by Zane Grey
This camp appeared to be Durade’s destination. His caravan rode through and halted on the outskirts of the far side. Preparations began for what Allie concluded was to be a permanent halt. And here there was at once a significant disintegration of Durade’s party. One by one the scouts received payment from their employer and with horse and pack disappeared toward the camp. The lean old fellow who had taken kindly interest in Allie looked in at the opening of the canvas over her wagon and, wishing her luck, bade her good bye. The women likewise said good bye, informing her that they were going on home. Not one man among those left would Allie have trusted.
During the hurried settling of camp Durade came to Allie.
“Allie, you don’t have to keep cooped up in there unless I tell you,” he said. “But don’t talk to anyone . . . and don’t go that way.” He pointed toward the humming camp. “That place beats any gold diggings I ever saw,” he concluded.
The tall scant sage afforded Allie some little seclusion and she walked there until Durade called her to supper. She ate alone on a wagon seat, and, when twilight fell, she climbed into her wagon, grateful that it was high off the ground and enclosed her from all except sound.
Darkness came; the fire died down; the low voices of Durade and his men, and of callers who visited them, flowed continuously. Then, presently, there arose a strange murmur, unlike any sound Allie had ever heard. It swelled into low distant roar. She was curious about it. Peeping out of her wagon cover, she saw where the darkness flared to yellow with a line of lights, torches or lanterns or fires. Crossing and recrossing these lights were black objects, in twos and threes and dozens. And from this direction floated the strange low roar. Suddenly she realized. It was the life of the camp. Hundreds and thousands of men were there together—and as the night advanced the low roar rose and fell, lulled away to come again—strange, sad, hideous, mirthful. For a long time Allie could not sleep.
Next morning Durade called her. When she unlaced the canvas flaps, it was to see the sun high and to hear the bustle of work all about her.
Durade brought her breakfast, and gave her instructions. While he was about in the daytime, she might come out and do what she could to amuse herself, but when he was absent, or at night, she must be in her wagon tent, laced in, and was not to answer any call. She would be guarded by Stitt, one of his men, a deaf mute, faithful to his interests and who had orders to handle her roughly should she disobey. Allie would not have been inclined to disobey even without the fear and abhorrence she felt of this ugly and deformed mute.
That day Durade caused to be erected tents, canopies, tables, benches, and last a larger tent, into which the tables and benches were carried. Fresno worked hard, as did all the men except Stitt, who had nothing to do but watch Allie’s wagon.
Wearily the time passed for her. How many more days must she spend thus, watching idly, because there was nothing else to do? Still, back in her consciousness, there was a vague and growing thought. Sooner or later Neale would appear in the flesh. As he appeared in her dreams.
That night, Allie, peeping out, saw by the fire and torchlight, men drawn to Durade’s large tent. Mexicans, Negroes, Irishmen—all kinds of men passed, loud and profane, careless and reckless, quarrelsome and loquacious. Soon there arose in her ears the long-forgotten but now familiar sounds of a gambling hall in full blast. The rolling rattle of the wheel, sharp between the lulls of many voices, strident and keen, intermingled with the strange, rich, false clink of gold.
It needed only a few days and nights for Allie Lee to divine Durade’s retrogression. He had been a gambler for the sake of gambling; now in addition he was possessed of an unscrupulous intent, a strange, cold, devouring passion to get gold that he might gamble with it. Allie divined evidence of this, saw it, heard it. The man had struck the descent, and he was all the more dangerous for that breaking of his career.
Not a week had elapsed before his gambling hall roared all night. Allie got most of her sleep during the day. She shut out what sound she could and tried to be deaf to the rest. But she had to hear the pistol shots, and shrill cries, and the trample of heavy boots, as men dragged a dead gamester out to the ditch.
Day was a relief, a blessing. Allie was frequently cooped up in her narrow canvas-covered wagon, but she saw from there that life of the grading camp.
