Duncan chuckled conspiratorially. 'Well, we know Maxwell ain't even going to come close.' The chuckle turned into a manic laugh that set Johnny's teeth on edge.
'Chinks weren't much help,' Tibbits noted, choosing to ignore Duncan.
Johnny nodded. 'Gets under my craw sometimes.'
'Good workers, though,' Tibbits said.
He watched two of them pass by, carrying a gutshot Sioux toward the tracks. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I guess they are.'
Another Indian raid.
Harrison was so angry and frustrated he felt like hitting the wall. This time, they hadn't attacked the crew or the camp but had damaged the rails two days east of line's end. It had been a surprisingly primitive assault, conducted not with modern weapons or stolen explosives but with rocks and sheer manpower that had been used to seriously damage the tracks. A supply train headed west toward Wyoming had been derailed, all four cars overturned. Though the engineer and the other four men on board had escaped thanks to a bevy of pack animals that had been on their way to the workers' camp to replace those lost in recent attacks, by the time agents of the railroad returned to survey the damage, the cars had all been burned and adjacent tracks piled high with debris.
Now he had to get a crew to repair the damage before another supply train could be sent to the workers- which would delay construction for at least a week.
Assuming he could
He could always ship some Chinese over there. They did anything they were ordered to do. And for pennies on the dollar. The Chinks were so happy to be in America they were willing to take on any shit job that was thrown at them.
Harrison stared out his office window at the rail yard. What about that, though? There was no way he could finish this project on time without the Chinese. Six thousand of them were on his payroll right this moment, he didn't regret for a second hiring them (but a lot of them were coming over now, and thanks to railroad work, they were dispersing across the country. He hated to admit it, but maybe that blowhard Chester Williams was right; maybe there was some sort of reason, some long-term goal. America was a big country and still largely unsettled. They'd had to kick out the British, the French and the Spanish to get where they were today, and they were still trying to put down these Indians. Maybe the Chinese were thinking ahead, planning for the future, hoping to get a piece of the pie and settle a large portion of the land themselves.
I hated to think he was contributing to that.
But what could he do about it? He owned a railroad company. It was his job to keep the trains moving, not decide who was to settle where.
Still, this was his country, and he didn't want to see il tinned. As obnoxious as Williams was, the man nnyhi have a point. The next time he was in Washington. Harrison decided, he'd bring it up with people who might have some ideas on the subject, who might have some answers, who might be able to do something about it.
O'Hearn stood above the navvy, kicking him as hard as he could while the Chink tried to scramble away. 'When I say now, I mean now!' he shouted, emphasizing each word with a boot to the backside. He had no idea if the worker understood what he was saying or even if he'd understood the original order, but it felt good to get his frustration out this way, and he continued kicking even after the man had become unconscious.
The translator, as usual, was sick and useless, sweating with a fever in one of the Chinese tents. O'Hearn didn't think he'd ever seen a more womanly man. The son of a bitch was probably a eunuch. Didn't they do that kind of thing over there in China?
The peculiar thing was, the other Chinese seemed to never get sick. Either that or they just didn't show it. His men had had the dysentery and assorted stomach ailments for half the season. But those Chinks just kept on toiling day after day, unchanged and unfazed, like machines. It was probably because they'd brought all their own food with them, with all of those weird herbs and shit. They even boiled their water before drinking it. If that food they cooked hadn't been so goddamn disgusting, he would have asked them to cook for the whole camp, but he wasn't about to subject his men to that heathen slop.
Besides, if regular people ate that food, they might get poisoned.
Or the Chinese might poison them on purpose.
They made him mad sometimes with their passivity, and on those occasions he found himself wanting to just beat the living tar out of them-which he often did. But that didn't seem to make any difference. Even with bruised and bloodied faces, they still stared at him blankly through those slanty eyes, and it made him want to beat them all the more. Every so often, though, he thought he saw something else behind the submissiveness, an inner hidden fire, a desire for revenge, and he thought that maybe the Chinks
Or maybe it was just his imagination.
The one he'd just kicked into unconsciousness lay unmoving on the ground, and his companions stood by watching impassively. O'Hearn motioned angrily for ihcm to pick him up and take him away, and four of them did so, looking at him all the while with those unreadable eyes, their fellows standing behind them motionless. Some of them had to have wives back home, he thought. He wondered, if he fucked their wives in front of them, whether that would get a reaction out of the passive sons of bitches.
It had been a long time since he'd had a woman, and even an Indian one or a Chinese one sounded good at this point. The railroad had promised to provide women when they were recruiting workers, but they'd gone back on their promise, and the men were getting restless. It wasn't right to live like this; it wasn't natural. They weren't priests.
Nearby, he heard the crack of a whip as one of the hands tried to make a recalcitrant horse team pull a load of ties to the track. That gave him an idea. Maybe tonight, for the men's amusement, he could arrange a little wager. To cheer them up. He could take out the Chinese translator, tie him to a post and whip him. The men could place bets on how long the Chink would last before passing out.
They were going to be in this pass for the better part of a week, so there wouldn't be much variety in the work. Besides, everyone knew their jobs by now. They needed the translator only under special circumstances. If he was out of commission for a few days, it shouldn't pose a hardship.
It might even teach the translator to be a little bit more of a man in the future.
O'Hearn grinned.
And the men always liked a little sport.
Although he still kept the house in Chicago, as well as an apartment in New York, for the past five years, Chester Williams' primary residence had been in the small town of Bear Flats, California. It was near there that he had made his fortune in gold, and it was there that he had made his home, using California's finest builders to construct a house he had designed with one of New York's top architects. He felt at home here, and in this backwater village, away from the prying eyes of his peers and the gossiping mouths of their wives, he had set up a virtual fiefdom, a community in which the constabulary existed to do his bidding and the other homeowners lived in fear of his wrath. Several of the local businesses had been set up specifically to serve his needs-he was the only customer of the bookbinder, for instance, and if it had not been for him, there would be no haberdasher in town-and not only did he notice the deference the locals showed to him; he expected it.
It had been known for quite some time that Crazy Merle, the miner who lived up in Hells Canyon foolishly insisting that there was an undiscovered vein of gold running through Dodge Mountain, had taken on a Chinese wife after killing her husband in a drunken rage back in Colima. He and the woman had even had a half-breed kid a while back, and though no one had bothered them until now-afraid that Merle might shoot them on their way up the canyon, more than likely-Williams decided that that had to change. It was an abomination, a man consorting with a Chinese, and after returning from his most recent meeting with Harrison, he decided that such behavior would no longer be tolerated in Bear Flats.
Williams sent his
