the back door to await his pleasure
"Big Jim Torrance, you mean," he interrupted, throwing back his huge head to laugh. "The crudest boss that ever hammered a lazy bohunk to his pick. No, no, little girl, not all your airs, not all my big jobs, can make me more than a half-taught rough-neck–a success, I’ll admit. But the biggest success he ever had was in having a daughter–"
He dived for her, but she held him off by planting the bottom of the pan on his face.
"Now," she ordered, "you finish your work."
By the time he had obeyed orders–emptied the last pan of water, taken a look at the two horses in the stable behind the shack, tossed his mud-caked boots through the back door to await his pleasure–inter-larding between each chore another glance at the trestle–Tressa was in her own room.
Torrance returned to the front door. A crash of musical instruments broke from the ugly clutter of buildings on the river bottom.
"Do cut it short to-night, Tressa. Morani’s got the orchestra going already. Where that Italian devil stows music in that vile body of his, and where he manages to find more of it in those other brutes, beats me."
He could hear her moving about her room, sliding drawers, lifting and dropping the implements of her evening toilet.
"Not another woman in a hundred miles," he grumbled, "at least not one that matters. And yet I got to go through this waiting every night!"
She laughed, her mouth full of the coil of her hair.
His eye moved upward from the camp and settled on one lone shack that crowned a promontory overlooking the ugly scene below.
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