There were various bosses—boarding boss, who fed the laborers, and stable boss, who had charge of the teams, and grading boss, who ruled the diggers and scrapers, and the timekeeper boss, who kept track of the work of all.
In the early morning, a horde of hungry men stampeded the boarding tents where the cooks and waiters made mad haste to satisfy loud and merry demands. At sunset the same horde drooped in, dirty and hot and lame, and fought for seats while others waited.
Out on the level plain stretched the hundreds of teams, moving on and returning, the drivers shouting, the horses bending. The hot sun glared, the wind whipped up the dust, the laborers spurred to the shout of the boss—and on westward crept the low, level, yellow bank of sand and gravel—the roadbed of the U.P.R.
Thus the daytime had its turmoil, too, but splendid, like the toil of heroes united to gain some common end, and the army of soldiers was there, ever keen-eyed, for the skulking Sioux.
Mull, the boss of the camp, became a friend of Durade’s. The wily Spaniard could draw any class of man. This Mull had been a driver of truck horses in New York and now he was a driver of men.
He was huge, like a bull, heavy-lipped and red-cheeked, hairy and coarse, with big sunken eyes. A brute—a cave man! He drank; he gambled. He was at once a bully and a pirate. Responsible to no one but his contractor, he hated the contractor and hated his job. He was great in his place, brutal with fist and foot, a gleaner of results from hard men at a hard time.
He won gold from Durade, or, as Fresno guffawed to a comrade, he had been allowed to win it. Durade picked his man. He had big schemes and he needed Mull.
Benton was Durade’s objective point—Benton, the great and growing camp city, where gold and blood were spilled in the dusty streets and life roared like a blast from hell.
All that Allie heard of this Benton increased her dread, and at last determined her that she would run any risk rather than be taken there.
That night, as soon as it grew dark, she slipped out of the wagon and, under cover of the darkness, made her escape.
Chapter Fifteen
The building of the U.P.R. as it advanced westward, caused many camps and towns to spring up and flourish, like mushrooms in a single night. Therefore towns and communities were born, for the strangeness and the like of which there was no analogy.
Warren Neale did not get away from the fascination of the work and life, even though, instead of being important and strenuous, he was now insignificant and idle. He began to drink and gamble in North Platte, more in a bitter defiance than from any real desire. Then he drifted to Kearney and afterward to Cheyenne.
At Kearney, King answered to the violence growing more unrestrained in him. In a quarrel with a construction boss named Smith, King accused Smith of being the crooked tool of the crooked commissioners who had forced Neale to quit his job. Smith grew hot and profane. The cowboy promptly slapped his face. Then Smith, like the fool he was, went after his gun. He never got it out.
It distressed Neale greatly that King had badly shot up a man—and a railroad man. No matter what King said, Neale knew the shooting was on his account. His deed made the cowboy a marked man. It changed him, also, toward Neale, inasmuch as that he saw his wildness was making small Neale’s chances of returning to work. King never ceased importuning Neale to go back to his job. After shooting Smith, the cowboy made one more eloquent appeal to Neale, then left for Cheyenne. Neale followed him.
Cheyenne was just emancipating itself from the end of a reign as a headquarters town, and although depleted and thin it had made a bid for permanency. But the sting and wildness of life had gone on with the rails and the operation of the
next and most famous town—Benton.
Neale boarded a train for Benton and watched with bitterness the familiar landmark he had learned to know so well while surveying the line and now saw again under hateful circumstance. He was no longer connected with the great project—no more a necessary part of the great movement.
Beyond Medicine Bow the grass and the green failed, and the immense train of freight cars and passenger coaches, loaded to capacity, clattered on into arid country. Gray and red, the drab and fiery colors of the desert lent the ridges character, forbidding and barren.
From a car window Neale got his first glimpse of the wonderful terminus city, and for once his old thrills returned. He recalled the distance—seven hundred—no, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from Omaha—so far westward was Benton.
