The Man from the Bitter Roots

by Lockhart, Caroline

  Bruce’s eyes were shining brilliantly with the excitement of the desperate game ahead when he put into the river, but nothing could exceed the carefulness, the caution with which he worked his boat out of the eddy so that when the current caught it it should catch it right. Watching the landmarks on either shore, measuring distances, calculating the consequences of each stroke, he placed the clumsy barge where he would have it, with all the accurate skill of a good billiard player making a shot.

  The boat reached the edge of the current; then it caught it full. With a jump like a race-horse at the signal it was shooting down the toboggan slide of water toward the jutting granite ledge. The blanched bailer in the stern could have touched it with his hand as the boat whipped around the corner, clearing it by so small a margin that it seemed to him his heart stood still.

  Bruce’s muscles turned to steel as he gripped the sweep handle for the last mad rush. He looked the personification of human daring. The wind blew his hair straight back. The joy of battle blazed in his eyes. His face was alight with a reckless exultation. But powerful, fearless as he was, it did not seem as though it were within the range of human skill or possibilities to place a boat in that toboggan slide of water so that it would cut the current diagonally, miss the rock nearest shore and shoot across to miss the channel boulder and that yawning hole beneath. But he did, though he skimmed the wide-mouthed well so close that the bailer stared into its dark depths with bulging eyes.

  The boat leaped in the spray below, but the worst was passed and Bruce and his hind sweepman exchanged the swift smile of satisfaction which men have for each other at such a time.

  “Keep her steady—straight away.” He had not dared yet to lift his eyes to look behind save for that one glance.

  “My God! they’re comin’ right together!”

  The sharp cry from the hind sweepman made him turn. They had rounded the ledge abreast and Smaltz’s boat inside was crowding Saunders hard. Saunders and his helper were working with superhuman strength to throw the boat into the outer channel in the fraction of time before it started on the final shoot. Could they do it! could they! Bruce felt his lungs—his heart—something inside him hurt with his sharp intake of breath as he watched that desperate battle whose loss meant not only sunk machinery but very likely death.

  Bruce’s hands were still full getting his own boat to safety. He dared not look too long behind.

  “They’re goin’ to make it! They’re almost through! They’re safe!” Then—shrilly—“They’re gone! they’ve lost a sweep.”

  Bruce turned quickly at his helper’s cry of consternation, turned to see the hind-sweep wildly threshing the air while the boat spun around and around in the boiling water, disappearing, reappearing, sinking a little lower with each plunge. Then, at the risk of having every rib crushed in, they saw the bailer throw his body across the sweep and hold it down before it quite leaped from its pin. The hind-sweepman was scrambling wildly to reach and hold the handle as it beat the air. He got it—held it for a second—then it was wrenched out of his hand. He tried again and again before he held it, but finally Bruce said huskily——

  “They’ll make it—they’ll make it sure if Saunders can hold her a little longer off the rocks.”

  His own boat had reached quieter water. Simultaneously, it seemed, both he and his helper thought of Smaltz. They took their eyes from the boat in trouble and the hind-sweepman’s jaw dropped. He said unemotionally—dully—as he might have said—“I’m sick; I’m hungry”—“They’ve struck.”

  Yes—they had struck. If Bruce had not been so absorbed he might have heard the bottom splintering when she hit the rock.

  Her bow shot high into the air and settled at the stern. As she slid off, tilted, filled and sunk, Smaltz and Porcupine Jim both jumped. Then the river made a bend which shut it all from Bruce’s sight. It was half a mile before he found a landing. He tied up and walked back, unexcited, not hurrying, with a curious quietness inside.

  Smaltz and Jim were fighting when he got there. Smaltz was sitting astride the latter’s chest. There were epithets and recriminations, accusations, counter-charges, oaths. The Swede was crying and a little stream of red was trickling toward his ear. Bruce eyed him calmly, contemplatively, thinking what a face he made, and how ludicrous he looked with the sand matted in his corn-silk hair and covering him like a tamale casing of corn-meal as it stuck to his wet clothes.

