The Settler

"I said for you to call him." Carter's tone, in its very gentleness, caused the girl to look quickly so she caught his queer expression. Compounded of curiosity, interest, expectation, his glance seemed to flicker above, below, around the red teamster, to enfold, wrap him with its subtle questioning. Impressed more than she could have been by threat or command, she waited – she knew not for what – oppressed by the loom of imminent danger.

But it was not in the teamster's book to disobey – just then. Lingering to pick another coal, he sauntered down the room under flow of that curious, flickering glance, and closed the door behind him with a bang. Sharp as the crack of a gun, Dorothy half expected to see smoke curling up to the massive roof-logs. But though her father and lover looked their surprise, Carter resumed his eating, and there was no comment until he excused himself a few minutes later.

Tugging his gray beard, the chief engineer then turned to the surveyor. "Why doesn't he fire that fellow?"

Shrugging, the young fellow passed the question up to the cook. "You've known them longest."

Thus tapped, the cook turned on a flow of information, appending his own theory of Carter's patience to a short and unflattering history of Michigan Red. "You see, Red thought he was the better man from the beginning, an' it was just up to the boss to give him fair chance to prove it. As for him, he likes the excitement. You've seen a cat play with a mouse? Well – an' when the cat does jump – "

"Good-bye mouse," the surveyor finished.

The cook's significant nod filled Dorothy with astonishment. From the social heights upon which the accident of birth had placed her, she had looked down upon the laboring-classes, deeming them rude, simple, unsophisticated. Yet here she found complex moods, a vendetta conducted with Machiavellian subtlety, a drastic code that compelled a man to cherish his enemy till he had had opportunity to strike.

The knowledge helped her to a conclusion which she stated as they walked back to her father's tent. "Such pride! I understand now why he left her. Just fancy his keeping on that man?"

"Damned nonsense, I call it," her father growled. "That fellow will make trouble for him yet."

The prediction amounted to prophecy in view of a conversation then proceeding in the bunk-house. As Michigan's table-mate had fully reported the scene at supper, the teamsters were ready with a fire of chaff when he stumbled over the dark threshold after delivering Carter's message.

"Been dinin' in fash'n'ble sassiety, Red?" a man questioned.

"Nope!" another laughed. "Voylent colors ain't considered tasty any more, so the boss fired him out 'cause his hair turned the chief's gal sick."

Hoarse chuckling accompanied the teamster's answering profanity, but when, after roundly cursing themselves, Carter, the surveyor, chief engineer, he began on Dorothy, laughter ceased and Big Hans called a stop.

"That's right." A voice seconded Hans's objection. "We ain't stuck on the boss any more'n you are, Red; but this gal isn't no kin of his'n. Leave her alone."

"Sure!" the first man chimed in. "An' if he's feeling his oats jes' now, he'll be hit the harder when we spring our deadfall. Did you sound the graders to-day? Will they – "

"Shet up!" Michigan hissed. "That big mouth o' yourn spits clean across the camp to the office." And thereafter the conversation continued in sinister whispers that soon merged in heavy snoring. Silence and darkness wrapped the camp.

Awaking while it was still dark, the camp rubbed sleepy eyes and looked out, shivering, on smouldering smudges. Outside, the air whined of mosquitoes. At the long hay-racks horses snorted and pawed frantically under the winged torture; patient oxen uttered mained lowings. Growling and grumbling, the camp distributed itself – teamsters to feed and rebuild smudges, choppers and sawyers to the grindstone and filing-benches. It was a cold, dank world. Pessimism prevailed to the extent that a man needed to walk straitly, minding his own business, if he would avoid quarrel. But optimism came with dawn – teamsters hissed cheerfully over their currying, saw-filers and grinders indulged in snatches of song – reaching a climax with the breakfast-call. When, half an hour later, Dorothy appeared in the cook-house doorway, the camp had spilled its freight of men and teams into the forest.

Warned by the shadow, the cook looked up and saw her in Stetson hat, short skirt, high-laced shoes, a sunlit vision with the freshness of the morning upon its cheeks. "God bless you! Come right in," he exclaimed. "Your daddy an' Mr. Hart hev' gone down line. Devil's Muskeg got hungry las' night an' swallered ten thousand yards of gradin'."

As yet she knew nothing of those treacherous sinks that gulp grades, trestles, and the reputations of their builders as a frog swallows flies, and he went on, answering her puzzled look: "Morass, you know, swamp with quicksand foundation that goes clean down to China. Nope, 'tain't Mr. Carter's loss. He ain't such a fool as to go an' load a muskeg down with clay and rock. An Easterner had it on a sub-contract, an' though Mr. Carter warned him, he reckoned he could make it bear a grade on brush hurdles. Crowed like a Shanghai rooster because it carried trains for a week.

"Oh, I don't know," he commented upon her pity for the luckless contractor. "You kain't do nothin' with them Easterners. He was warned. Besides," he vengefully added, "he shedn't ha' come crowing over us. More coffee, miss?"

Leaving the cook-house, a shadow fell between her and the sun, and Carter gave her good-morning. "Breaks the poor devil," he supplemented the cook's information, "and bothers us. Cuts off our communications. We shall have to move the outfits back to prairie grading till they are re-established. I'm going down there – now, if you'd like a hand-car ride?"

Would she? In five minutes she was speeding along under urge of ten strong arms, over high trestles which gave her sudden livid gleams of water far below, through yellow cuts, across hollow-sounding bridges, always between serried ranks of sombre spruce. Sometimes the car rolled in between long lines of men who were tamping gravel under the ties. Rough fellows at the best, they had herded for months in straw and dirt, seeing nothing daintier than their unlovely selves, and as they were not the kind that mortifies the flesh, the girl was much embarrassed by the fire of eyes. Apart from that, she hugely enjoyed the ride. With feet almost touching the road-bed, she got all there was of the motion, besides most of the wind that blew her hair into a dark cloud and set wild roses blooming in her cheeks.