It lay in the heart of barrenness, alkali, desolation, in the face of windswept desert with dust devils sweeping along, yellow and funnel-shaped—a huge blocked-out town set where no town could ever live. Benton was prey for sun, wind, dust, drought—and the wind was terrible and insupportably cold. No sage, no cedars, no grass, not even a cactus bush, nothing green or living relieved the eye, which swept across the gray and the white, through the dust, to the distant bare and desolate hills of drab. The hell that was reported to abide at Benton was in harmony with its setting. The immense train clattered and jolted to a stop. A roar of wind, a cloud of powdery dust, a discordant and unceasing din of voices, came through the open windows of the car. The heterogeneous mass of humanity with which Neale had traveled jostled out, struggling with packs and bags.
Neale, carrying his bag, stepped off into half a foot of dust. He saw a disintegrated crowd of travelers that had just arrived, of travelers ready to depart, and soldiers, Indians, Mexicans, Negroes, loafers, merchants, tradesmen, laborers—a changing and remarkable spectacle of humanity. He saw stagecoaches with hawkers bawling for passengers to Salt Lake, Ogden, Montana, Idaho; he saw a white street—white with dust where it was not thronged with moving men and women, and lined by tents and canvas houses and clapboard structures, and the strangest conglomeration of painted and printed signs that ever advertised anything in the world.
A woman, well clad, young, not uncomely, but with hungry eyes like those of a hawk, accosted Neale. He drew away. In the din he had not heard what she said. A boy likewise spoke to him; a Mexican tried to take his baggage; a man jostling him felt of his pocket, and, as Neale walked on, he was leered at, importuned, grasped, accosted, and all but mobbed.
So this was Benton.
A pistol shot pierced the din. Someone shouted. A wave of the crowd indicated commotion somewhere, and then the action and noise were precisely as before. Neale crossed five intersecting streets, and evidently the wide street he was on was the main one. In that walk of five blocks he saw thousands of persons, but they were not the soldiers who protected the line nor the laborers who made the road. These were the travelers, the business people, the stragglers, the nondescripts, the parasites, the criminals, the desperadoes, and the idlers—all who must by hook or crook live off the builders.
Neale was conscious of a sudden exhilaration. The spirit was still in him. After all, his defeated ambition was nothing in the great sum of this work. How many had failed! He thought of the nameless graves already dotting the slopes along the line and already forgotten. It would be something to live through the heyday of Benton.
Under a sign, HOTEL, he entered a door in a clapboard house. The place was as crude as an unfinished barn. Paying in advance for lodgings, he went to the room shown him—a stall with a door and a bar, a cot and a bench, a bowl and a pitcher. Through cracks he could see out over an uneven stretch of tents and houses. Toward the edge of town stood a long string of small tents and several huge ones, which might have been the soldiers’ quarters.
Neale went out in search of a meal and entered the first restaurant. It was merely a canvas house stretched over poles, with compartments at the back. High wooden benches served as tables, low benches as seats. The floor was sand. At one table sat a Mexican, an Irishman, and a Negro. The Irishman was drunk. The Negro came to wait on Neale, and, receiving an order, went darting to the kitchen. The Irishman sidled over to Neale.
“Say, did yez hear about Casey?” he inquired, very friendly.
“No, I didn’t,” replied Neale. He remembered Casey, the flagman, but probably there were many Caseys in that camp.
“There was a foight . . . out on the line . . . yisteddy,” went on the fellow, “an’ the domn’ redskins chased the gang to the troop train. Phwat do you think? A bullet knocked Casey’s pipe out of his mouth . . . as he was runnin’ . . . an’ b’gorra, Casey stopped fer it an’ was all shot up.”
“Is he dead?” inquired Neale.
“Not yit. No bullets can’t kill Casey.”
“Was his pipe a short black one?”
“It was that.”
“And did Casey have it everlastingly in his mouth?”
“He shlept in it.”
