That put it strictly up to me. A job I hadn’t been formally introduced to, an all-Mexican crew of two hundred mule-skinners, a four-mile fill with drainage culverts to get in place — and the rainy season to beat.
I sat up all night in Hobbs’ tent with a gasoline lantern hanging from the ridge-pole, going over the blueprints and field books, trying to get the feel of the job.
We started moving dirt in the morning, and I tried to be all over the job at once.
Mexicans are funny. I’d rather work a job with Mex labor than any other kind, but they do take lots of bossing. The one thing they haven’t got is initiative. They’ll do anything they’re told, and do it well, but they have to be told or they won’t do a damn thing.
I was going nuts before the morning was half over. I had a transit set up in the middle of the gap, and a level at each end of the fill that we were working both ways.
Running from one instrument to another; setting a few curve stations with the transit; trotting back to drop in some blue-tops at one end of the fill; then going back to the other end to re-set slope stakes that had been dragged out by careless wheelers — it had me goofy.
With two hundred teams moving dirt all the time, you understand, and I had to keep them moving.
I was standing behind a level, cussing my Mexican rodman who was holding the level rod upside down on a stake, when I heard an American voice behind me:
“You wouldn’t be needing a spare engineer, Mister?”
A million dollars wouldn’t have sounded as good to me right then. I pushed back my hat and wiped a muddy mixture of sweat and dust from my forehead. The man was sitting a roan mare, looking down at me. He wore white whipcords and a white shirt, but he looked at home in the Texas saddle.
His eyes were blue and there was a flame in them. He didn’t blink while I stood there and stared. He was about thirty, and there was red sunburn on his face like a man gets when he comes fresh into the blistering heat south of the Rio Grande.
I couldn’t quite figure him out, but I only asked one question:
“Can you run a level?”
He stepped off the roan onto the soft fill and came toward me. There was a bulge under his shirt on the left side. I’ve seen enough shoulder holsters to know what it was.
The way he stepped up to the level, squinted through the telescope and adjusted the focus to his eye was all the answer my question needed.
You can tell just by the way a man walks up to a tripod whether he knows his stuff or not. It’s a trick of seeing the position of the three legs and not stepping close enough to any one of them to throw the instrument out of level. Engineers get so they do it subconsciously, and it’s a sure way of spotting a phoney.
He didn’t know the Mexican lingo, but you can set grade stakes with arm signals. I gave him the field book showing grade elevations for each station and told him to go to it.
I asked him his name as I started to the other end of the fill.
He gave me a steady look and said: “Just call me Sam.”
That was all right with me. I would have called him sweetheart if he’d wanted it that way. I was so damned glad to get some help that I didn’t care how many babies he had strangled back in the States.
I took three deep breaths and moved on down the job. Things began to take shape when I had time to study the blueprints and get squared around. With Sam handling one instrument, I felt the job was whipped.
By quitting time that night, everything was going smoothly. I could see it would be a cinch to finish in six weeks if Sam stuck with me.
I told him so after a feed of frijoles con chile and tortillas that the Mex cook dished up.
We were sitting together in the tent, and Sam nodded. He didn’t say anything. He was tired, and the sunburn on his face had deepened to a fiery red. He slouched back on his bunk and seemed to be busy with private thoughts.
I got up and fiddled with the radio, a battery set that Hobbs had left behind. I got it working, and tuned in a news broadcast over a Fort Worth station. The announcer’s voice crackled in the quiet that had fallen over camp in the twilight:
“The search for the slayer of Bully Bronson shifts below the Mexican Border tonight. Authorities are convinced that Bronson’s assistant engineer, who murdered his chief in cold blood after an argument in a highway construction camp, has slipped through a cordon of officers in the Big Bend section and made his escape across the Rio Grande. This station has been requested by police to broadcast the following description to Mexican authorities who are warned that...”
I reached over and snapped the radio off. Sam was sitting up straight, watching me through slitted eyes. Three buttons of his shirt were open and his right arm was crooked at the elbow, gun-hand where it could go inside his shirt in a hurry.
I said: “To hell with that stuff. Everybody in this part of the country knows Bully Bronson needed killing. I hope they never get the guy that did it.”
Sam relaxed a little. He reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, drew out an empty pack. I tossed him my makings of Bull Durham and brown papers. He tore two papers and spilled half a sack of tobacco before he got a bulging cigarette rolled and licked.
When he had it burning, he said: “But murder is still murder.” He clamped his teeth together, like he was having a hard time keeping from saying too much.
“It’s not murder when a guy like Bully Bronson gets bumped,” I argued. “Hell, I know fifty men that’ll sleep easier tonight because Bronson is dead.”
“It’s murder when a man waits until another is asleep, then blows the top of his head off with a shotgun.” Sam’s voice was thin and shaky. His cigarette went to pieces in his fingers when he tried to draw on it.
“There’s a lot of things that go into a killing like that,” I told him. “No one will ever know how much the killer took off Bronson before he got up nerve to do the job. And, from what I know of Bronson, I figure it was smart to wait until the old devil was asleep, and then use a shotgun to make sure of doing a good job.”
Sam got another cigarette rolled without tearing the paper. He said, low:
“The law still calls it first degree murder.”
I nodded. I was watching his face. “If the law ever gets a chance to say anything about it. If he’s across the river, he doesn’t have to worry about the law.”
“There’s such a thing as extradition.”
I laughed. “You don’t know this country like I do. Extradition is just a big word south of the Rio Grande. What a man has done back in the States doesn’t count against him down here. A man leaves his past behind him when he crosses the river.”
Sam thought that over, dragging on his brown-paper cigarette. His lips twisted and he asked:
“Can a man ever get away from... his past?”
I stood up and yawned. I knew something was going to crack if we kept on along that line. I said:
“Hard work is the best medicine for that kind of thinking. We’ve got a tough job in front of us here. It’s going to take all both of us can do, working together, to put it over.”
I turned my back on him to give him time to think it over and get my meaning straight.
There was just enough daylight left to see the end of the railroad fill there in front of camp.
It’s an ugly, hard country south of the Big Bend. Nothing will grow in the hot sand except mesquite and cactus, and the only things that can live are lizards and long-eared jack-rabbits.
You forget how ugly it is in the darkness. Even the bare thorny mesquite and the spiny cactus plants look friendly. You’re able to take a deep breath again after trying not to breathe all day for fear of burning your lungs.