  He left them and walked up the river where the rock rose like a monument to his hopes. With his hands on his hips he watched the water rippling around it, slipping over the spot where the boat lay buried with some portion of every machine upon the works while like a bolt from the blue the knowledge came to him that since the old Edison type was obsolete the factories no longer made duplicates of the parts.

  * * *

  XX

  “The Forlorn Hope”

  It was August. “Old Turtle-back” was showing up at the diggin’s and the river would reach low water-mark with less than half a foot.

  Pole in hand, big John Johnson of the crew stood on the rocking raft anchored below The Big Mallard and opposite the rock where the boat had sunk and smiled his solemn smile at Bruce.

  “Don’t know but what we ought to name her and break a bottle of ketchup over the bow of this here craft a’fore we la’nch her.”

  “The Forlorn Hope, The Last Chance, or something appropriate like that,” Bruce suggested, although there was too much truth in the jest for him to smile. This attempt to recover the sunken boat was literally that. If it was gone, he was done. His work, all that he had been through, was wasted effort; the whole an expensive fiasco proving that the majority are sometimes right.

  The suspense which Bruce had been under for more than two months would soon be ended one way or the other. Day and night it seemed to him he had thought of little else than the fate of the sunken boat. His brain was tired with conjecturing as to what had happened to her when the water had reached its flood. Had the force of it shoved her into deeper water? Had the sand which the water carried at that period filled and covered her? Had the current wrenched her to pieces and imbedded the machinery deep in the sediment and mud?

  Questioning his own judgment, doubtful as to whether he was right or wrong, he had gone on with the work as though the machinery was to be recovered, yet all the time he was filled with sickening doubts. But it seemed as though his inborn tenacity of purpose, his mulish obstinacy, would not let him quit, driving him on to finish the flume and trestle 40 feet high with every green log and timber snaked in and put in place by hand; to finish the pressure box and penstock and the 200 feet of pipe-line riveted on the broiling hillside when the metal was almost too hot to touch with the bare hand. The foundation of the power house was ready for the machinery and the Pelton water-wheel had been installed. It had taken time and money and grimy sweat. Was it all in vain?

  Asking himself the question for which ten minutes at most would find the answer Bruce sprang upon the tilting raft and nodded—

  “Shove off.”

  As Bruce balanced himself on the raft while the Swede poled slowly toward the rock that now arose from the water the size of a small house, he was thankful that the face can be made at times to serve as so good a mask. Not for the world would he have had John Johnson guess how afraid he was, how actually scared to death when the raft bumped against the huge brown rock and he knew that he must look over the side.

  Holding the raft steady, Johnson kept his eyes on Bruce’s face as he peered into the river and searched the bottom. Not a muscle of Bruce’s face moved nor an eyelid flickered in the tense silence. Then he said quietly—

  “John, she’s gone.”

  A look of sympathy softened the Swede’s homely face.

  Bruce straightened up.

  “Gone!” he reiterated—“gone.”

  Johnson might guess a little but he could never guess the whole of the despair which seemed to crush Bruce like an overwhelming weight as he stood
looking at the sun shining upon the back of the twisting green snake of a river that he had thought he could beat; Johnson never had risked and lost anybody’s money but his own, he never had allowed a woman he loved to build her hopes upon his judgment and success. To have failed so quickly and so completely—oh, the mortification of it! the chagrin!

  Finally Johnson said gently:

  “Guess we might as well go back.”

  Bruce winced. It reminded him what going back meant. To discharge the crew and telegraph his failure to Helen Dunbar, Harrah and the rest, then to watch the lumber dry out and the cracks widen in the flume, the rust take the machinery and the water-wheel go to ruin—that’s what going back meant—taking up his lonely, pointless life where he had left it off, growing morbid, eccentric, like the other failures sulking in the hills.

  “There were parts of two dynamos, one 50 horse-power motor, a keeper, and a field, beside the fly-wheel in the boat.” Bruce looked absently at Johnson but he was talking to himself. “I wonder, I wonder”—a gleam of hope lit up his face—“John, go up to Fritz Yandell’s and borrow that compass that he fished out of the river.”

