The U. P. Trail by Zane Grey (historical books to read TXT) 📗

was one Irish trooper of thousands who varied the song and tune to suit his taste. The content alone they all held. Drill! They were laborers who could turn into regiments at a word.

They shaved their stubby beards and donned their best—a bronzed, sturdy, cheery army of wild boys. The curse rested but lightly upon their broad shoulders.

Strangely enough, the morning began without the gusty wind so common to that latitude, and the six inches of powdery white dust did not rise. The wind, too, waited. The powers of heaven smiled in the clear, quiet morning, but the powers of hell waited—for the hours to come, the night and the darkness.

At nine o’clock a mob of five thousand men had congregated around the station, most of them out in the open, on the desert side of the track. They were waiting for the pay-train to arrive. This hour was the only orderly one that Benton ever saw. There were laughter, profanity, play—a continuous hum, but compared to Benton’s usual turmoil, it was pleasant. The workmen talked in groups, and, like all crowds of men sober and unexcited, they were given largely to badinage and idle talk.

“Wot was ut I owed ye, Moike?” asked a strapping grader.

Mike scratched his head. “Wor it thorty dollars this toime?”

“It wor,” replied the other. “Moike, yez hev a mimory.”

A big Negro pushed out his huge jaw and blustered at his fellows.

“I’s a-gwine to bust thet yaller nigger’s haid,” he declared.

“Bill, he’s your fr’en’. Cool down, man, cool down,” replied a comrade.

A teamster was writing a letter in lead-pencil, using a board over his knees.

“Jim, you goin’ to send money home?” queried a fellow-laborer.

“I am that, an’ first thing when I get my pay,” was the reply.

“Reminds me, I owe for this suit I’m wearin’. I’ll drop in an’ settle.”

A group of spikers held forth on a little bank above the railroad track, at a point where a few weeks before they had fastened those very rails with lusty blows.

“Well, boys, I think I see the smoke of our pay-dirt, way down the line,” said one.

“Bandy, your eyes are pore,” replied another.

“Yep, she’s comin’,” said another. “‘Bout time, for I haven’t two-bits to my name.”

“Boys, no buckin’ the tiger for me to-day,” declared Bandy.

He was laughed at by all except one quiet comrade who gazed thoughtfully eastward, back over the vast and rolling country. This man was thinking of home, of wife and little girl, of what pay-day meant for them.

Bandy gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder.

“Frank, you got drunk an’ laid out all night, last payday.”

Frank remembered, but he did not say what he had forgotten that last pay-day.

A long and gradual slope led from Benton down across the barren desert toward Medicine Bow. The railroad track split it and narrowed to a mere thread upon the horizon. The crowd of watching, waiting men saw smoke rise over that horizon line, and a dark, flat, creeping object. Through the big throng ran a restless murmur. The train was in sight. It might have been a harbinger of evil, for a subtle change, nervous, impatient, brooding, visited that multitude. A slow movement closed up the disintegrated crowd and a current of men worked forward to encounter resistance and opposing currents. They had begun to crowd for advantageous positions closer to the pay-car so as to be the first in line.

A fight started somewhere, full of loud curses and dull blows; and then a jostling mass tried the temper of the slow-marching men. Some boss yelled an order from a box-car, and he was hooted. There was no order. When the train whistled for Benton a hoarse and sustained shout ran through the mob, not from all lips, nor from any massed group, but taken up from man to man—a strange sound, the first note of calling Benton.

The train arrived. Troops alighting preserved order near the pay-car; and out of the dense mob a slow stream of men flowed into the car at one end and out again at the other.

Bates, a giant digger and a bully, was the first man in the line, the first to get his little share of the fortunes in gold passing out of the car that day.

Long before half of that mob had received its pay Bates lay dead upon a sanded floor, killed in a drunken brawl.

And the Irishman Mike had received his thirty dollars.

And the big Negro had broken the head of his friend.

And the teamster had forgotten to send money home.

And his comrade had neglected to settle for the suit of clothes he was wearing.

And Bandy, for all his vows, had gone straight for bucking the tiger.

And Frank, who had gotten drunk last pay-day, had been mindful of wife and little girl far away and had done his duty.

As the spirit of the gangs changed with the coming of the gold, so did that of the day.

The wind began to blow, the dust began to fly, the sun began to burn; and the freshness and serenity of the morning passed.

Main street in Benton became black-streaked with men, white-sheeted with dust. There was a whining whistle in the wind as it swooped down. It complained; it threatened; it strengthened; and from the heating desert it blew in stiflingly hot. A steady tramp, tramp, tramp rattled the loose boards as the army marched down upon Benton. It moved slowly, the first heave of a great mass getting under way. Stores and shops, restaurants and hotels and saloons, took toll from these first comers. Benton swallowed up the builders as fast as they marched from the pay-train. It had an insatiable maw. The bands played martial airs, and soldiers who had lived through the Rebellion felt the thrill and the quick-step and the call of other days.

Toward afternoon Benton began to hurry. The hour was approaching when crowded halls and tents must make room for fresh and unspent gangs. The swarms of men still marched up the street. Benton was gay and noisy and busy then. White shirts and blue and red plaid held their brightness despite the dust. Gaudily dressed women passed in and out of the halls. All was excitement, movement, color, merriment, and dust and wind and heat. The crowds moved on because they were pushed on. Music, laughter, shuffling feet and clinking glass, a steady tramp, voices low and voices loud, the hoarse brawl of the barker—all these varying elements merged into a roar—a roar that started with a merry note and swelled to a nameless din.

The sun set, the twilight fell, the wind went down, the dust settled, and night mantled Benton. The roar of the day became subdued. It resembled the purr of a gorging hyena. The yellow and glaring