The Man from the Bitter Roots

by Lockhart, Caroline

  The look which darkened Jennings’s face when his instructions to Woods were countermanded surprised Bruce. It was more than chagrin, it was—ugly. It prejudiced Bruce against him as all his puttering had failed to do. The correctness or incorrectness of his contention concerning the cross-arm seemed of less importance than the fact that Bruce’s interference had impaired his dignity—belittled him in the eyes of the crew.

  “Am I the constructin’ ingineer, or ain’t I? If I am, I’m entitled to some respect.” More than ever Jennings looked like a bear pouting in a trap.

  “What’s your dignity got to do with it?” Bruce demanded. “I’m General Manager, when it comes to that, and I’ve been packing cross-arms like a mule. This is no time to talk about what’s due you—get results. This pay-roll can’t go on forever, Jennings. There’s an end. At this rate it’ll come quick. You know what the success of this proposition means to me—my first, and, I beg of you don’t putter any more; get busy and put up those machines. You say that 50 horse-power motor has got to be rewound—”

  “One man can’t work on that alone,” Jennings interrupted in a surly tone. “I can’t do anything on it until that other electrician comes in.”

  “Get Smaltz to help you.”

  “Smaltz! What does he know. Him holding out for them four-be-five cross-arms shows what he knows.”

  “Sometimes I think he knows a good deal more than he lets on.”

  “Don’t you think it,” Jennings sneered. “He don’t know half as much as he lets on. Jest one of them rovin’ windjammers pickin’ up a little smatterin’ here and there. Run a power-house in the Coeur d’Alenes. Huh—what’s that! This here feller that I got comin’ is a ’lectrical genius. He’s worked with me on drudgers, and I know.”

  Glaring at the victorious carpenter who, being human, sent back a grin, Jennings went to the power-house, mumbling to the last that “four-be-five’s” would never hold.

  “I think I go now I think.”

  “Toy!”

  The old Chinaman at his elbow was dressed for travelling in a clean but unironed shirt; and his shoes had been newly hobbed. His round, black hat was pulled down purposefully as far as his ears would permit. All his possessions were stuffed into his best overalls with the legs tied around his waist and the pair of attached suspenders worn over his shoulders so that at first glance he presented the startling appearance of carrying a headless corpse pick-a-back.

  Bruce looked at him in astonishment. He would as soon have thought of thus suddenly losing his right arm.

  The Chinaman’s yellow face was impassive, his snuff-brown eyes quite blank.

  “I go now,” he repeated.

  “But Toy—” There are a special set of sensations which accompany the announcement of the departure of cooks, Bruce felt distinctly when his heart hit his boots. To be without a cook just now was more than an annoyance—it was a tragedy—but mostly it was the Chinaman’s ingratitude that hurt.

  “I go,” was the stubborn answer.

  Bruce knew the tone.

  “All right—go,” he answered coldly, “but first I want you to tell me why.”

  A flame of anger leaped into Toy’s eyes; his whole face worked; he was stirred to the centre of his being.

  “She kick on me!” he hissed. “She say I no can cook!”

  Instantly Bruce understood. Jennings’s bride had been guilty of the one unforgivable offense. His own eyes flashed.

  “Tell her to keep out of the kitchen.”

  Toy shook his head.

  “I no likee her; I no stay.”

  “Won’t you stay if I ask you as a favor?”

  The Chinaman reiterated in his stubborn monotone:

  “She kick on my glub; I no likee her; I no stay.”

  “You’re going to put me in an awful hole, Toy, if you go.”

  “She want my job, I think. All light—I no care.”

  Bruce knew him too well to argue. The Chinaman could see only one thing, and that loomed colossal. He had been insulted; his dignity would not permit him even to breathe under the same roof with a woman who said he could not cook. He turned away abruptly and jogged down the trail with the overalls stuffed with his possessions bobbing ludicrously on his back.