  Johnson looked puzzled but started in a hurry. In an hour or so he was back, still puzzled; compasses he thought were for people who were lost.

  “It’s only a chance, John, another forlorn hope, but there’s magnetic iron in those dynamos and the needle might show it if we can get above the boat.”

  Johnson’s friendly eye shone instantly with interest. Starting from the spot of the wreck, he poled slowly down the river, keeping in line with the rock. Ten, twenty, thirty—fifty feet below the rock they poled and the needle did not waver from the north.

  “She’d go to pieces before she ever travelled this far.” The glimmer of hope in Bruce’s eyes had died. “Either the needle won’t locate her or she’s drifted into the channel. If that’s the case we’ll never get her out.”

  Then Johnson poled back and forth, zig-zagging from bank to bank, covering every foot of space, and still the needle hung steadfastly to its place.

  They were all of fifty feet from where the boat had sunk and some forty feet from shore when Bruce cried sharply:

  “Hold her steady! Wait!”

  The needle wavered—agitated unmistakably—then the parts of the dynamos and the motor in the boat dragged the reluctant point of steel slowly, flutteringly, but surely, from its affinity, the magnetic North.

  Bruce gulped at something in his throat before he spoke——

  “John, we’ve got her!”

  “I see her!” Johnson executed a kind of dance on the rocking raft. “Lookee,” he pointed into the exasperatingly dense water, “see her there—like a shadow—her bow is shoved up four—five feet above her stern. Got her?”

  Bruce nodded, then they looked at each other joyfully, and Bruce remembered afterward that they had giggled hysterically like two boys.

  “The water’ll drop a foot yet,” Bruce said excitedly. “Can you dive?”

  “First cousin to a musk-rat,” the Swede declared.

  “We’ll build a raft like a hollow square, use a tripod and bring up the chain blocks. What we can’t raise with a grappling-hook, we’ll go after. John, we’re going to get it—every piece!”

  “Bet yer life we’ll get her!” John cried responsively, “if I has to git drunk to do it and stand to my neck in water for a week.”

  * * *

  XXI

  Toy

  Bruce paused in the blithesome task of packing six by eights to look at the machinery which lay like a pile of junk on the river bank. Each time he passed he looked at it and always he felt the same hot impatience and burning sense of irritation.

  The days, the weeks, months were going by and nothing moved.

  Two months Jennings had named as the maximum of time required to set up the machines and have the plant in working order. “We’ll be throwin’ dirt by the middle of July,” he had said, confidently, and it was now close to the middle of September. The lost machinery was no longer an excuse, as every piece had been recovered by grappling and diving, and landed safely at the diggin’s.

  Twice the whole crew save Jennings had dragged a heavy barge fifteen miles up the river, advancing only a pull at a time against the strong current, windlassing over the rapids with big John Johnson poling like mad to keep the boat off the rocks; sleeping at night in wet clothing, waking stiff and jaded as stage horses to go at it again. Six days they had been getting up, and a little over an hour coming down, while two trips had been necessary owing to the low stage of the water, which now made the running of a deeply loaded boat impossible. It had been a severe test of endurance and loyalty in which none had fallen short and no one among them had worked with more tireless energy than Smaltz, or his erstwhile friend but present enemy, Porcupine Jim.

  There was amazingly little damage done to the submerged machinery, and when the last bit of iron was unloaded on the bank, the years which had come upon Bruce in the weeks of strain and tension seemed to roll away. Unless some fresh calamity happened, by September, surely, they would be “throwing dirt.”

  Now, as Bruce changed the lumber from the raw spot on his right shoulder to the raw spot on his left shoulder he was wondering how much more of a chance was due Jennings, how much longer he could hold his tongue. A more extended acquaintance with his “practical man” had taught him how easily a virtue may become a fault.

  In his insistence upon solidity and exactitude he went beyond the point of careful workmanship and became a putterer. He was the King of Putterers. He could out-putter a plumber. And when he had finished it was usually some unimportant piece of work that any man who handled tools could have done as well in half the time.

