The Tracks We Tread/Chapter 16
Chapter XVI
“Well! but I can’t help it,” said Kiliat.
Ormond looked at him.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t suppose you could. You’re not built that way. But you can back me up when your father comes along to ask questions. And I think that he will probably come very soon. To-day most likely.”
“What—what the devil have you been doing?” cried Kiliat, in wrath.
Ormond was patching a nine-inch pipe. The pipe was red-hot in the sunshine; the plate was hot, and the tap turned stickily in his hands. He grovelled for a dropped bolt in the half-dried clay of the underway, picked it out, and said:
“I wrote telling him that I meant to chuck the whole thing if he is not here before Friday. And as he knows you pretty well, I fancy that he will be here before Friday.”
“Chuck it! You can’t chuck it! I—I—I—can’t run this plant, Ormond.”
Ormond raised himself, rubbing back the rough hair on his forehead.
“Then you’d better not go back on me when your father—which is your father, Kiliat?”
They were two stocky bull-necked men who stumbled over the heat-hazed shingle. From top hat to patent leathers they wore the gear of town life, and both were panting and purple with the labour. Ormond jerked his trousers higher through the belt strap, and straightened the shoulders under the loose shirt. His whole body was alive with fight. He had risked much in bringing directors up here; but all the rotten length of the Lion had called him dumbly once too often. He waited for Kiliat’s casual introductions; said just one thing in his throat when the boy slid down into the paddock where Gordon was working the second jet, and met the two promptly.
“I am very pleased to see you,” he said. “You would like to look over the plant, of course? And I presume that you got my letter?”
The other man—Ormond knew him for the chief of the directors—stared at the sullen network of pipes; at Ormond’s one-roomed whare behind the tin power-house; at white-faced Roddy shovelling the wash at the box tail.
“My soul!” he said. “What a place! What a ghastly place to live in!”
Ormond had lived on the Changing Creek seven years. He had shot rabbits in every shingle gully that fed it, from the penstock right into Argyle. He knew it by hot sluggish day, and by perfect evening, and by fierce storm-racked night. And, beyond all places in the wide earth, it was home to him. Just a little he grinned, resting a foot on the main pipe. These fat men would never know the Lion.
“Did you get my letter?” he said again; and the life of the Lion was throbbing under his foot.
Then Kiliat the elder spoke. He told Ormond many things that Ormond knew far better than he did; he complained of Ormond’s contant demand for repairs; he desired explanation—full explanation.
“My son says that everything is in good order. We were given to understand that everything was in good order when we took the claim over.”
Ormond’s temper was waking.
“I can’t help what you were given to understand. It was not in good order. If your son were here as often as a manager should be he might know what he’s talking about. The flumes and trestles are rotten. I’m eternally patching them. If you’ll kindly come round here, and examine the pipes for the powerhouse and the Pelton wheel you might see the plugs in them. I have given a week’s work to each of those pipes this year. Then the jets———” Ormond wrenched an hydraulic jet out of its elbow and rolled it forward. “We are supposed to be doing hydraulic work now, and the jet I’m using is the size of this one.” He pulled out a measure and laid it over the lip. “Seven and three-quarter inches. It should be five and a half. How much pressure do you think we lose when the things are worn to that size?”
Ormond’s flannel shirt was dirty; it was loose at the sunburnt neck, and his trousers were tucked anyhow into the long boots. But the two fat directors were nervous. The Lion did not look at all the same, laid nakedly here on the creek bed with a hard-eyed man standing over her to crush them with figures. Ormond had an unpleasantly virile grasp of his subject.
“Well, well!” said the chief of the directors. “I daresay we can manage a new jet for you. But you are asking for pipes; a quarter-mile of pipes; twenty-one foot pipes at six pounds apiece! We can’t let you have those, you know. And you got some steel things without consulting us———”
“I had to have them. The plate topping the lift pipe was nearly worn through. I’d asked you twice.”
“My son said that you had the box too close on the escape,” said the elder Kiliat, wisely.
Ormond bit off the word that tingled has tongue.
