough to repair the crack in a cylinder head nor bearings welded to a crankshaft in an overheated starting motor. There had been a lesson to learn. It had been learned. Daisy Etta would be repaired, and the next time—well, at least she would know her own weaknesses.
Tom swung the two-cycle machine and edged in next to the Seven, with the edge of his blade all but touching Daisy Etta’s push-beam. They got off and Peebles bent over the drum-tight right track.
“Watch yourself,” said Tom.
“Watch what?”
“Oh—nothin’, I guess.” He circled the machine, trained eyes probing over frame and fittings. He stepped forward suddenly and grasped the fuel-tank drain cock. It was closed. He opened it; golden oil gushed out. He shut it off, climbed up on the machine and opened the fuel cap on top of the tank. He pulled out the bayonet gauge, wiped it in the crook of his knee, dipped and withdrew it.
The tank was more than three quarters full.
“What’s the matter?” asked Peebles, staring curiously at Tom’s drawn face.
“Peeby, I opened the cock to drain this tank. I left it with oil runnin’ out on the ground. She shut herself off.”
“Now, Tom, you’re lettin’ this thing get you down. You just thought you did. I’ve seen a main-line valve shut itself off when it’s worn bad, but only ’cause the fuel pump pulls it shut when the motor’s runnin’. But not a gravity drain.”
“Main-line valve?” Tom pulled the seat up and looked. One glance was enough to show him this one was open.
“She opened this one, too.”
“O.K.—O.K. Don’t look at me like that!” Peebles was as near to exasperation as he could possibly get. “What difference does it make?”
Tom did not answer. He was not the type of man who, when faced with something beyond his understanding, would begin to doubt his own sanity. His was a dogged insistence that what he saw and sensed was what had actually happened. In him was none of the fainting fear of madness that another, more sensitive, man might feel. He doubted neither himself nor his evidence, and so could free his mind for searching out the consuming “why” of a problem. He knew instinctively that to share “unbelievable” happenings with anyone else, even if they had really occurred, was to put even further obstacles in his way. So he kept his clamlike silence and stubbornly, watchfully, investigated.
The slipped track was so tightly drawn up on the roller flanges that there could be no question of pulling the master pin and opening the track up. It would have to be worked back in place—a very delicate operation, for a little force applied in the wrong direction would be enough to run the track off altogether. To complicate things, the blade of the Seven was down on the ground and would have to be lifted before the machine could be maneuvered, and its hydraulic hoist was useless without the motor.
Peebles unhooked twenty feet of half-inch cable from the rear of the smaller dozer, scratched a hole in the ground under the Seven’s blade, and pushed the eye of the cable through. Climbing over the moldboard, he slipped the eye on the big towing hook bolted to the underside of the belly-guard. The other end of the cable he threw out on the ground in front of the machine. Tom mounted the other dozer and swung into place, ready to tow. Peebles hooked the cable onto Tom’s drawbar, hopped up on the Seven. He put her in neutral, disengaged the master clutch, and put the blade control over into “float” position, then raised an arm.
Tom perched upon the arm rest of his machine, looking backwards, moved slowly, taking up the slack in the cable. It straightened and grew taut, and as it did it forced the Seven’s blade upward. Peebles waved for slack and put the blade control into “hold.” The cable bellied downward away from the blade.
“Hydraulic system’s O.K., anyhow,” called Peebles, as Tom throttled down. “Move over and take a strain to the right, sharp as you can without fouling the cable on the track. We’ll see if we can walk this track back on.”
Tom backed up, cut sharply right, and drew the cable out almost at right angles to the other machine. Peebles held the right track of the Seven with the brake and released both steering clutches. The left track now could turn free, the right not at all. Tom was running at a quarter throttle in his lowest gear, so that his machine barely crept along, taking the strain. The Seven shook gently and began to pivot on the taut right track, unbelievable foot-pounds of energy coming to bear on the front of the track where it rode high up on the idler wheel. Peebles released the right brake with his foot and applied it again in a series of skilled, deft jerks. The track would move a few inches and stop again, force being applied forward and sideward alternately, urging the track persuasively back in place. Then, a little jolt and she was in, riding true on the five truck rollers, the two track carrier rollers, the driving sprocket and the idler.
Peebles got off and stuck his head in between the sprocket and the rear carrier, squinting down and sideways to see if there were any broken flanges or roller bushes. Tom came over and pulled him out by the seat of his trousers. “Time enough for that when you get her in the shop,” he said, masking his nervousness. “Reckon she’ll roll?”
