The camp might go to perdition so far
Five hundred yards up the wide bottom of the valley the construction camp sprawled its ugly mass. From where he stood in the doorway he looked down on it over the grade–its straggling unformed planning; the flimsy shacks, half unhewn logs, half canvas, without respect for streets or angles or lines; its half-hearted struggle to lift itself up the slope to the sheltered forest above.
A disreputable, careless, disgusting picture of hardened man catering only to his simplest needs. In large part the survival of previous grade and bridge camps which had merely picked up their canvas when they moved along, it had been patched up with more disreputable canvas, now mouldy and torn, with bits of roof gone here, and windows and doors missing there. The very dregs even of construction camps. Big Jim Torrance himself had used it first on grade and had sold the portable parts to a contractor with work further west. Then O’Connor, the first contractor to tackle the trestle, had shoved his men into what was left with orders to do their damnedest. And now Torrance again, having taken over the task O’Connor had funked in a moment of panic.
Half a thousand bohunks[1] were existing there now, five hundred of the wildest foreigners even Torrance had handled. But they were his gang. And Mile 130 was his camp. That thought had impelled him once to punch the head of a leering engineer who rashly ventured to call it "Torrance’s pig-sty" in Torrance’s hearing. The camp might go to perdition so far as he was concerned, but he wasn’t going to have any rank outsider shoving it along.
With a determined little set to her lips, her only inheritance from her father, Tressa Torrance passed through the living room and seized him by the ear; and he returned to earth with a howl of mock pain.
"You little tyrant!" he protested, wrapping one arm about her and hoisting her to his shoulder. "Your mother wasn’t a patch to you."
She wriggled herself free and, still holding to the ear, led him into the shack.
"At least you can empty the water," she ordered.
"Oh, I can do more than that. How about the pans?"
"They’re done."
He was really contrite. "I guess I did forget, little girl."
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