  Bruce had a favorite bush, thick, and a safe distance from the work, behind which it was his wont to retire at such times as the sight of Jennings puttering while the crew under him stood idle, became too much for Bruce’s nerves:

  “He’d break the Bank of England!” Bruce would exclaim in a vehement whisper behind the bush. “If he’d been on the pay-roll of Rameses II, they’d have dug up his work intact. It’s fierce! As sure as shooting I’m going to run out of money.”

  Yet so long as Jennings was in charge, Bruce would not listen to attacks upon him behind his back, and Jennings had succeeded in antagonizing almost all the crew. With the same regularity that the sun rose he and Woods, the carpenter, had their daily set-to, if over nothing more important than the mislaying of a file or saw—no doubt they were at it now.

  Bruce sighed. It seemed eons ago that he had had time to watch the kingfisher flying to his nest or the water-ousel ducking and teetering sociably at his feet. They never came any more, neither they nor the black bear to his service-berry bush and Old Felix had learned in one bitter lesson how his confidence in man had been misplaced. Nothing came any more but annoyances, trouble, and thinking of trouble. Bruce wondered what was the matter with Toy. He had looked as grim and forbidding at breakfast as a Chinese god of war.

  But it was no time to speculate, with a load of lumber grinding into his sore shoulder, so Bruce hurried on across the slippery foot-log and up a steep pitch to see the carpenter charging through the brush brandishing a saw as if it was a sabre.

  “I want my ‘time,’” he shouted when he saw Bruce. “Him or me has got to quit. I won’t work with that feller—I won’t take orders from the likes o’ him! I never saw a man from Oregon yit that was worth the powder to blow him up! Half-baked, no-account fakirs, the whole lot of ’em—allus a hirin’ for somethin’ they cain’t do! Middle West renegades! Poor white trash! Oregon is the New Jersey of the Pacific coast; it’s the Missoury of the West. It ought to be throwed into some other state and its name wiped off the map. That there Jennings has got the ear-marks of Oregon printed on him like a governmint stamp. Every time I see that putterin’ web-foot’s tracks in the dust it makes me hot. He don’t know how to put up this plant no mor’n I do and you’ll find it out. If an
Oregonian’d be offered a job teachin’ dead languages in a college he’d make a bluff at doin’ it if he couldn’t write his own name. Why them ‘web-feet’—”

  “Just what in particular is the matter?” Bruce asked, as the carpenter paused, not for want of verbal ammunition but because he was out of breath.

  “Matter!” panted Woods, “he’s got us strainin’ our life out puttin’ up them green four-by-eight’s when they’s no need. They’d carry a ocean cable, them cross-arms would. Four-by-fives is big enough for all the wire that’ll be strung here. John Johnson jest fell out’n a tree a liftin’ and like to broke a lung.”

  “Do you feel sure that four-by-five’s are strong enough?”

  “Try it—that’s all I ask.”

  “You’d better come back to work.”

  The carpenter hesitated.

  “I don’t like to quit when you need me, but,” he waved the rip-saw in a significant gesture, “if that Oregonian gives me any more back-talk I aims to cut him up in chunks.”

  It was the first time Bruce had countermanded one of Jennings’s orders but now he backed Woods up. He had shared the carpenter’s opinion that four-by-five’s were strong enough but he had said nothing, supposing that Jennings was following precedent and knew what he was about. Woods, too, had voiced a suspicion which kept rising in his mind as to whether Jennings did know how to put up the machines. Was it possible that the unimportant detail work which Jennings insisted upon doing personally in order that it might be exactly right, was only a subterfuge to put off as long as possible the day when the showdown must come? Was it in his mind to draw his generous wages as long as he safely might then invent some plausible excuse to quit?

  Bruce was not a fool but neither was he apt to be suspicious of a person he had no good reason to mistrust. He had made every allowance for Jennings’ slowness, but his bank account was rapidly reaching a stage where, even if he would, he could no longer humor Jennings’ mania for solidity. Something had to move, and, taking Jennings aside, Bruce told him so.