Hard Money by Short Luke;

Author:Short, Luke;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Borg Hulteen was roaming the way between the two bunkhouses, his eyes on the bunkhouse doors, a slab of bread and ham in his fist. It was a half-hour yet till the shift change at the tunnel head, but Borg was hunting up his crew, ordering them one by one away from their brief rest into the tunnel. By six, before six, he would have them at work.

Seay stepped to the door of the office and called to him, and Borg tramped over, chewing morosely on the tag end of his supper. Seay was already seated in the doorway, and Borg sat down beside him. From one side of his mouth he emptied a considerable accumulation of tobacco juice; that done, he chewed again on the bread and ham.

“Hot, hunh?” he commented.

“I talked with Bonal this noon,” Seay said. “They’ve got him on the run again.”

“Money?”

“Yes.”

“How far can we get with what we’ve got?”

“That depends on you,” Seay said. “We’ve got enough for a month’s expenses, Bonal says.”

Borg was quiet a moment. “We can turn it into two if you’ll keep them process servers away from the tunnel head.” Borg grinned suddenly. “Hell, come to that, we could store enough grub in there to make it three—if you could still keep them out of the tunnel.”

Seay smiled meagerly. “It may come to that. I fought with Bonal to lay part of that money on equipment. If we got the drills we can fight court orders for a long time. Providing, of course”—and here he looked swiftly at Borg—“that the men will take a wage cut and maybe no wages at all toward the last.”

“I know nine men that will,” Borg answered slowly.

“It may come to that, and I hate to do it.”

Borg rose and wiped his mouth with a hairy forearm. “Maybe I’m wrong, Phil, but I think we’re workin’ into a new formation there at the head—softer rock.”

Seay looked up at him. “You sure?”

Borg nodded. “I ain’t one of these experts with a hammer, but I can tell how it drills. This is softer. Besides, the color’s different. I’ll know better tonight when I come off.”

When Borg was gone Seay sat on the sill, turning over in his mind the implications of what Borg had just told him. But he refused to count on luck, and he rose and returned to the office. On the desk was the time sheet, his legacy from Hardiston. When he thought of that spare, vicious little man, the old anger boiled up in him, but it was an impotent anger now. Not even Tober guessed that it was Hardiston who had sold the tunnel information to Feldhake—sold it twice, this last time out of revenge for being detected in selling it the first time. Nor did Bonal, who accepted Seay’s word that the desert heat was breaking the little man, and that he had been sent to the coast for a vacation.

Fighting his restlessness, he concentrated on the time sheet, the pen fragile and strange in his square hand.

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