"And still Smith couldn't see. He thought the charge was of violating
social morality by pursuing a married woman, and tried to mitigate the
offense by showing the woman encouraged him and by pleading: 'And after
all, Mr. Forrest, a man is only a man, and I admit she made a fool of
me and I made a fool of myself.' "'Mr. Smith,' Dick said. 'You've
worked for me eight years. You've been a foreman six years of that
time. I have no complaint against your work. You certainly do know how
to handle labor. About your personal morality I don't care a damn. You
can be a Mormon or a Turk for all it matters to me. Your private acts
are your private acts, and are no concern of mine as long as they do
not interfere with your work or my ranch. Any one of my drivers can
drink his head off Saturday night, and every Saturday night. That's his
business. But the minute he shows a hold-over on Monday morning that is
taken out on my horses, that excites them, or injures them, or
threatens to injure them, or that decreases in the slightest the work
they should perform on Monday, that moment it is my business and the
driver goes down the hill.'
"'You, you mean, Mr. Forrest,' Smith stuttered, 'that, that I'm to go
down the hill?' 'That is just what I mean, Mr. Smith. You are to go
down the hill, not because you climbed over another man's fence--that's
your business and his; but because you were guilty of causing a
disturbance that is an impairment of ranch efficiency.'
"Do you know, Evan," Paula broke in on her recital, "Dick can nose more
human tragedy out of columns of ranch statistics than can the average
fiction writer out of the whirl of a great city. Take the milk
reports--the individual reports of the milkers--so many pounds of milk,
morning and night, from cow so-and-so, so many pounds from cow
so-and-so. He doesn't have to know the man. But there is a decrease in
the weight of milk. 'Mr. Parkman,' he'll say to the head dairyman, 'is
Barchi Peratta married?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Is he having trouble with his
wife?' 'Yes, sir.'
"Or it will be: 'Mr. Parkman, Simpkins has the best long-time record of
any of our milkers. Now he's slumped. What's up?' Mr. Parkman doesn't
know. 'Investigate,' says Dick. 'There's something on his chest. Talk
to him like an uncle and find out. We've got to get it off his chest.'
And Mr. Parkman finds out. Simpkins' boy; working his way through
Stanford University, has elected the joy-ride path and is in jail
waiting trial for forgery. Dick put his own lawyers on the case,
smoothed it over, got the boy out on probation, and Simpkins' milk
reports came back to par. And the best of it is, the boy made good,
Dick kept an eye on him, saw him through the college of engineering,
and he's now working for Dick on the dredging end, earning a hundred
and fifty a month, married, with a future before him, and his father
still milks."
"You are right," Graham murmured sympathetically. "I well named him
when I named him Great Heart."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account