“Your son says a good many things—to others,” he said quietly.
“Well, you see, that was sheer carelessness. We were told you were a fairly capable man—I beg your pardon?”
“I didn’t speak. Yes?”
“A fairly capable man, and—er—a fairly truthful one. You must give me leave to doubt the fact of your being either the one or the other, Mr. Ormond.”
“Will you kindly tell me why?”
“Er—er—you have no right to take that tone with me, sir.”
“I’ll show you if I have in a minute. Why?”
“Kiliat, my dear fellow, perhaps you had better let me speak———”
“I won’t! Curse it! D’you think I can’t manage the man myself?”
If Ormond had been one whit less angry he must have laughed. But he stood unmoving, with a set to his body that caught Bert Kiliat’s idle attention and brought him up over the paddock side to hear his father say:
. . . “And so it is not only your incessant and puerile demands, annoying though they are. We shall require you to give very good reasons for the extraordinary falling off in the returns———”
“Whew!” whistled young Kiliat, staring on the three. “I say, pater, I told you to go a bit slow with Ormond.”
“Hold your tongue! Well, Mr. Ormond?”
“I can give you several reasons,” said Ormond, speaking very levelly. “In the first place we have had bad weather in the hills. That breaks the race and occasions a stoppage. Twice since midwinter a flume has been washed out in a spate. Each time we were near a week mending it, for we can’t work many hours in the short days. A great many of the pipes are worn out. I have to be constantly changing them for repairs. That all takes time. Then we had to run out a tail race before we could come down to work on the flat. The dredges won’t allow us to deflect the creek behind them.”
“The dredges can’t stop you. You are on your own ground.”
“That’s what I told him,” said Bert Kiliat. “But he wouldn’t listen. Nobody listens to me.”
“The wash carries down into their paddocks,” said Ormond, controlling his words. “I think I have given sufficient reasons to satisfy the ordinary intelligence. If you want to know any more you can ask the men. Now, Mr. Kiliat, I have just one thing to say to you. If you were a younger man I’d have knocked you down before now. As it is, you will please take a week’s notice from me dating from to-day. And I should advise your son to give a little more of his time to the claim during that week. For I shall do no more work than the ordinary overseer. All orders must come from him in future.”
Bert Kiliat’s face was blank in the merciless light.
“Oh, I say!” he cried. “I told you so, pater! For Heaven’s sake, hedge on what you’ve said, can’t you? I don’t know how to manage the beastly thing.”
The elder Kiliat was giddy with rage. He faced the stern-eyed man with the stern background of black pipes and wild hills, and he said more than one thing that would not look well on paper. Unequivocally he chopped a week off Ormond’s discharge, tendering coin instead. He drew out a cheque to that effect on the beating main pipe of the Lion, and Ormond tore it up. Then the chief of the directors spoke apologetically, and Bert Kiliat complained, and the elder Kiliat said several things more.
Ormond went away from it all, walking blindly. From its covered box by the Pelton wheel the telephone bell rang up from Adams, twenty-two miles away at the intake. Ormond picked up the receiver mechanically; then dropped it and sent word to Kiliat by Mears. Mears was carting over some ripples that Ormond had forged out yesterday. The sight of them made the blood boil into his head and throat. He turned into his whare and banged the door.
Father Denis had been up the river for a christening that day. Through the morning heat his pony had crawled and sweated and loitered by each clump of bush. But it came home before a whipping wind and a rattle of thunder that shook the hills. Then the housekeeper—she was the only human being to whom Father Denis gave obedience—ordered dried clothes and a fire and warm food. So the priest turned his back on the fury of the swift night, and returned thanks for comfort.
“An’ ut’s all of a rough noight we’ll be havin’ on us, sure,” he said, with both slippers on the fender. “Bedad, I’m hopin’ as no wan will be afther choosin’ ut for dyin’ in, and want me out—now, if that is a body come cryin’ on me—begorra! Ormond, bhoy! I’m glad tu see ye. Ut is not a buryin’ or a christenin’ ye’ll be wantin’ out ov me the noight, eh?”
