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Updated: June 4, 2025
Then, after a couple of days' unsatisfactory work, the water dropped so low in Big Squaw creek that there was only sufficient pressure to use one scraper. Bruce discharged all the crew save Smaltz, Banule, and Porcupine Jim, who labored in the kitchen a living insult to the Brotherhood of Cooks.
"We dare not risk the other channel, Saunders," said Bruce briefly, "the water's hardly up enough for that." "I don't believe we could make it," Saunders answered; "it's too long a chance." Smaltz was studying the rocks and current intently, as though to impress upon his mind every twist and turn.
"Say, me and Porcupine Jim been talkin' it over and wonderin' if we'd pay our own way around so it wouldn't cost the Company nothin', if you'd let us come down with a boat from Meadows?" "Can you handle a sweep?" "Can I?" Smaltz sniggered. "Try me!" Bruce looked at him a moment before he answered. He was wondering why the very sight of Smaltz irritated him.
He demanded again: "Why didn't you shut down, Smaltz?" "I've told you once," was the sullen answer. Bruce turned to the telephone and rang the bell hard. "Hello hello hello!" came the frantic reply. "Can you swim, Banule?" "Yes." "Then take it where the cable crosses the river. Come quick." He put the receiver back on its hook and stepped to the lever.
Finally he cried: "Ready-O!" The wire tightened and the slack disappeared under Smaltz's steady pull. The carpenter and the crew watched the cross-arm anxiously as the strain came upon it under the taut wire. Their faces brightened as it held. Smaltz looked at Jennings quizzically. "More?" "You ain't heard me tell you yet to stop," was the snarling answer. "Here goes, then."
When Bruce crossed to the work the next morning, the "come-along" was clamped to the transmission wire and hooked to the block-and-tackle. Naturally Jennings had charge of the stretching of the wire and he selected Smaltz as his assistant. All the crew, intensely interested in the test, stood around as Jennings, taciturn and sour and addressing no one but Smaltz, puttered about his preparations.
"Thank God, that worry's over!" Bruce ejaculated as he read it, and Smaltz lingered. "I may get a night's sleep now instead of lying awake listening to the river." "Oh, the machinery's started?" Bruce had an impression that he already knew the contents of the telegram in spite of his air of innocence and his question. "Yes," he nodded briefly.
I'll bet a hundred to one you know how to make horsehair bridles," Woods, the carpenter, had once told him pointedly, and the criticism had voiced Bruce's own thoughts. In the mail which Smaltz had brought down from Ore City was a letter from Helen Dunbar.
It had been laborious, nerve-racking work and every trip had had its accident, culminating in the loss of the best pack-horse in the string, the horse having slipped off the trail, scattering its pack, as Smaltz announced it, "from hell to breakfast." But the iron strips and rods were made into riffles now, and laid.
"Looks like somebudy's been high-gradin' this here pie." The criticism might have touched even a mild-tempered cook; it made a demon of Bertha. She started around the table with the obvious intention of doing Smaltz bodily harm, but at the moment, Porcupine Jim, whose roving eye had been searching the table for more food, lighted upon one of the special dishes set before Jennings' plate.
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