The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

At eleven, unless there were unexpected telegrams or business, she could usually count on finding Dick alone for a space, although invariably busy. Passing the secretaries’ room, the click of a typewriter informed her that one obstacle was removed. In the library, the sight of Mr. Bonbright hunting a book for Mr. Manson, the Shorthorn manager, told her that Dick’s hour with his head men was over.

She pressed the button that swung aside a section of filled book-shelves and revealed the tiny spiral of steel steps that led up to Dick’s work room. At the top, a similar pivoting section of shelves swung obediently to her press of button and let her noiselessly into his room. A shade of vexation passed across her face as she recognized Jeremy Braxton’s voice. She paused in indecision, neither seeing nor being seen.

“If we flood we flood[272],” the mine superintendent was saying. “It will cost a mint – yes, half a dozen mints – to pump out again. And it’s a damned shame to drown the old Harvest[273] that way.”

“But for this last year the books show that we’ve worked at a positive loss,” Paula heard Dick take up. “Every petty bandit from Huerta down to the last peon who’s stolen a horse has gouged us. It’s getting too stiff – taxes extraordinary – bandits, revolutionists, and federals. We could survive it, if only the end were in sight; but we have no guarantee that this disorder may not last a dozen or twenty years.

“Just the same, the old Harvest – think of flooding her!” the superintendent protested.

“And think of Villa,” Dick replied, with a sharp laugh the bitterness of which did not escape Paula. “If he wins he says he’s going to divide all the land among the peons. The next logical step will be the mines. How much do you think we’ve coughed up[274] to the constitutionalists in the past twelvemonth?

“Over a hundred and twenty thousand,” Braxton answered promptly. “Not counting that fifty thousand cold bullion to Torenas before he retreated. He jumped his army at Guaymas and headed for Europe with it – I wrote you all that.”

“If we keep the workings afloat, Jeremy, they’ll go on gouging, gouge without end, Amen. I think we’d better flood. If we can make wealth more efficiently than those rapscallions, let us show them that we can destroy wealth with the same facility.”

“That’s what I tell them. And they smile and repeat that such and such a free will offering, under exigent circumstances, would be very acceptable to the revolutionary chiefs – meaning themselves. The big chiefs never finger one peso in ten of it. Good Lord! I show them what we’ve done. Steady work for five thousand peons. Wages raised from ten centavos a day to a hundred and ten. I show them peons – ten-centavo men when we took them, and five-peso men when I showed them. And the same old smile and the same old itching palm[275], and the same old acceptability of a free will offering from us to the sacred cause of the revolution. By God! Old Diaz was a robber, but he was a decent robber. I said to Arranzo: ‘If we shut down, here’s five thousand Mexicans out of a job – what’ll you do with them?’ And Arranzo smiled and answered me pat. ‘Do with them?’ he said. ‘Why, put guns in their hands and march ’em down to take Mexico City.’”

In imagination Paula could see Dick’s disgusted shrug of shoulders as she heard him say:

“The curse of it is – that the stuff is there, and that we’re the only fellows that can get it out. The Mexicans can’t do it. They haven’t the brains. All they’ve got is the guns, and they’re making us shell out more than we make[276]. There’s only one thing for us, Jeremy. We’ll forget profits for a year or so, lay off the men, and just keep the engineer force on and the pumping going.”

“I threw that into Arranzo,” Jeremy Braxton’s voice boomed. “And what was his comeback? That if we laid off the peons, he’d see to it that the engineers laid off, too, and the mine could flood and be damned to us. – No, he didn’t say that last. He just smiled, but the smile meant the same thing. For two cents I’d a-wrung his yellow neck, except that there’d have been another patriot in his boots and in my office next day proposing a stiffer gouge.

“So Arranzo got his ‘bit’[277], and, on top of it, before he went across to join the main bunch around Juarez, he let his men run off three hundred of our mules – thirty thousand dollars’ worth of mule-flesh right there, after I’d sweetened him, too. The yellow skunk!”

“Who is revolutionary chief in our diggings right now?” Paula heard her husband ask with one of his abrupt shifts that she knew of old time tokened his drawing together the many threads of a situation and proceeding to action.

“Raoul Bena.”

“What’s his rank?”

“Colonel – he’s got about seventy ragamuffins.”

“What did he do before he quit work?”

“Sheep-herder.”