Neale knew that particular Casey, and he examined this loquacious Irishman more closely. He recognized him as Pat Shane, one of the trio he had known during the survey in the Black Hills two years ago. The recognition was a stab to Neale. Memory of the Black Hills—of the lost Allie Lee—was a flayed and exquisite surface on his mind. Shane had aged greatly. There were scars on his face that Neale had not seen before.
“Mister, don’t I know yez?” leered Shane, studying Neale with bleary eyes.
Neale did not care to be remembered. The waiter brought his dinner, which turned out to be a poor one at a high price. After eating, Neale went out and began to saunter along the walk. The sun had set and the wind had gone down. There was no flying dust. The street was again crowded with men, but nothing like it had been after the arrival of the train. No one paid much attention to Neale. On that wall he counted nineteen saloons, and probably some of the larger places were of like nature, but not so wide open to the casual glance.
Neale strolled through the town from end to end, and across the railroad outside of the limits, to a high bank where he sat down. The desert was beautiful away to the west, with its dull mottled lines backed by gold and purple, and its sweep and heave and notched horizon. Near at hand it seemed drab and bare, like his life, unproductive and desolate. He watched a long train of flat and boxcars come in, and saw that every car swarmed with soldiers and laborers. The train discharged its load of thousands and steamed back for more.
Twilight fell. All hours were difficult for Neale, but twilight was the most unendurable, for it had been the hour Allie Lee loved best and during which she and Neale had walked hand in hand along the brook, back there in the lonely and beautiful valley in the Black Hills. Neale could not sit still long; he could not rest, nor sleep well, nor work, nor be of any use to himself or anyone, because he was haunted and driven by the memory of Allie Lee. He drifted to find new scenes, he drank so that he would gamble, and he gambled to forget. And at such quiet hours as this one, in the midst of the turmoil he had sought for weeks, a sadness filled his soul and an eternal remorse. Then the love that had changed him and life that had failed him seemed utterly unrelated.
To and fro he paced over the bare ridge while twilight shadowed. A star twinkled in the west, a night wind began to seep the sand. The desert, vast, hidden, mysterious, yet so free, so untrammeled, darkened.
Lights began to flash up along the streets of Benton. And presently Neale became aware of a low and mounting hum, like a first stir of angry bees.
Loud and challenging strains of a band drew Neale toward the center of the main street where men were pouring into a big tent. He halted outside and watched. It took no more now than this strident business-like quick-step music and sight of the men and women attracted thereby to make Neale realize that Benton had arisen in a day, would die out in a night, and its life would be swift, vile, and deadly.
When the band ceased, a subdued roar came from inside the big tent—a commingling of ro
ugh voices of men and humming of wheels and clinking of glasses and gold, and rattling of dice, the hoarse call of a croupier or dealer, the shuffling of feet—a roar pierced now and then by a shrill, vacant, soulless laugh of a woman.
It was that last sound that almost turned Neale away from the door. He shunned women. But this place fascinated him. Tonight he was not in one of his violent moods when he must have drinking, gambling—both of which for him were attended by violent action. He went in under the flaming lamps.
The place was crowded—a huge tent stretched over a framework of wood, and it was full of people, din, smoke, movement. The floor was of good planking covered with sand. Walking was possible only around the narrow aisles between groups at tables.
Neale’s sauntering brought him to the bar. It had to him a familiar look, and afterward he learned it had been brought complete from St. Louis, where he had seen it in a saloon. It seemed a huge glittering magnificent monstrosity in that coarse bare setting: wide mirrors, glistening bottles, paintings of nude women, row after row of polished glasses, a brawny, villainous bartender with three attendants all working fast, a line of roughhouse men five deep before the bar—all constituted a scene with the aspects of a city and yet with an atmosphere no city ever knew. The drinkers were not all rough men. There were elegant black-hatted frock-coated men of leisure in that line—not directors and commissioners and traveling guests of the U.P.R., but gentlemen of chance. Gamblers!