American boys he couldn’t catch so easily with these ideas. Americans knew this sort of Pat too well to fall for his cooperative contracts. He took on Americans only when he could procure no others. Most welcome were the newly arrived Hunks, Czechs, Poles, Germans, Italians, fellows who had heard back home the stories of men working in the Mexican oil-fields and earning from thirty to fifty dollars a day almost without bending a finger. Having arrived in the republic, they learned during the first week that such fantastic wages were as rare as are the wages a bricklayer gets in Chicago, according to the fairy-tales circulating in Europe. After these men are here two months or so they kneel down before any contractor who offers them five dollars a day, and if he offers them eight, they worship him as they never worship the Almighty, and the contractor may do with them what he likes. After six months without a job they are ready to accept whatever is offered.
Dobbs would not have fallen for the doctrines of Pat McCormick had he tried them on him. His economic condition left him no choice. He was in his way as glad at landing this job as were the Hunks.
The cooperative arrangement made it obligatory for all hands to work eighteen hours out of twenty—four, every day as long as the contract lasted. There was no extra pay. Eight dollars was the pay for the working-day, and the length of the working-day was decided by Pat. There was no rest on Sunday. The Mexican hands were protected by their law. They could not be worked a minute longer than eight hours or Pat would have landed in jail and been kept there until he paid ten thousand pesos for breaking the labor law.
A sort of road had been cut out of the jungle so that in very dry weather the trucks could come right on the lot where the camp was to be rigged up. Mexican peons, having been sent a few weeks ahead by Pat, had the camp-site cleared when the rigbuilders arrived.
Eight dollars a day looked like a lot of money when Dobbs had nothing in his stomach, but he learned that eight dollars a day may be meager pay for certain jobs. The heat was never less than one hundred degrees in the open, where all the work had to be done, surrounded by jungle. He was pestered by the ten thousand sorts of insects and reptiles the jungle breeds. He thought a hundred times a day that his eyes would burn away from the heat above and around him. No breeze could reach the men at work here. Carrying lumber, hoisting it high up for the derrick to be built, and hanging often for minutes like monkeys with only one hand on a beam, or holding on with one leg snake-fashion around a rope and grasping heavy boards swinging out that had to be hauled in to be riveted or bolted, he risked his life twenty times every day, and all for eight dollars.
Pat allowed no rest except for a few hours’ sleep. Until eleven at night they worked by the light of gas- lanterns, and at five in the morning they were already hard at work again. “We have to use the cool morning hours, boys,” Pat would say when he waked them. No sooner had they gulped down their coffee at meal-time and settled to pick their teeth leisurely than Pat would get restless and hustle them up: “Boys, sure it’s hot. I know. We’re in the tropics. It’s hot in Texas sometimes too. Hell knows it’s not my fault. I have to finish that goddamn contract. The sooner we’re through, the sooner we’ll be out of this hell here, and we’ll go back to town and have cold drinks. Hi, Harry, get the Mexicans, those damn lazy rascals, to unload the steamengine, and start to adjust the parts. Jump at it. And, Slick, you and Dobbs get the drum up the derrick and have it anchored. I’ll see after the cabins. Hurry, hurry up and get busy.”
Pat McCormick sure made a pile with these contracts. He was paid well by the companies for the rigging contracts. The companies allowed fair wages and decent working-hours for all, but the sooner Pat could finish the job, the more was left over to go into his pockets, for he had no other expenses than the wages he paid out. To drain the last ounce of work out of his men he promised them a bonus if inside of a certain number of days the job were finished. This promise of a bonus was his whip, since he knew that a real slave-driver’s whip would not do with workers today. He won; he won always. He rigged up two camps in the same time other contractors would have rigged barely one.
“All right, boys, put all your bones into that job. You’ll be with me again on my next contract. I’ve already got three almost for sure coming my way. Get going.” This was another whip he used, promising his slaves future jobs provided they worked the way he wanted them to.
When the camp was rigged, the gang went back to town. The Mexican peons returned to their near-by villages.
Said Dobbs: “Now what about the pay? I haven’t seen a buck yet from you, Pat.”
“What’s the hurry, pal? You’ll get your dough all right, don’t you worry a bit. I won’t run away with it. You’re again on my next contract I have with the Mex Gulf. Sure you are.”
“Now look here, Pat,” said Dobbs, “I haven’t got a cent even to buy me a new shirt. I look like the worst bum.”
“Now don’t you cry out for mother here,” Pat tried to quiet him. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let you have thirty per cent of your pay. That’s all I can do for you. And don’t you tell the others.”
Dobbs learned that none of the other boys had received his wages in full. Two who were eager to be with Pat on the next contract again had asked very humbly “at least a little, please, Mr. Pat,” and they were awarded five per cent, so that they could have a few meals; they had not eaten since they had returned to town.
11
Within a few days Dobbs had heard many tales about Pat McCormick. Pat was known not to pay cash to his men if he could avoid it. This was one of the reasons that he seldom had an American with him on a contract. Only foreigners and halfbaked Americans fell for him. Most of them were glad to go with him any time he hollered. They had their meals because Pat paid the Chinese cook for catering as advance on the wages for the boys. And usually he paid something in cash when the boys he owed were running after him and crying that they had no money for eats and for beds.
One afternoon when Dobbs was drinking a glass of coffee at the bar of the Spanish cafe on the plaza, Curtin, passing by, saw him and stepped up.
“I might as well have coffee too. What you doing, Dobble?”
Curtin, who was from California, had worked for Pat with Dobbs.
“Did you get your money?” Dobbs asked.
“Forty per cent is all I’ve squeezed out of that bandit so far.”
“I’d like to know one thing—if he has collected the pay for the contract—that’s what I would like to know,” Dobbs said.
“Rather difficult to find out,” answered Curtin. “The companies are often a bit slow in paying the contracts. Often they are short of ready cash, since the funds they have here in the republic are all taken up for drilling- expenses or for paying out options unexpectedly acquired.”
“You’ve got no idea, Cuts, for which company the contract was?”
“Not even a touch. Could just as well have been for an outsider, a private party that wants to try his luck in oil. What do I know?” Curtin said.
For a whole week Dobbs and Curtin had been running after Pat. He could not be found anywhere. At the Bristol Hotel, where he usually lived, the clerk knew nothing about him.
“He’s hiding out somewhere to get away with the money,” Curtin thought. “He knows that we can’t hang around here all the time. So he waits for the moment that we take another job; then he comes out of his hole.”
Dobbs, after another gulp of coffee, said: “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that guy uses our money to speculate with in some new well. He’s got tips all the way to the Alamo and to the Ebano sections.”
This idea made Curtin hot. “That guy’s going to learn something from me. Just let me catch him.”
At that very instant Pat McCormick strolled across the plaza, with a Mexican dame at his side who was flashing a new dress, elegant shoes, and a new colorful silk umbrella.
“What do you think of that?” Dobbs asked. “Rags paid for with our hard-earned money.”
“Let’s get him, right now,” Curtin hollered, “and let’s get him hard this time.”
As quick as the devil Curtin was at Pat’s side, and with him was Dobbs.
Curtin caught Pat by the shirt-sleeve, for he was wearing no coat.
“How are you, boys? Want a drink?” Pat tried to be friendly.
Then he noticed that these two men were deadly serious, so he said to the dame: “Perdone me, shiucksy dear, mi vida, I’ve got some business to attend to with these two gentlemen. I’ll take you over to that cafe. You wait there for me a while, honey.”