She gained, too, a new view-point of Carter, who chatted gayly, pointing, explaining, as though they were merely out for pleasure and another had not been just added to the heavy cares that burdened his broad shoulders. She learned more of the life, its hardship, comedy, tragedy, in half an hour's conversation, than she could have obtained for herself in a year's experience.

These different elements sometimes mixed – as when he indicated a blackened excavation. "See that? A man was sitting on the stump that was blasted out there. Reckon he got sort of tired of the world," he replied to her horrified question, "and wanted a good start for the next." Then, easily philosophical, quietly discursive, he wandered along, touching the suicide's motives. There had been different theories – drink, religion, a girl – but he himself inclined to aggravated unsociability. The sombre forest, with its immensity of sad, environing space, had translated mere moroseness into confirmed hypochondria. He had so bored the stumping outfit, to which he belonged, with pessimistic remarks on things in general that, in self-defence, they threw something at him whenever he opened his mouth; and so, bottled up, his gloom accumulated until, in an unusually dismal moment, he placed a full box of dynamite under a stump and sat down to await results.

"Why didn't some one pull him off?" she cried.

His answer was pregnant. "Short fuse. Anyway, the boys didn't feel any call to mix in his experiments – especially as he swore a blue streak at them till the stump lifted."

"Horrible!" she breathed.

"Just what they said." He solemnly misunderstood her. "They never heard such language. 'Twas dreadfully out of place at a funeral."

"Oh – I didn't mean that!" Then, considering his serious gravity, "Was – was there – "

"Pretty clean." He relieved her of the remainder of the question. "Mostly translated."

Incredulous, she glanced from him to his men and received grisly confirmation, for one thrust out a grimy finger to show a horseshoe ring. "I picked it up on the track, miss, forty rod from the – obseq'ses. Didn't allow he'd want it again."

Shuddering, she turned back to Carter, but before she could make further comment the car rolled from a cut out on the edge of the Devil's Muskeg.

She thought him cold-blooded until, that evening, she learned from her friend, the cook, that he had been caught on the edge of the blast as he rushed to save the man and had been thrown a hundred feet. A little disappointed by his apparent callousness, she joined her father and lover, who, with the contractor, stood looking out over the muskeg. Sterile, flat, white with alkali save where black slime oozed from the sunken grade, it stretched a long mile on either side of the right of way. Around its edges skeleton trees thrust blanched limbs upward through the mud, and beyond this charnel forest loomed the omnipresent spruce. In spring-time its quaking depths would have opened under a fox's light padding, but the summer's sun had dried the surface until it carried a team – which fact had lured the contractor to his financial doom. A fat, gross man, he stood mopping his brow and wildly gesticulating towards the half-mile of rails that, with their ties, lay like the backbone of some primeval lizard along the mud, calling heaven and the chief engineer to witness that this calamity was beyond the prevision of man.

"'Jedgment of God,' it's termed in government contrac's," he exclaimed to the chief, who, however, shrugged at such blackening of Providence.

"Well, Mr. Buckle," he answered, as Carter came up, "the judgment was delivered against you, not us."

"Yes, yes!" the man grovellingly assented. "I know – mine's the loss. But you gentlemen orter give me a chance to make it up building round this cursed mud-hole?"

"Round what?"

He turned scowlingly upon Carter. "This mud-hole, I said." With a greasy sneer, he added: "But mebbe you kin build across it?"

"I can."

"What?" he screamed his angry surprise. "Why, hell! Wasn't it you that tol' me it wouldn't carry a grade?"

"I said it wouldn't carry yours."

His quiet assurance gave the contractor pause, while engineer and surveyor looked their surprise. "Going to drive piles down to China?" The contractor grew hysterically sarcastic. "You'll need a permit from Li Hung Chang. What do you know about grades, anyway? I was building this railroad while you was wearing long clothes."

"Likely." Carter's easy drawl set the others a-grin and caused Dorothy to hide her smile in her handkerchief. "But you ain't out of yours yet. A yearling baby wouldn't try to stack rock on top of mud. But that isn't the question. D' you allow to finish the contract?"

"Think I'm a fool?" the man rasped.

"'Tain't always polite to state one's thoughts. But – do you?" And when the other tendered a surly negative, he turned to the engineer. "You hear, sir? And now I file my bid."

The chief, however, looked his doubt. As yet engineering science offered no solution for the muskeg problem, and this was not the first grade he had seen sacrificed to a theory. "Are you serious?"

"As a Methodist sermon," Carter answered his grave question. Then, drawing him aside, he pulled a paper from his pocket – an estimate for the work. It was dated two weeks back, prevision that caused the chief to grimly remark: "Pretty much like measuring a living man for his coffin, wasn't it? But look here, Carter! I'd hate to see you go broke on this hole. I doubt – and your figure is far too low. What's your plan?"

"I'm going to make a sawdust fill with waste from the Portage Mills."

Whistling, the chief looked his admiration, then grinned, the idea was so ludicrous in its simplicity. For, all said, the problem resolved itself into terms of specific gravity – iron sinks and wood floats in water; and the muskeg which swallowed clay would easily carry a sawdust bank. Moreover, the idea was thoroughly practicable. Situated five miles from Winnipeg, the Portage Mills were the largest in the province and their owners would willingly part with the refuse that cumbered their yards.

"You've got it!" he cried, slapping his thigh.