3stalwarts (158 page)

In the morning, the girl said that she was able to ride. Her face was brighter. She was very quiet, between them on the seat; and both of them were speechless in the early morning.

The mare, stepping briskly, pitched her ears at roadside clumps, and tossed her bits. The wheels rolled smoothly down the road. Bennet drew up at the corner of a side track.

“This way turns up to Corbal’s. Mann’s is just beyond the woods. Listen. You can hear the men.”

They could hear voices.

“You’ll want to get in this morning, Jerry?”

“Maybe I’d better.”

“Then if you’ll pass the girl a couple of dollars, I’ll take her up. I’ll tell Corbal she’s my niece and I’m boarding her while I’m on my circuit. He knows who I am— or thinks he does.”

The girl smiled down at Jerry. Her eyes were soft.

Bennet said, “I’ll tell Corbal you’re a relative and keeping an eye on her. Maybe you can visit with her sometimes.”

“Yes.”

The old man chuckled. He spoke to the mare. The wheels spun.

The girl looked back. Her eyes were speaking for her. Jerry watched till she was out of sight. She was not pretty by the way he had always judged a girl: she was too small.

When Jerry came forth from the woods, he found the Irondequot Valley sloping downward from his feet. On the left of the road, Mann’s mill-dam stuck out of a sheer hillside; it backed up water in a narrow lake along the edge of the hill. On the north shore was lower land. The mill itself was next to the wheel housing on the north end of the dam: a big overshot wheel of eight-foot radius. The mill was built half in stone and half in wood.

Jerry could not make out how far the pond extended. The dam, constructed of cribs and broken rock and earth, had a lift of twenty feet, so the pond must reach much farther than his eye could carry.

Leaving the road before he reached the bridge, he climbed the hill. It was heavily scrubbed with maple, birch, and hemlock; but near the top the shrubbery thinned out; and suddenly, in an open space, he came upon red stakes, three in a row. A little way ahead, to mark the beginning of a northward curve, he saw another set. He followed them. As he went on, the ground rose on his right; it was bushed over lightly there with blueberries and buffalo sod. He mounted with it, and in a little while he saw, standing on the apex of the hill, Bates and Myron Holley, the commissioner.

At Jerry’s shout Bates turned round. He waved his hand and his face lit up. He touched the commissioner’s elbow. Myron Holley turned. Together they waited on Jerry’s approach.

As he came up, his eye took in the course of the crossing; instantly he felt a wave of admiration for Geddes, who, alone with one axeman and one rodsman back in 1809, had had the vision to find out this place.

Bates shook his hand.

“I’m glad to see you, Fowler. I thought you might come yesterday.”

“I nighted in the woods.”

“It was a heavy storm,” Myron Holley said. He had a quiet, cultured voice, and calm brown eyes. It was the first time Jerry had met him face to face; but next to Clinton, Wright, and Geddes, he admired this man’s work. With a single driver he had to cover over a hundred miles of digging, paying off the contractors, making judgments for farm damage, settling fifty-cent accounts to axemen, rodsmen, ploughmen, hearing the troubles of a man who laid a culvert and making out his advance, or spotting misappropriation of state funds and bringing in the magistrates. He nighted where night found him, in shanties, in a tent he carried on his wagon, making out his day’s accounts by candlelight, with a smoke pot on the table to ward off the bugs, accounts that ran from a ten-thousand-dollar digger’s contract down to a fourteen-cent spike-lifter. Three years after, the legislature would rise up in wrath because he could not tell them where thirty thousand dollars had gone; truly, during seven years of service, he had had to handle over two million dollars in cash, of varying state currencies in shillings, fips, silver half-dollars, and local factory bills from seventy-five cents upwards; but couldn’t a man keep ledgers, they demanded? He told them that for two months in the spring he traveled on foot —carrying his cash in his hand satchel, with one man to bring his clothes and tent and able to keep only rough notes of expenditures; but that, they said, was not the point: an honest man who handled public funds kept books… . But now Jerry saw a man already tired in his body.

He said, “I consider this the biggest work the whole line will show. Bates has been arguing me out of wood, Mr. Fowler. I don’t need much convincing.”

Bates, in his dry, matter-of-fact voice, said, “Yes, Jerry. Look here. Look over there. You’re not an engineer, but you can tell how much wood will do for us. Can you build us a trough to carry forty feet by four of water over there?”

