McTeague - Frank Norris (great reads TXT) 📗

here was the plank bridge with its one rotten board; and here the flat overgrown with manzanita, where he once had shot three quail.

At noon, after he had been tramping for some two hours, he halted at a point where the road dipped suddenly. A little to the right of him, and flanking the road, an enormous yellow gravel-pit like an emptied lake gaped to heaven. Farther on, in the distance, a canyon zigzagged toward the horizon, rugged with pine-clad mountain crests. Nearer at hand, and directly in the line of the road, was an irregular cluster of unpainted cabins. A dull, prolonged roar vibrated in the air. McTeague nodded his head as if satisfied.

“That’s the place,” he muttered.

He reshouldered his blanket roll and descended the road. At last he halted again. He stood before a low one-story building, differing from the others in that it was painted. A verandah, shut in with mosquito netting, surrounded it. McTeague dropped his blanket roll on a lumber pile outside, and came up and knocked at the open door. Someone called to him to come in.

McTeague entered, rolling his eyes about him, noting the changes that had been made since he had last seen this place. A partition had been knocked down, making one big room out of the two former small ones. A counter and railing stood inside the door. There was a telephone on the wall. In one corner he also observed a stack of surveyor’s instruments; a big drawing-board straddled on spindle legs across one end of the room, a mechanical drawing of some kind, no doubt the plan of the mine, unrolled upon it; a chromo representing a couple of peasants in a ploughed field (Millet’s Angelus) was nailed unframed upon the wall, and hanging from the same wire nail that secured one of its corners in place was a bullion bag and a cartridge belt with a loaded revolver in the pouch.

The dentist approached the counter and leaned his elbows upon it. Three men were in the room⁠—a tall, lean young man, with a thick head of hair surprisingly gray, who was playing with a half-grown great Dane puppy; another fellow about as young, but with a jaw almost as salient as McTeague’s, stood at the letterpress taking a copy of a letter; a third man, a little older than the other two, was pottering over a transit. This latter was massively built, and wore overalls and low boots streaked and stained and spotted in every direction with gray mud. The dentist looked slowly from one to the other; then at length, “Is the foreman about?” he asked.

The man in the muddy overalls came forward.

“What you want?”

He spoke with a strong German accent.

The old invariable formula came back to McTeague on the instant.

“What’s the show for a job?”

At once the German foreman became preoccupied, looking aimlessly out of the window. There was a silence.

“You hev been miner alretty?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Know how to hendle pick’n shov’le?”

“Yes, I know.”

The other seemed unsatisfied. “Are you a ‘cousin Jack’?”

The dentist grinned. This prejudice against Cornishmen he remembered too.

“No. American.”

“How long sence you mine?”

“Oh, year or two.”

“Show your hends.” McTeague exhibited his hard, callused palms.

“When ken you go to work? I want a chuck-tender on der night-shift.”

“I can tend a chuck. I’ll go on tonight.”

“What’s your name?”

The dentist started. He had forgotten to be prepared for this.

“Huh? What?”

“What’s the name?”

McTeague’s eye was caught by a railroad calendar hanging over the desk. There was no time to think.

“Burlington,” he said, loudly.

The German took a card from a file and wrote it down.

“Give dis card to der boarding-boss, down at der boarding-haus, den gome find me bei der mill at sex o’clock, und I set you to work.”

Straight as a homing pigeon, and following a blind and unreasoned instinct, McTeague had returned to the Big Dipper mine. Within a week’s time it seemed to him as though he had never been away. He picked up his life again exactly where he had left it the day when his mother had sent him away with the travelling dentist, the charlatan who had set up his tent by the bunk house. The house McTeague had once lived in was still there, occupied by one of the shift bosses and his family. The dentist passed it on his way to and from the mine.

He himself slept in the bunk house with some thirty others of his shift. At half-past five in the evening the cook at the boardinghouse sounded a prolonged alarm upon a crowbar bent in the form of a triangle, that hung upon the porch of the boardinghouse. McTeague rose and dressed, and with his shift had supper. Their lunch-pails were distributed to them. Then he made his way to the tunnel mouth, climbed into a car in the waiting ore train, and was hauled into the mine.

Once inside, the hot evening air turned to a cool dampness, and the forest odors gave place to the smell of stale dynamite smoke, suggestive of burning rubber. A cloud of steam came from McTeague’s mouth; underneath, the water swashed and rippled around the car-wheels, while the light from the miner’s candlesticks threw wavering blurs of pale yellow over the gray rotting quartz of the roof and walls. Occasionally McTeague bent down his head to avoid the lagging of the roof or the projections of an overhanging shute. From car to car all along the line the miners called to one another as the train trundled along, joshing and laughing.

A mile from the entrance the train reached the breast where McTeague’s gang worked. The men clambered from the cars and took up the labor where the day shift had left it, burrowing their way steadily through a primeval river bed.

The candlesticks thrust into the crevices of the gravel strata lit up faintly the half dozen moving figures befouled with sweat and with wet gray mould. The picks struck into the loose gravel with a yielding shock. The long-handled shovels