  Heavy-hearted Bruce watched him go. If Toy had forgotten that he owed him for his life he would not remind him, but he had thought that the Chinaman’s gratitude was deeper than this, although, it was true, he never had thanked him or indicated in any way that he realized or appreciated what Bruce had done. Nevertheless Bruce had believed that in his way Toy was fond of him, that deep under his yellow skin there was loyalty and a passive, undemonstrative affection. Obviously there was none. He was no different from other Chinamen, it seemed—the white man and his country were only means to an end.

  Bruce would not have believed that anybody with oblique eyes and a shingled queue could have hurt him so. Of the three men he had befriended, two had turned the knife in him. He wondered cynically how soon he would hear from Uncle Bill.

  * * *

  XXII

  The General Manager

  Jennings and Woods were now sworn enemies and the stringing of the wires became a matter of intense interest, as this was the test which would prove the truth or fallacy of Jennings’ cantankerous harping that the cross-arms were too light.

  In isolated camps where there is no outside diversion such tests of opinion become momentous matters, and the present instance was no exception. Mrs. Jennings, too, had taken sides—her husband’s, naturally—and the anti-Jennings faction was made to realize fully the possibilities for revenge which lie within the jurisdiction of the cook.

  The alacrity with which Jennings’s bride stepped into Toy’s shoes convinced Bruce that the Chinaman had been correct in his assertion, but he was helpless in the circumstances, and accepted the inevitable, being able for the first time to understand why there are wife-beaters.

  Jennings had opined that his bride was “lasty.” She looked it. “Bertha” stood six feet in her moccasins and lifted a sack of flour as the weaker of her sex toy with a fan. She had an undershot jaw and a nose so retroussé that the crew asserted it was possible to observe the convolutions of her brain and see what she had planned for the next meal. Be that as it may, Bertha had them cowed to a man, with the possible exception of Porcupine Jim, whose hide no mere sarcasm could penetrate. There was general envy of the temerity which enabled Jim to ask for more biscuits when the plate was empty. Even Smaltz shrank involuntarily when she came toward him with her mouth on the bias and a look in her deep-set eyes which said that she would as soon, or sooner, pour the steaming contents of the coffee-pot down the back of his neck than in his cup, while Woods averred that “Doc” Tanner who fasted forty days didn’t have anything on him.

  Nobody but Jennings shared Bertha’s hallucination that she could cook, and he was the recipient of special dishes, such delicacies as cup-custard, and toast. This in no wise added to Jennings’s popularity with the crew and when Bruce suggested as much to the unblushing bride she told him, with arms akimbo and her heels well planted some three feet apart, that if they “didn’t like it let ’em come and tell her so.”

  Bertha was looking like a gargoyle when the men filed in for supper the night before the stringing of the wires was to begin. The fact that men antagonistic to her husband dared walk in before her eyes and eat, seemed like bravado, a challenge, and filled her with such black resentment that Bruce trembled for the carpenter when she hovered over him like a Fury, with a platter of bacon.

  Woods, too, felt his peril, and intrepid soul though he was, seemed to contract, withdraw like a turtle into his flannel collar, as though already he felt the sizzling grease on his unprotected pate.

  Conversation was at a standstill in the atmosphere charged with Bertha’s disapproval. Only Porcupine Jim, quite unconscious, unabashed, heaped his plate and ate with all the loud abandon of a Berkshire Red. Emboldened by the pangs of hunger a long way from
satisfied, John Johnson tried to “palm” a fourth biscuit while surreptitiously reaching for a third. Unfortunately John was not sufficiently practised in the art of legerdemain and the biscuit slipped from his fingers. It fell off the table and rolled like a cartwheel to Bertha’s feet.

  “Shan’t I bring you in the shovel, Mr. Johnson?” she inquired in a tone of deadly politeness as she polished the biscuit on her lip and returned it to the plate.

  John’s ears flamed, also his neck and face. The honest Swede looked like a sheep-killing dog caught in the act. He dared not answer, and she added:

  “There’s three apiece.”

  “Mrs. Jennings, I haven’t put the camp on half-rations yet.” Bruce was mutinous at last.