Jerry looked down upon the crossing as if he looked down on a map.

“The hill looks ninety feet to me,” he said.

It dropped off sheer from his feet. Now he could see the course the canal would follow. The hill stuck out into the horseshoe pond like a lizard’s tongue. To west the ground sloped up again, almost to the hill’s level.

“We’re standing on a hundred feet,” said Bates. “But the bottom of the ditch is seventy-six feet over the pond level. Eighty feet in all. And west, there, the ground mounts up again to this level in twelve hundred feet. Near a quarter mile.”

“How wide’s the pond water there?”

“Four chains and seven links from edge to edge.”

Jerry thought.

He said, “Water that length and height would have an awful outward thrust against the braces. Myself, I wouldn’t undertake to make it hold-whoever drew me plans.”

Holley sighed.

“I think the same. But I have got to convince them back in Albany. They passed over my head in ordering timbers.”

Bates said, “We can use them other places. Now they’ve spent that money for economy they may feel better towards us. They’ve showed their will.”

“What am I to do?” Jerry asked Bates.

“Mann’s done all his spring sawing. We’ve had to rent the mill for summer to let down the water. We’re going to build a stone culvert.

After that, we’ll tell them. Then if they want wood they can send someone out to build it. They won’t get any engineer.”

“And me?” said Jerry.

“You’re to lay a flooring, boy. You’ve got to set in piles. I’ve figured out embankment slope for that height. The floor has got to be 245 feet long. Twenty-six across will handle all the water if we make the arch full Roman. The piles are all stacked down there.”

Next to the monumental stacks of gleaming, brand-new timbers, Jerry saw a great black heap of piling.

“Most of them are twenty foot,” said Bates. “You’ve got to pile in quicksand and I’ve figured on eight hundred piles. But there are two hundred more in case it’s bad.” He faced east. “Mann’s opened up his sluice.”

Jerry and Myron Holley looked down across the treetops. Mann’s dam made just a thread beyond the deep-blue pond, and his mill was a tiny box to look at. But below the dam a surge of coffee-colored water boiled away.

“It will take two days, to get it down,” said Bates.

“You’ve got a piler?”

“Bemis. Roger Hunter has brought him in.”

Jerry looked back at the culvert-site. Behind a clump of hemlocks stood a shanty, and beside the shanty he saw a small grey spot that marked a wagon-hood. He made out Hunter’s odd-colored horses grazing alongside.

“We might as well go down,” said Bates. “I’ve got a boat to row across with.”

Holley said good-bye.

“My driver’s down at Mann’s. I’ve got to get back to pay up with Dancer Borden by tomorrow night.”

He went away.

Jerry looked out before he followed Bates. Miles and miles west he could see across the level upland. Rochester lay that way, the Genesee, and miles beyond was Erie. But he turned quickly south. There lay the end of Mann’s pond, and the creek coming in through flags. His eyes followed the course southward through a soft-wood forest. There was a clearing a half mile beyond, and in it he saw a little gristmill. Eastward the view was closed to him… .

In the shanty, Hunter was polishing his bells. He rose up eagerly as Jerry entered.

“Jerry Fowler— man, I’m glad to see you.” He shook hands powerfully. “When I got in last night I seen your tool box in the corner. And I thought I’d wait.”

His hard face shone, and he sat down again and occupied his strong hands with vigorous polishing.

“I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

“That’s right, I guess. We’ve been right occupied in Rochester. They’re trying to make stone stick in the Genesee above the falls. And I’ve been hauling it for them. Jerry, when do you plan to come out there?”

Jerry smiled.

“There’s time enough.”

“Not too much. Water will be in Montezuma soon. In two years more water will be in Albany, and long before that time boats will have hauled clear in to Rochester.”

“That’s time enough.”

“Listen here,” said Hunter. “I used to think a pity in it that I couldn’t roll my Pennsylvania wagon any more when this got finished. Now I am pernickety as a filly brought to stud awaiting its completion. I’ve spoke to Colonel Rochester, and he will back us up in a transportation company. Say, will you join in with me?” He looked across. “There’s no one I’d like better.”

Jerry could not think of things ahead; something in him was stirred; a new nerve ripened.

He said, “I’ve got this place to set up first.”