Ormond walked straight up to the fire, and his eyes were strange.
“I’ve left her,” he said. “I’ve left her, Father! I’ve left the Lion!”
Father Denis had loved a woman once. He loved her better now. To the best of his belief Ormond had loved the Lion instead. And Ormond would love it more dearly now the ways had parted them. Father Denis knew all this even as he came to his feet in haste.
“Bhoy, ye are soaked clane through! Will ye have some duds ov mine? No, then? Bedad, there’s a betther tu ahl things, will ye bhut foind ut, Ormond. Sit ye down now, an’ talk ut out. Whose blame is ut, then?”
Ormond answered questions wearily and without elaboration. He sat with his elbows on his knees, propping his chin on his hands, and staring at the fire. It was a plain face at best, weather-marked and lined. But all the endurance and the alert decision were gone out of it.
“I’m tired,” he said. “Tired! Tired! There isn’t much good in anything after all. A man puts the best of himself into a thing, and—do you know what he feels like when he’s told that his best isn’t worth a tinker’s curse?”
“Ut is only a man’s own sowl can tell him that.”
“Is it? Then my soul has told me, I suppose. But Kiliat said it first.”
When a man has had seven years of his life—and near thirty years of experience before that—assessed at rather less than nothing, there are two dangers that lie under his feet. Father Denis knew and faced them both, using the straight unflinching speech that alone could meet a straight man’s needs. And the thunder cannoned round the hills, and the lightning snickered by the window as Argyle cowered under the anger of a full-waked storm.
Someone beat a mad tattoo on the knocker, followed the sound down the passage and burst into the dusky room, calling on Ormond. Ormond looked up without interest.
“Yes,” he said. “What is it, Gordon?”
“Bert Kiliat says will yer come up wi’ him ter the penstock? Adams ’as bin ringin’ an’ ringin’ like he was dotty. It don’t take much ter put him off his onion. Will yer come—come now? The hills will be movin’ wi’ water gittin’ in behind them, an’ he’s scared fur the race. Are yer comin’?”
“No!” said Ormond. “You can tell Mr. Bert Kiliat that I have left the Lion.”
“Oh, go on!” Amazement shook the last shreds of respect from Gordon. “Yer can’t let the Lion go ter blazes. That rotter Kiliat’s no use. Come an’ tell us what ter do. Come on!”
Ormond battered a lump of coal down with his heel.
“I am not coming,” he said. “You can go back and tell them that I’ll see them in perdition first. Put it anyway you like. I don’t care.”
A silence that was rigid restraint fell between the two men when Gordon was gone. Father Denis only smoked in company. Ormond was not company to-night. He stood staring at the fire with his hands sunk deep in his pockets. Then he walked over to the window, and leaned his forehead on the glass.
Father Denis used no more words. For it is decreed that a man must fight his battles alone and unaided. And the cruellest battle of Ormond’s life was upon him in the little dark room where the tick of the clock beat off the seconds.
Down the mountain sides the rain came in eddies. A sudden lift struck out the full moon riding in wrack above the crest that gave the Lion life. Ormond watched with his lips drawn in. Then he wheeled, and came back to the still man at the fire.
“Good-night, Father. I’m off.”
“Where then?”
“To get a horse that’ll take me up the Changing.”
“An’ ye’re ahl roight,” said Father Denis gladly. “I knew ut, bhoy.” And then Ormond was gone into the night.
In Conroy’s stables, Randal loafed in the crowd that drew round the harness room door. But he skulked into the shadow as Ormond passed with quick alert speech and command. Randal had done no full day’s work since the half-healed scar on his breast was raw. Yet the shame of this had not jagged him before now. Conroy’s voice rumbled down between the low-lit stalls.
“Luck—nuthin’! It’s the Devil’s luck an’ all of it you’ll want to-night, Ormond—there’s the roan pony, then. He kin stand up ter it.”
“Where is he? Chuck along some gear, boys.”
To the steel jangle and the swift clatter of hoofs on the flags Conroy cast one injunction:
“Jes’ remember that pony’s worth fifty notes, Ormond. An’ the Lion won’t be wuth a rotten egg come mornin’.”
