I remember every little thing as I stood there in the open doorway of the tent waiting for Sam to say something. A mule squealed in the corrals, and some of the Mexicans were singing to a guitar accompaniment.
Did you ever hear Mexicans singing one of their native songs? You’ve missed something.
A coyote howled on the far rim of the valley while I stood there. I suppose you’ve never heard a coyote’s howl drifting through the darkness across a valley either? That’s something else you’ve missed.
Sam’s voice was harsh, close to my ear: “The job isn’t my lookout.”
I pulled a lot of the cool evening air into my lungs. I knew this was the showdown. I had to make Sam see it my way.
“It’s my lookout, Sam. I didn’t ask for it, but here it is, dumped in my lap. It’s up to us to get the fill in place before water starts running down from the hills and washes it out.”
He leaned against the upright supporting pole and looked out over the valley.
I nodded toward the fill. “It’s our job, Sam.”
There was a twisted funny look on his face. “Engineers are damned fools.”
I agreed with him. “They just wouldn’t be engineers if they weren’t. They’d be ribbon clerks or shoe salesmen.”
He laughed, and I know he was thinking about a murdered man across the river:
“Men die and other men run away from the electric chair, but there’s always a job to think about.”
I turned back into the tent. I knew Sam was going to see me through. I said:
“After we get the grade ready for the track-laying crew will be time enough to talk about other things.”
He nodded, came back and sat on his bunk. The twisted look was gone from his face. “I suppose it might help a man... to get one more job under his belt.”
He took off his shirt, showing a shoulder harness with a .45 automatic in a clip holster.
Neither of us said anything as he unbuckled the harness and hung it over the head of his bunk.
It stayed there until the job was finished.
It wasn’t tough, as such jobs go. The usual run of luck you run into on construction work. Rock where you don’t expect to find it, and so much sand in the fill that it wouldn’t hold a two-to-one slope.
Too much sotol in camp on pay nights, grudges settled the Mexican way with knives which left us shorthanded until we could get more teamsters.
Sam was plenty okay. He didn’t have an awful lot of experience on dirt work, but he was built out of the stuff that makes engineers. With all the guts in the world, and never trying to get out from under when there was extra work to be done.
Lots of nights those first two weeks we worked until twelve or later under the hot glare of a gasoline lantern, figuring mass diagrams to balance the cut and fill, changing gradients.
Never a word between us about the search for Bully Bronson’s murderer — and the radio stayed turned off.
Your mind gets numbed after so long on a rush job that takes everything you’ve got. There aren’t any tomorrows and the yesterdays don’t count.
There’s only the present — with the heat and the dust, swarms of sand-flies, the shouts of teamsters getting their loaded wheelers up the hill, a thick haze rising from the valley with snow-capped mountain peaks showing dimly through it from the southwest, the two ends of a narrow railroad grade creeping toward each other so slowly that you’d swear you were making no progress at all if you didn’t have station stakes to tell you different.
Two white men on a job like that are bound to get pretty close, or learn to hate each other’s guts.
During those weeks Sam and I got about as close as two men can ever get. Without words, you understand. Neither of us were the kind to shoot off our mouths.
It wasn’t the sort of thing you talk about. Working side by side fifteen or twenty hours a day, words get sort of useless.
I quit being the boss after the first couple of days. We were just two engineers pushing a job through.
After it was finished?
Hell, I didn’t know.
I didn’t waste any time thinking about what would come after it was done. I don’t think Sam did, either.
Maybe one of us was a murderer. That didn’t count. See what I mean? The job was the only thing that counted.
No. I suppose you don’t understand. You’re a newspaper reporter. You’ve spent a lot of years practicing to get cynical. A job, to you, means something to work at eight hours a day and then forget while you go out sporting.
You asked for human interest stuff. I’m giving it to you even if you don’t recognize it.
Five weeks dropped out of the lives of two men while time stood still and a construction job went on.
You’re going to snort when I tell you how it ended. You’re going to say it doesn’t make sense and that men don’t act that way.
Maybe it won’t make sense to you. Maybe your readers won’t believe it if you print it.
But it did happen like I’m telling you.
By the end of three weeks I’d forgotten what I’d guessed was his reason for crossing the Border in a hurry. His automatic still hung at the head of his bunk, and neither of us had mentioned Bronson’s murder since that first night.
But you can’t get away from a thing like that. It was with us all the time.
Sam was right when he said a man can’t leave a thing like murder behind him just by crossing a muddy stream of water.
That’s why I got a prickly feeling up my spine one afternoon when I saw two riders pushing up a little cloud of dust in the valley between us and the river.
There was that subconscious sense of fear that had been riding me all the time. The feeling that our luck couldn’t possibly hold, that there was bound to be a pay-off.
I was running the last bit of center-line with the transit. Sam was on the far end of the fill, staking out a drainage culvert.
I swung the telescope on the riders half a mile away, and it brought them right up to me.
I knew I had guessed right. They spelled trouble. Slouching in the saddle, wearing dust-stained range clothing with cartridge belts slanting across their middles.
They were headed toward camp and I knew I had to keep them away from Sam if the fill was going to get finished.
I left the transit sitting there, and walked back to camp. The two riders were pulling in close when I stepped inside our tent.
One was a heavy man with a gray mustache. The other was long and lanky with a scar on his cheek. Both carried six-shooters in open holsters, and had saddle guns in boots slung beneath their right stirrup leathers.
Cow-country deputies, if I ever saw any.
They pulled up in front of the cook-tent and yelled for the cook. When he came to the door, the heavy one said:
“We heard across the river that you had a new gringo engineer here. Is that right?”
The cook was scared. He bobbed his head, sir: “Si, si, Senior. Es verdad.”
The scar jumped up and down on the thin man’s face. “Where’s he at? We’ve come to take him back.”
I waited to hear what the cook would say. He’d seen me pass by on my way to the tent. But Sam was new on the job, too, and he might send them out to Sam.
He didn’t. He pointed to the tent and told them I was inside.
I slid back and got hold of Sam’s automatic. It was cocked when I met them at the door.
They didn’t take time to get a good look at me. They saw the automatic and reached for their guns.