“Well, you’ll have company for it. A suckish little runt. Bemis, you remember him? But Jerry, I’ll hold out for you till next spring. Can you let me know then?”

“I’ll let you know then.”

He felt Hunter eyeing him shrewdly.

“If I’d not known you was a married man, I’d think you were girl-piney. Maybe you are at that. I wouldn’t blame you, knowing your wife.”

The door slammed open.

Bemis swaggered in under his bowler hat.

He passed Jerry an unfilled receipt for haulage of a pibr.

“Here,” he said. “Will you sign this?”

“I’ll do my best,” said Jerry.

“Thanks,” said Bemis.

Jerry filled the receipt and passed it over to Hunter.

“What’s news back eastward?” he asked.

“They’re making progress,” Bemis said. “Them southern delegates don’t know how us Americans can dig. You remember Weston?”

“The English engineer?”

“Yes, him. He said it would take two whole years to blast the rocks around Cohoes. We’ve done it in eighty days.”

Hunter gave Jerry a wink at Bemis’s “we.” But he said, “An Englishman’s all right. The only trouble with him is he hasn’t ever considered an Irishman. You put an Irishman against a stone mountain and give him plenty of blasting powder and he’ll go through. An Englishman would do it scientific, but an Irishman would just bust loose.”

He had fought himself to keep away; but to-day with a south wind tossing out the trilliums up the bank, he would go.

The track for the hammer was bolted together and was being raised on its angle braces. It squatted knee-deep in the slimy muck from which the water had drawn down, its sledges buried; and Cosmo Turbe on his spiked boots climbed the steep of the track with the rope to carry the weight. He passed it over the pulley. Piute Sowersby, boot-deep in mud, caught the end and guided it round the winch-drum, turned the right-hand crank until the driver’s weight was taken up and its wheels caught on the iron tracks. Dripping wet upon the bank, his plump, smooth face mud-smeared, Bemis rubbed his hands together and stuffed himself with pride.

“She’s my own idea. I done her new this winter. A take-down piler especially built for this big ditch. I’ve got a patent onto her,” he added warningly for Jerry’s benefit.

But Jerry was thinking with the wind against his face, “I’d ought to go and see if she’s all right. I’m responsible for her. I’d have gone up sooner but for starting things. I will go up tonight.”

Piute was patting the crank.

“I’ve always hankered to get my fists on this. You and me will have a picnic, Cosmo.”

The little man slid down the tracks, leaped off, and landed in the mud. He came up squeezing fistfuls of black slime. He held them out to Piute.

“You poor bezabor, what do you think you have got there?”

Grinning widely, Cosmo opened his slimy hands.

“What do you think you’ve got, you poor dumb frog?”

“Picnic hands,” said Cosmo seriously.

“Picnic hands? My God, what are you talking of?”

“Well,” and Cosmo bashfully dropped his eyes, “the girls would have to wear white stockings.”

Bates was casting the sight for the two corner-piles. His rodsman steadied a striped stake on the upward line upon the hill.

With his monster all complete, Bemis forgot his importance. He was hungry to feed it. He laid his bowler hat face down upon a tuft of grass and sprang into the muck. He floundered out to his vast engine, an impish figure, his pants moulded tightly over his solid little buttocks.

Four gangs laid hold of corner ropes and dragged the engine to face north. She crept forward inch by inch to where Piute now held the upended pile; his great hands flattened like red lichens on the wood; his shoulders bent and his mouth breathing audible prayers for speed. They inched the engine forward until the angle of the track came flush with the top of the pile, and Cosmo set on the angle cap that transferred the slam of the hammer into a vertical thrust against the pile-crown. He leaped into the well and took the left-hand crank. Another man laid hold of the right. They turned. The paul tickled and the hammer climbed. Bemis with a mallet knocked up the paul. The hammer moved; the rope slid faster than the eye could follow; the drum gears roared; there was a heavy thud and Piute was looking down at his crooked arms and the blisters on his palms.

“By dog,” he whispered, “she went down three foot.”

“She’s set her tooth. Wind up them winches.”

The gears began to rattle and the paul danced lightly. Once more Bemis tapped it up. The hammer fell like a bolt. This time the men holding the corner ropes felt the thud in the muck against their boot-soles; and the driver automatically lifted over the blow and squatted down again a good foot backward.