Ormond was into the street as the stable boys’s hands left the girth, and the roan pony raced with reefed rein for the bridge. Beside the abutment Ormond swung for the shingle, working up the creek and across, holding his bearings true to the foot. On the far side he struck the track that swerved ever away to the left, and gave the pony its head up the rain-battered lull.
A clear plan had shaped in his mind ere ever he crossed the leather. It gave the sense that snatched a short-handled chopper from a shelf in the mews, and that turned the pony’s head to Paddy’s Gully, some twelve miles below the penstock. Not Bert Kiliat nor any living man could help the race if Adams had not talked lies on the wire. Indubitably Ormond knew this. For the Lion race was of all things difficult to guard. It doubled on itself many times down the mountain; and should a slip come, the whole race must go out, swept before the torrent in the flumings below. The fluming straddled swamps and little gullies and worked-out mining country. The big two-mile flume was strong. Ormond had given it all his spare time for a year past. And Paddy’s Gully flume was strong, for it had been renewed in the last three months. Ormond could trust them to carry the first of the rush—the half—possibly the whole. And this meant more than his nerve dared face. It meant the swamping and buckling of the slighter fluming near the claim. It meant the choking and wrenching apart of the two miles of pipes, and the driving of them into the paddock bottom with a welter of broken jets, boxes, connections. It meant the death of the Lion.
The sleet whipped Ormond’s ears; the near hills rocked and changed shape as the storm lightened and rose again. He slewed from the track to drive the roan pony into a mad little mountain river that rolled boulders at him and smelt of new-wet earth. This cut off five miles, and bruised his shin badly on a sharp rock. The rain pelted like steel knitting needles, and the pony’s steady scramble flagged slightly. Here was no track, and the footway spread cruelly uncertain. But the knobs and spurs and gullies through which the Lion race took its way down the mountain drew Ormond forward, unswerving, where the windy wrack drove.
The Big Flume dribbled suddenly on his head as he rode athwart the track nineteen feet below. He heard her roar above the growling thunder and the snap of the rain. Then he brought the pony up the gully side with hooked spurs.
“Three miles to Paddy’s Gully, yet,” he said, and flogged the pony across the tussock length of them.
Paddy’s Gully flume received direct from the race, and it was here that Ormond must strike if he would do more than Kiliat, now riding with his men from the penstock where blind terror chased them.
The shored-up channel was running full and angry by his knee when he passed out of the tussock to the flax swamp. The end of the world cut sheer off before him, and Ormond left the saddle and slung the rein to a broom root in two movements. He dropped down, hand over hand, with the chopper buttoned inside his shirt. The floor of Paddy’s Gully was riddled with fallen-in shafts, and Ormond went forward at a run, nosing among them by instinct. Every foot of the gully was trodden ground to him.
The roar of blood in his ears deadened the roar of thunder along the night. The snicker of lightning was against his cheek; and once, far behind, he heard the roan pony scream in fear. The moon swept out from the thick black for two breaths. Through sleet like the bars of a cage Ormond saw the great hump of the Lion Mountain stripped into naked lines and sleek with streams. Below, and brought forward to the eye, a thousand rivers gallopped through scrub and round bluffs; spilling sideways into the bubbling gullies, and coasting down the spurs with heads of foam. Somewhere in the midst of that hell the race was going out. Somewhere, in or below it, Bert Kiliat and a dozen more were racing for life.
“And not one of them thought of Paddy’s Gully!” said Ormond in a high fierce pride. “Not one! Oh, good God! Can’t the dark hold up? Just for ten minutes!”
Paddy’s Gully flume was under a mile in length, and the gully fell east to the river. A break in the big flume would send the whole torrent down Changing Creek. A break here would save more than the Lion.
Ormond swarmed up the flume cat-wise, and crawled out along the cross-ties. The wind plucked his hands loose more than twice, and the weight of his body as he snatched and swung took the skin from his palms. At his ear the flume was running full and steady, with no grate of boulders to jar it. The wild strange smell of flax blew up from the swamp to mix with the air that stank of sulphur and new-made mud. Ormond cast himself from tie to tie, making sternly forward. There was no shake on the flume yet; but neither was there time for pause. When the flood struck it would give short warning.
