Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [80]
“Tregoning? That nice toothless fellow? I thought he was an absolute fixture.”
“So did everybody else. Fourteen years he’s worked here. Maybe he thought he was a fixture too, but nobody’s a fixture with Kendall. If he’s going to make an example of somebody, he doesn’t care if there isn’t a competent replacement in camp. There isn’t, in fact. Tregoning was a good one. But he came home from San Jose on the stage the other day with some lengths of stovepipe he’d bought, and Ewing spotted him. You know the rule about buying only at the company store. Kendall gave him forty-eight hours to get off the mountain. That means by this afternoon.”
“Oh,” she said, “that’s despicable!”
“You’re damned right it’s despicable.”
The warning whistle blew, so harsh and peremptory it seemed some extension of Kendall himself, not simply of the company’s power. Before it had stopped, doors were opening on Shakerag Street; within two minutes there were men in the street with lunch pails. Through the open door she could hear their glottal talk like a gabbling of geese. She said, “Couldn’t you have done something?”
“I went to him and protested,” Oliver said. “He told me my job was to keep the Santa Isabel tunnel going in, he’d take care of the men. I think he lit on poor old Tregoning so hard because he knows I like him. ”
“Oliver, you must expose that man to Mr. Prager and Mr. Smith!”
“Yes?” said Oliver, with a sidelong glance. “They all belong to the same clubs.”
“But surely they wouldn’t allow this sort of thing.”
“Kendall’s the manager,” Oliver said. “From the point of the view of the stockholders, he’s a good one. He’s got the mine paying good dividends. They’re not going to jeopardize their profits just because he fires a Cornish hoist man.”
“But you said he’d like to fire you, too, and that could hurt the company. Look what you saved them on that machinery.”
“He won’t fire me,” Oliver said. “He’ll just try to make me quit. The day after I went and talked to him about Tregoning he had Hernandez hang that sign in here. He doesn’t mean ‘No Smoking.’ He means, You’d better watch your step, young fellow.’ ”
“But you stand right in front of it and smoke!”
“Yep.”
“What if he sees you?”
“I expect he will.”
“But what if he calls you down?”
“He’ll only do it once.”
“Oliver,” she said earnestly, “why do we even try to stay?”
“Because I’m still learning something,” he said. “I’m getting a lot of good experience, and an engineer’s capital is his experience. Also I haven’t got any other job lined up. Also you like it here, and you’ve still got some drawings to do.”
“I wouldn’t have liked it if I’d known about all this. I can’t, ever again.”
“Oh, it’s nothing new,” he said. “There’s just this sort of crisis right now.
“I hate to think of you having to submit to that man.”
“Submit?” he said mildly. “Is that what I’m doing?”
The seven o’clock whistle cut loose, screaming across the gulch. Just on its dying wail Mr. Hernandez came in. Susan saw that the street outside had a woman or two in it, but not a single man. Not a straggler was hurrying to tunnel or shaft house or tramway. This morning everybody was on time. She supposed the spies would report that the object lesson taught through Tregoning and the two Mexicans had been taken to heart. When she first arrived, she had thought the place as orderly as a military post. Now she understood how it was done.
“Buenos dias,” she said in response to Hernandez’s soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.
Oliver laid a hand on her back. “You’d better get. No loitering in this office, eh, Chepe?”
Hernandez made a small sound with his tongue against his teeth. “Did you hear that he promised to