The Trail of 98 | Page 9

first, only worse. I ached as if I had
been beaten. Stiff and sore I dragged myself to the tunnel again. I lifted,
strained, tugged and shoved with a set and tragic face. Five hours of
hell passed. It was noon. I nursed my strength for the after effort.
Angrily I talked to myself, and once more I pulled through. Weary and
slimy with wet mud, I shot down the cable line. Snugly settled in his
bunk, the Prodigal had read another two hundred pages of "Les
Misérables." Yet--I reflected somewhat sadly--I had made two dollars.

On the third day sheer obstinacy forced me to the tunnel. My
self-respect goaded me on. I would not give in. I must hold this job
down, I must, I MUST. Then at the noon hour I fainted.
No one saw me, so I gritted my teeth and once more threw my weight
against the cars. Once more night found me waiting to descend in the
bucket. Then as I stood there was a crash and shouts from below. The
cable had snapped. My Swede and another lay among the rocks with
sorely broken bones. Poor beggars! how they must have suffered
jolting down that boulder-strewn trail to the hospital.
Somehow that destroyed my nerve. I blamed myself indeed. I flogged
myself with reproaches, but it was of no avail. I would sooner beg my
bread than face that tunnel once again. The world seemed to be divided
into two parts, the rest of it and that tunnel. Thank God, I didn't have to
go into it again. I was exultantly happy that I didn't. The Prodigal had
finished his book, and was starting another. That night he borrowed
some of my money to play solo with.
Next day I saw the foreman. I said:
"I want to go. The work up there's too hard for me."
He looked at me kindly.
"All right, sonny," says he, "don't quit. I'll put you in the gravel pit."
So next day I found a more congenial task. There were four of us. We
threw the gravel against a screen where the finer stuff that sifted
through was used in making concrete.
The work was heart-breaking in its monotony. In the biting cold of the
morning we made a start, long before the sun peeped above the wall of
mountain.
We watched it crawl, snail-like, over the virgin sky. We panted in its
heat. We saw it drop again behind the mountain wall, leaving the sky
gorgeously barred with colour from a tawny orange glow to an ice-pale

green--a regular pousse café of a sunset. Then when the cold and the
dark surged back, by the light of the evening star we straightened our
weary spines, and throwing aside pick and shovel hurried to supper.
Heigh-ho! what a life it was. Resting, eating, sleeping; negative
pleasures became positive ones. Life's great principle of compensation
worked on our behalf, and to lie at ease, reading an old paper, seemed
an exquisite enjoyment.
I was much troubled about the Prodigal. He complained of muscular
rheumatism, and except to crawl to meals was unable to leave his bunk.
Every day came the foreman to inquire anxiously if he was fit to go to
work, but steadily he grew worse. Yet he bore his suffering with great
spirit, and, among that nondescript crew, he was a thing of joy and
brightness, a link with that other world which was mine own. They
nicknamed him "Happy," his cheerfulness was so invincible. He played
cards on every chance, and he must have been unlucky, for he
borrowed the last of my small hoard.
One morning I woke about six, and found, pinned to my blanket, a note
from my friend.
"Dear Scotty:
"I grieve to leave you thus, but the cruel foreman insists on me working
off my ten days' board. Racked with pain as I am, there appears to be
no alternative but flight. Accordingly I fade away once more into the
unknown. Will write you general delivery, Los Angeles. Good luck and
good-bye. Yours to a cinder,
"Happy."
There was a hue and cry after him, but he was gone, and a sudden
disgust for the place came over me. For two more days I worked,
crushed by a gloom that momently intensified. Clamant and imperative
in me was the voice of change. I could not become toil-broken, so I saw
the foreman.

"Why do you want to go?" he asked reproachfully.
"Well, sir, the work's too monotonous."
"Monotonous! Well, that's the rummest reason I ever heard a man give
for quitting. But every man knows his own business best. I'll give you a
time-cheque."
While he was making it out I wondered if, indeed, I did know my own
business best; but if