“She’ll roll. I never saw a track in that condition come back that easy. By gosh, it’s as if she was tryin’ to help!”
“They’ll do it sometimes,” said Tom, stiffly. “You better take the two-tractor, Peeby. I’ll stay with this’n.”
“Anything you say.”
And cautiously they took the steep slope down, Tom barely holding the brakes, giving the other machine a straight pull all the way. And so they brought Daisy Etta down to Peebles’ outdoor shop, where they pulled her cylinder head off, took off her starting motor, pulled out a burned clutch facing, had her quite helpless—
And put her together again.
“I tell you it was outright, cold-blooded murder,” said Dennis hotly. “An’ here we are takin’ orders from a guy like that. What are we goin’ to do about it?” They were standing by the cooler—Dennis had run his machine there to waylay Chub.
Chub Horton’s cigar went down and up like a semaphore with a short circuit. “We’ll skip it. The blacktopping crew will be here in another two weeks or so, an’ we can make a report. Besides, I don’t know what happened up there any more than you do. In the meantime we got a runway to build.”
“You don’t know what happened up there? Chub, you’re a smart man. Smart enough to run this job better than Tom Jaeger even if he wasn’t crazy. And you’re surely smart enough not to believe all that cock and bull about the tractor runnin’ out from under that grease-monkey. Listen—” He leaned forward and tapped Chub’s chest. “He said it was the governor. I saw that governor myself an’ heard ol’ Peebles say there wasn’t a thing wrong with it. Th’ throttle control rod had slipped off its yoke, yeah—but you know what a tractor will do when the throttle control goes out. It’ll idle or stall. It won’t run away, whatever.”
“Well, maybe so, but—”
“But nothin’! A guy that’ll commit murder ain’t sane. If he did it once, he can do it again and I ain’t fixin’ to let that happen to me.”
Two things crossed Chub’s steady but not too bright mind at this. One was that Dennis, whom he did not like but could
not shake, was trying to force him into something that he did not want to do. The other was that under all of his swift talk Dennis was scared spitless.
“What do you want to do—call up the sheriff?”
Dennis ha-ha-ed appreciatively—one of the reasons he was so hard to shake. “I’ll tell you what we can do. As long as we have you here, he isn’t the only man who knows the work. If we stop takin’ orders from him, you can give ’em as good or better. An’ there won’t be anything he can do about it.”
“Doggone it, Dennis,” said Chub, with sudden exasperation. “What do you think you’re doin’—handin’ me over the keys to the kingdom or something? What do you want to see me bossin’ around here for?” He stood up. “Suppose we did what you said? Would it get the field built any quicker? Would it get me any more money in my pay envelope? What do you think I want—glory? I passed up a chance to run for councilman once. You think I’d raise a finger to get a bunch of mugs to do what I say—when they do it anyway?”
“Aw, Chub—I wouldn’t cause trouble just for the fun of it. That’s not what I mean at all. But unless we do something about that guy we ain’t safe. Can’t you get that through your head?”
“Listen, windy. If a man keeps busy enough he can’t get into trouble. That goes for Tom—you might keep that in mind. But it goes for you, too. Get back up on that rig an’ get back to the marl pit.” Dennis, completely taken by surprise, turned to his machine.
“It’s a pity you can’t move earth with your mouth,” said Chub as he walked off. “They could have left you do this job single-handed.”
Chub walked slowly toward the outcropping, switching at beach pebbles with a grade stake and swearing to himself. He was essentially a simple man and believed in the simplest possible approach to everything. He liked a job where he could do everything required and where nothing turned up to complicate things. He had been in the grading business for a long time as an operator and survey party boss, and he was remarkable for one thing—he had always held aloof from the cliques and internecine politics that are the breath of life to most construction men. He was disturbed and troubled at the back-stabbing that went on around him on various jobs. If it was blunt, he was disgusted, and subtlety simply left him floundering and bewildered. He was stupid enough so that his basic honesty manifested itself in his speech and actions, and he had learned that complete honesty in dealing with men above and below him was almost invariably painful to all concerned, but he had not the wit to act otherwise, and did not try to. If he had a bad tooth, he had it pulled out as soon as he could. If he got a raw deal from a superintendent over him, that superintendent would get told exactly what the trouble was, and if he didn’t like it, there were other jobs. And if the pulling and hauling of cliques got in his hair, he had always said so and left. Or he had sounded off and stayed; his completely selfish reaction to things that got in the way of his work had earned him a lot of regard from men he had worked under. And so, in this instance, he had no hesitation about choosing a course of action. Only—how did you go about asking a man if he was a murderer?
Selected Stories Page 20