  The bride drew herself up and reared back from the waist-line until she looked all of seven feet tall. The row of short locks that hung down like a row of fish-hooks beneath a knob of black hair seemed to stand out straight and the window rattled in its casing as she swarmed down on Bruce.

  “Look a here, young feller, I don’t need no boss to tell me how much to cook!”

  Jennings protested mildly:

  “Now don’t you go and git upset, Babe.”

  “Babe” turned upon him savagely:

  “And don’t you go to takin’ sides! I’m used to livin’ good an’ when I think what I give up to come down here to this hole—”

  “I know ’taint what you’re used to,” Jennings agreed in a conciliatory tone.

  Smaltz took this occasion to ostentatiously inspect a confection the upper and lower crusts of which stuck together like two pieces of adhesive plaster.

  “Looks like somebudy’s been high-gradin’ this here pie.”

  The criticism might have touched even a mild-tempered cook; it made a demon of Bertha. She started around the table with the obvious intention of doing Smaltz bodily harm, but at the moment, Porcupine Jim, whose roving eye had been searching the table for more food, lighted upon one of the special dishes set before Jennings’ plate.

  It looked like rice pudding with raisins in it! If there was one delicacy which appealed to James’s palate more than another it was rice pudding with raisins in it. He arose from the bench in all the pristine splendor of the orange-colored cotton undershirt in which he worked and dined, and reached for the pudding. It was a considerable distance and he was unable to reach it by merely stretching himself over the table, so James, unhampered by the rules of etiquette prescribed by a finical Society, put his knee on the table and buried his thumb in the pudding as he dragged it toward him by the rim.

  Without warning he sat down so hard and so suddenly that his feet flew up and kicked the table underneath.

  “Leggo!” he gurgled.

  For answer Bertha took another twist around the stout neck-band of his orange undergarment.

  “I’ll learn you rough-necks some manners!” she panted. “I’ll git the respect that’s comin’ to a lady if I have to clean out this here camp!”

  “You quit, now!” He rolled a pair of wild, beseeching eyes around the table. “Somebudy take her off!”

  “Coward—to fight a woman!” She fell back with a section of James’s shirt in one hand, with the other reaching for his hair.

  He clapped the crook of his elbow over his ear and started to slide under the table when the special Providence that looks after Swedes intervened. A long, plump, shining bull-snake took that particular moment to slip off one of the log beams and bounce on the bride’s head.

  She threw herself on Jennings emitting sounds like forty catamounts tied in a bag. The flying crew jammed in the doorway, burst through and never stopped to look behind until they were well outside.

  “Hy-sterics,” said the carpenter who was married—“she’s took a fit.”

  “Hydrophoby—she must a bit herself!” Porcupine Jim was vigorously massaging his neck.

  The bride was sitting on the floor beating her heels, when Bruce put his head in the door cautiously:

  “If there’s anything I can do—”

  Bertha renewed her screams at sight of him.

  “They is—” she shrieked—“Git out!”

  “You don’t want to go near ’em when they’re in a tantrum,” advised the carpenter in an experienced tone. “But that’s about the hardest one I ever see.”

  Jennings, staggering manfully under his burden, bore the hysterical Amazon to her tent and it remained for Bruce to do her work.

  “That’s a devil of a job for a General Manager,” commented John Johnson sympathetically, as he stood in the doorway watching Bruce, with his sleeves rolled up, scraping assiduously at the bottom of a frying-pan.

  Bruce smiled grimly but made no reply. He had been thinking the same thing himself.

  Bruce often had watched an ant trying to move a bread-crumb many times its size, pushing with all its feet braced, rushing it with its head, backing off and considering and going at it again. Failing, running frantically around in front to drag and pull and tug. Trying it this way and that, stopping to rest for an instant then tackling it in fresh frenzy—and getting nowhere, until, out of pity, he gave it a lift.

  Bruce felt that this power-plant was his bread-crumb, and tug and push and struggle as he would he could not make it budge. The thought, too, was becoming a conviction that Jennings, who should have helped him push, was riding on the other side.

  “I wouldn’t even mind his riding,” Bruce said to himself ironically, “if he wouldn’t drag his feet.”

