Most people are either led or pushed through life. But there are some whose motive power must come from within.
CHAPTER II
At half-past six the next morning the whistle in the upper camp blew long and clear. It is a strange fact that the dispassionate whistle in the morning is the brutal enemy of labor, calling its victims to the struggle; but that at noon it is impartial and cheerful. It then attempts the rôle of referee in the great game between labor and capital and, like a good umpire, favors neither. Yet the same whistle at night, when it calls the game off, becomes the warm ally of the workman, encouraging him openly with promise of rest and supper. It is then as if it said to him: “I was compelled to be impartial. That is my duty; but frankly, now that it is over, I am glad that you have won.”
Loring opened his eyes as he heard the morning whistle, and, at first a little dazed, looked about him. Then he rose and stretched himself. Every bone in his body ached as the result of the night on the hard ground. All around him men were yawning sleepily as they crawled out of their blankets. Close beside the camp ran the tawny Gila river. Stephen walked down to the bank, and kneeling on a small rock which lay half afloat in the ooze mud, endeavored to wash. Then, refreshed, if not much cleaner, he made his way to the cook tent. Here under a fly stretched on poles were four long tables, heaped with tin plates and condensed milk cans. The monotony of the table furnishings was broken by a few dingy cans, decorated with labels of very red tomatoes, which served as sugar and salt holders. The old inhabitants of the camp were noisily greeting the newcomers, pounding on their cups and whistling whenever they perceived some old acquaintance.
The labor of the Southwest is of a very vagrant quality. A man merely works until he has money enough to move. Each time that he moves he spends all his money on a celebration, so that his wanderings, though frequent, are not long in duration. Thus many of these men had met before, around the smelters in Globe, in the Tucson district, or north in the Yavapai.
Loring found a place on one of the rickety benches, and looked toward the coffee-bucket. Sullivan, who was opposite to him, growled gloomily: “Say, the grub is rank. This coffee is festered water.” The description, though not an appetizing one with which to begin a meal, was not without truth. In varying degree it might have been applied to the rest of the breakfast, from the red, tasteless frijollas to the stew, which consisted of a few shreds of over-cooked meat, in the midst of a nondescript mass of questionable grease.
As Loring had finished eating what he could of the meal, and was contemplating borrowing some tobacco, the foremen, who, as etiquette demands, had eaten their breakfast in a group apart from the men, began to look at their watches, and to stir about actively.
“Hurry up now, boys! Out on the grade—quick! Vamos! Only five minutes more now!” they called.
The tools of the old workmen were scattered along the grade, where each had dropped them at the end of the previous day’s work. The newcomers were marched single file, through the tool-house, where each picked out his implements, then started off to the place assigned him. Loring, not from altruism, but because he did not know the difference which well chosen tools make in a long day’s toil, made no effort to grab. In consequence he emerged from the shed supplied with a split shovel, and a dull, loose-headed pick. A foreman beckoned him to a place on the grade, opposite to the cook tent. He immediately started to swing his pick.
“Don’t be in such a hell of a hurry!” called Sullivan, “you’ll have plenty to do later.”
The seven o’clock whistle blew sharply. “Lope her, boys!” sang out the section foreman. All talking stopped abruptly, and the click of picks, swung with steady blows, and the rasp of shovels echoed all along the grade. Loring, new to “mucking,” swung his pick with all the strength of his back, bringing it down, with rigid full arm strokes, upon the rocky soil. The foreman noticed this with amusement. “He’ll bust in an hour,” he thought; but he only said: “Loosen your grip a bit or you’ll get stone-bruises.” Then he passed on up the line, to tell a Mexican, who had already stopped to light a cigarette, that “this ain’t no rest cure.”
Hop Wah from the depths of the cook tent perceived Loring’s energetic labors, and called out to him: “Hey, me bludder, no swing like that! No damnee use. Just let him pick fall!” Stephen nodded gratefully, and complied with the practical advice. He worked steadily, only pausing to exchange his pick for a shovel, whenever he had broken enough earth, or loosened some large stone. “Surely,” he thought, “I can keep this up for ten hours. Here, at last, is a job that I can do.”
Stephen Loring had never in his life “made good.” He had started well on many ventures, and then given out. His friends had at first been intensely admiring, and had predicted great things for him; but gradually they had given him up as hopeless. They would have lent him money cheerfully; but a determination not to borrow was one of his few virtues. In consequence, having fallen stage by stage, he was now reduced to being a day laborer, a “mucker,” watched by a foreman to see that he did not shirk. If the same method had been applied to him earlier, it might have been his salvation. As it was, he had sunk beneath the current.
The next hour seemed to Loring twice as long as the first. His wrist pulsed with agony from the jar of the blows. He was compelled to wrap his handkerchief around his right hand, as he had worn great blisters sliding it up and down the pick handle. The sweat, as it rolled down from his forehead, made his cheeks smart. Every few minutes he was forced to rest. At ten o’clock the time-keeper came to him, and, drawing a shabby brown book from his pocket, entered Stephen’s name on the rolls. Then he drew from his pocket and handed to Loring a brass tag, like a baggage check. “Your number is four fifty-three; keep this now!”
Stephen looked at the tag for a second, then slipped it into his pocket. It did not jangle against anything. He leaned on his pick handle for a moment, and with mild interest listened to the time-keeper, as he accosted the Mexican who was working next to him.
“Eh, hombre! What’s your name? Cómo se llama?”
The foreman spoke sharply to Stephen, and with the blood rising slightly to his temples at the rebuke, he fell to work again.
Loring possessed a strong imagination and he had solaced many a hardship by either planning for pleasanter occupations in the future, or vividly reconstructing worse ones in the past. But imagination is a dangerous plaything. The men working on either side of him thought of nothing, except perhaps some solution of the great problem of the human race, how to make the greatest possible show of work with the least effort. Stephen, however, was accompanied in his work by imagination. To-day it was of a sort which was neither subtle nor pleasant. It began by saying to him: “You are healthy. You will probably live for thirty years or more. They will be pleasant years, won’t they? There are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, so if you work ten hours a day for thirty years, perhaps you may grow used to work. Work is a great companion, is it not, Stephen? It is unfortunate,” finished imagination glibly, “that you must do this forever.”
Loring spoke aloud in answer to his imagination, timing his syllables to the already shortened strokes of his pick. “Not forever?”
“Well,” rejoined imagination, “I see no alternative, do you? And what is more,” added the Devil who at this moment was operating imagination, “You are not even building the railroad. All you are doing is moving rocks. Any one can move rocks.”
By noon time Stephen was limp and exhausted. The hour’s respite