“I’ll let her have a quarter-mile,” said Ormond. “If she stands up to it that won’t be too much.”
He came astraddle the fluming side, and used the chopper with a free arm-swing, beating, cutting and splintering the wood into wreck. He worked backwards, knocking off the top board for a space of five feet. The wind was ice to his chilled body, but the sweat dropped from him. It was such a little chance, and it meant so very much. In the beginning the water had washed round his ankle. Before the first board was off it clung cold to his shin. He talked to it in quick broken words, while the wild night raved over him, and the flume shook on its skeleton trestles, and the rivers tore downwards; flooding the broken race, choking it again with rocks, leaping over by bare bluff and spur to the bottom.
Ormond sprang into the flume, came to one knee, and beat in the lower boards savagely. The water was under his armpits. It was slobbering over the gap. It was deathly cold, and the rush of it nailed him against the side as he battered the wood, blind and desperate.
“Give me a little longer, old girl!” he cried. “Only a little longer, and I can do it!”
The flume shivered as though a hundred ton of rolling stock crossed it.
“By Heaven!’ said Ormond; “she’s struck! But she’s carrying; I knew she would!” And he drove in the underwash with an insane pride that his work should be so strong.
Something splashed in the water at his shoulder. Something gripped him about the neck, bearing him down sideways. Ormond knew the man even as his clutching hands slid over him.
“Randal! For God’s sake let me up! Ah-h!”
In that moment he would have killed Randal if he could. He tried, striking with the chopper, which Randal caught by the blade, wrenching it this way and that. There was no more speech. Just the roar of the night, and of the rising water and the hard-drawn breathing of the men, and the crack of straining muscles. Ormond swung free once, beating on the board joint with a strength beyond his own. But as the wood splintered Randal bore him down. And along the ways he could hear the flood coming.
There were stones in the flume now—new-torn flint that scarred them as the water power rushed it by. Ormond clung to the bottom board with the muddy wetness round his ears. The board gave, gaped an inch. Then the force of the water swept in behind, driving the loose board out across the flume.
Ormond was beaten back with it, under the cross-ties, with all the wrath of heaven upon him. The roar overside jolted sense from his brain, and death seemed a little thing that mattered not. For the Lion was saved—the Lion———
It was Randal who shook him into consciousness with merciless hands.
“Come off! Curse it, will you come? Ormond———”
The mechanic in Ormond told him that the water would very presently dig out the trestles, pitch them forward, and part the flume. Animal instinct brought his numbed hands groping for the cross-ties. Randal was behind him, goading him forward, hauling him up where he stumbled in the lessening flood. The flume dipped underfoot, rocked as though an earthquake had it by the muscles, fell out sideways with a crashing thunder and a screech of tearing wood that overrode the yell of the storm.
Somewhere on the edge of the wreck Randal hung, gripping Ormond. Somewhere in the black slippery staging he found foothold for both, so that they crawled forward to fall on the sand hollows and the manuka where the rain beat, and to lie there until morning was red.
When Ormond roused, stiff and weary beyond caring, he saw Randal sitting with his knees drawn up, and the sunshine harsh on his face. The lines of his face hurt Ormond to the quick. He walked across with legs that refused to carry him straightly.
“It wouldn’t make any difference, Randal,” he said pitifully. “Kiliat has won. You knew, didn’t you?”
Randal looked out before him across the wreckage of the gully where the flood still gallopped in spume.
“Kiliat had everything in the Lion,” he said levelly. “If the Lion was done he was done, too. Do you think he would marry if he had to work for her? I know better than that.”
Ormond’s hands fell on the bowed shoulders. His palms were raw flesh, and the whole man was cramped with pain.
“Come along back, old chap,” he said.
“Come along back to Father Denis. For we’ve both of us loved too well, Randal; and we both know the punishment for that sin.”