  He was hoping with all his heart that the much discussed cross-arms would hold, for when the wires were up and stretched across the river he would feel that the bread-crumb had at least moved.

  When Bruce crossed to the work the next morning, the “come-along” was clamped to the transmission wire and hooked to the block-and-tackle. Naturally Jennings had charge of the stretching of the wire and he selected Smaltz as his assistant.

  All the crew, intensely interested in the test, stood around as Jennings, taciturn and sour and addressing no one but Smaltz, puttered about his preparations.

  Finally he cried:

  “Ready-O!”

  The wire tightened and the slack disappeared under Smaltz’s steady pull. The carpenter and the crew watched the cross-arm anxiously as the strain came upon it under the taut wire. Their faces brightened as it held.

  Smaltz looked at Jennings quizzically.

  “More?”

  “You ain’t heard me tell you yet to stop,” was the snarling answer.

  “Here goes, then.” Smaltz’s face wore an expressive grin as he put his strength on the rope of the block-and-tackle, which gave him the pull of a four-horse team.

  Bruce heard the cross-arm splinter as he came up the trail through the brush.

  Jennings turned to Woods and said offensively:

  “Old as you are, I guess I kin learn you somethin’ yet.”

  The carpenter’s face had turned white. With a gesture Bruce stopped his belligerent advance.

  “Try the next one, Jennings,” he said quietly.

  Once more the slack was taken up and the wire grew taut—so taut it would have twanged like a fiddle-string if it had been struck. Jennings did not give Smaltz the sign to stop even when the cross-arm cracked. Without a word of protest Bruce watched the stout four-by-five splinter and drop off.

  “There—you see—I told you so! I knowed!” Jennings looked triumphantly at the carpenter as he spoke. Then, turning to the crew: “Knock ’em off—every one. Now I’ll do it right!”

  Not a man moved and for an instant Bruce dared not trust himself to speak. When he did speak it was in a tone that made Jennings look up startled:

  “You’ll come across the river and get your time.” His surprise was genuine as Bruce went on—“Do you imagine,” he asked savagely, trying to steady his voice, “that I haven’t intelligence enough to know that you’ve got to allow for the swaying of the trees in the wind, for the contraction and expansion of heat and cold, for the weight
of snow and sleet? Do you think I haven’t brains enough to see when you’re deliberately destroying another man’s work? I’ve been trying to make myself believe in you—believe that in spite of your faults you were honest. Now I know that you’ve been drawing pay for months for work you don’t know how to do. I can’t see any difference between you and any common thief who takes what doesn’t belong to him. Right here you quit! Vamoose!” Bruce made a sweeping gesture—“You go up that hill as quick as the Lord will let you.”

  * * *

  XXIII

  “Good Enough”

  “Alf” Banule, the electrical genius for whom Jennings had sent to help him rewind an armature and who therefore had taken Jennings’s place as constructing engineer, had the distinction of being the only person Bruce had ever seen who could remove his socks without taking off his shoes. He accomplished the feat with ease for the reason that there were never any toes in the aforesaid shoes. As he himself said, he would have been a tall man if there had not been so much of him turned up at the end.

  The only way he was able to wear shoes at all, save those made to order, was to cut out the toes; the same applied to his socks, and the exposed portion of his bare feet had not that dimpled pinkness which moves poets to song. From the rear, Banule’s shoes looked like two bobsleds going down hill, and from the front the effect of the loose soles was that of two great mouths opening and closing. Yet he skimmed the river boulders at amazing speed, seeming to find no inconvenience in the flap-flapping of the loose leather as he leaped from rock to rock.

  In contrast to his yawning shoes and a pair of trousers the original shade of which was a matter of uncertainty, together with a black satine shirt whose color made change unnecessary, was a stylish Tyrolese hat—green felt—with a butterfly bow perched jauntily on one side. And underneath this stylishness there was a prematurely bald head covered with smudges of machine grease which it could readily be believed were souvenirs of his apprentice days in the machine shop. If indifference to appearance be a mark of genius it would be impossible to deny Banule’s claim to the title.