“Aw, Tom, I was just talkin’. Just a joke, Tom, I was just—”
“Yellow, too,” snarled Tom, stepping forward, raising a solid Texan boot.
Peebles barked “Tom!” and the foot came back to the ground.
“Out o’ my sight,” rumbled the foreman. “Git!”
Dennis got. Al Knowles said vaguely, “Naow, Tom, y’all cain’t—”
“You, y’wall-eyed string-bean!” Tom raved, his voice harsh and strained. “Go ’long with yer Siamese twin!”
“O.K., O.K.,” said Al, white-faced, and disappeared into the dark after Dennis.
“Nuts to this,” said Chub. “I’m turnin’ in.” He went to a crate and hauled out a mosquito-hooded sleeping bag and went off without another word. Harris and Kelly, who were both on their feet, sat down again. Old Peebles hadn’t moved.
Tom stood staring out into the dark, his arms straight at his sides, his fists knotted.
“Sit down,” said Peebles gently. Tom turned and stared at him.
“Sit down. I can’t change that dressing ’less you do.” He pointed at the bandage around Tom’s elbow. It was red, a widening stain, the tattered tissues having parted as the big Georgian bunched his infuriated muscles. He sat down.
“Talkin’ about dumbness,” said Harris calmly, as Peebles went to work, “I was about to say that I got the record. I done the dumbest thing anybody ever did on a machine. You can’t top it.”
“I could,” said Kelly. “Runnin’ a crane dragline once. Put her in boom gear and started to boom her up. Had an eighty-five-foot stick on her. Machine was standing on wooden mats in th’ middle of a swamp. Heard the motor miss and got out of the saddle to look at the filter-glass. Messed around back there longer than I figured, and the boom went straight up in the air and fell backwards over the cab. Th’ jolt tilted my mats an’ she slid backwards slow and stately as you please, butt-first into the mud. Buried up to the eyeballs, she was.” He laughed quietly. “Looked like a ditching machine!”
“I still say I done the dumbest thing ever, bar none,” said Harris. “It was on a river job, widening a channel. I come back to work from a three-day binge, still rum-dumb. Got up on a dozer an’ was workin’ around on the edge of a twenty-foot cliff. Down at the foot of the cliff was a big hickory tree, an’ growin’ right along the edge was a great big limb. I got the dopey idea I should break it off. I put one track on the limb and the other on the cliff edge and run out away from the trunk. I was about halfway out, an’ the branch saggin’ some, before I thought what would happen if it broke. Just about then it did break. You know hickory — if it breaks at all it breaks altogether. So down we go into thirty feet of water — me an’ the cat. I got out from under somehow. When all them bubbles stopped comin’ up I swum around lookin’ down at it. I was still paddlin’ around when the superintendent came rushin’ up. He wants to know what’s up. I yell at him, ‘Look down there, the way that water is movin’ an’ shiftin’, looks like the cat is workin’ down there.’ He pursed his lips and tsk tsked. My, that man said some nasty things to me.”
“Where’d you get your next job?” Kelly exploded.
“Oh, he didn’t fire me,” said Harris, soberly. “Said he couldn’t afford to fire a man as dumb as that. Said he wanted me around to look at whenever he felt bad.”
Tom said, “Thanks, you guys. That’s as good a way as any of sayin’ that everybody makes mistakes.” He stood up, examining the new dressing, turning his arm in front of the lantern. “You all can think what you please, but I don’t recollect there was any dumbness went on that mesa this evenin’. That’s finished with, anyway. Do I have to say that Dennis’ idea about it is all wet?”
Harris said one foul word that completely disposed of Dennis and anything he might say.
Peebles said, “It’ll be all right. Dennis an’ his popeyed friend’ll hang together, but they don’t amount to anything. Chub’ll do whatever he’s argued into.”
“So you got ’em all lined up, hey?” Tom shrugged. “In the meantime, are we going to get an airfield built?”
“We’ll get it built,” Peebles said. “Only — Tom, I got no right to give you any advice, but go easy on the rough stuff after this. It does a lot of harm.”
“I will if I can,” said Tom gruffly. They broke up and turned in.
Peebles was right. It did no harm. It made Dennis use the word ‘murder’ when they found, in the morning, that Rivera had died during the night.
The work progressed in spite of everything that had happened. With equipment like that, it’s hard to slow things down. Kelly bit two cubic yards out of the bluff with every swing of the big shovel, and Dumptors are the fastest short-haul earth movers yet devised. Dennis kept the service road clean for them with his pan, and Tom and Chub spelled each other on the bulldozer they had detached from its pan to make up for the lack of the Seven, spending their alternate periods with transit and stakes. Peebles was rod-man for the surveys, and in between times worked on setting up his field shop, keeping the water cooler and battery chargers running, and lining up his forge and welding tables. The operators fuelled and serviced their own equipment, and there was little delay. Rocks and marl came out of the growing cavity in the side of the central mesa — a whole third of it had to come out — were spun down to the edge of the swamp, which lay across the lower end of the projected runway, in the hornet-howling dump-tractors, their big driving wheels churning up vast clouds of dust, and were dumped and spread and walked in by the whining two-cycle dozer. When muck began to pile up in front of the fill, it was blasted out of the way with carefully placed charges of sixty percent dynamite and the craters filled with rocks and stone from the ruins, and surfaced with easily compacting marl, run out of a clean deposit by the pan.
And when he had his shop set up, Peebles went up the hill to get the Seven. When he got to it he just stood there for a moment scratching his head, and then, shaking his head, he ambled back down the hill and went for Tom.
“Been looking at the Seven,” he said, when he had flagged the moaning two-cycle and Tom had climbed off.
“What’d you find?”
Peebles held out an arm. “A list as long as that.” He shook his head. “Tom, what really happened up there?”
“Governor went haywire and she run away,” Tom said promptly, deadpan.
“Yeah, but—” For a long moment he held Tom’s eyes. Then he sighed. “O.K., Tom. Anyhow, I can’t do a thing up there. We’ll have to bring her back and I’ll have to have this tractor to tow her down. And first I have to have some help — the track idler adjustment bolt’s busted and the right track is off the track rollers.”
“Oh-h-h. So that’s why she couldn’t get to the kid, running on the starting motor. Track would hardly turn, hey?”
“It’s a miracle she ran as far as she did. That track is really jammed up. Riding right up on the roller flanges. And that ain’t the half of it. The head’s gone, like Harris said, and Lord only knows what I’ll find when I open her up.”
“Why bother?”
“What?”
“We can get along without that dozer,” said Tom suddenly. “Leave her where she is. There’s lots more for you to do.”
“But what for?”
“Well, there’s no call to go to all that trouble.”
Peebles scratched the side of his nose and said, “I got a new head, track master pins — even a spare starting motor. I got tools to make what I don’t stock.” He pointed at the long row of dumps left by the hurtling dump-tractors while they had been talking. “You got a pan tied up because you’re using this machine to doze with, and you can’t tell me you can’t use another one. You’re gonna have to shut down one or two o’ those Dumptors if you go on like this.”