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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mountain Divide, by Frank H. Spearman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Mountain Divide
+
+Author: Frank H. Spearman
+
+Illustrator: Armand Both
+
+Release Date: August 10, 2009 [EBook #29656]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOUNTAIN DIVIDE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MOUNTAIN DIVIDE
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY FRANK H. SPEARMAN
+
+PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+  ROBERT KIMBERLY. Illustrated by James
+    Montgomery Flagg. 12mo                           Net $1.30
+
+  WHISPERING SMITH. A Story of Rocky Mountain
+    Life. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. 12mo               $1.50
+
+  THE DAUGHTER OF A MAGNATE. Illustrated. 12mo           $1.50
+
+  DOCTOR BRYSON. A Novel. 12mo                           $1.50
+
+  THE MOUNTAIN DIVIDE. Illustrated. 12mo             Net $1.25
+
+  THE STRATEGY OF GREAT RAILROADS.
+    With Maps. 12mo                                  Net $1.50
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: AS BUCK'S STRAINING EYE FOLLOWED THE MOVEMENT, THE SECOND
+INDIAN STRUCK THE CLUB DOWN.]
+
+
+
+
+THE MOUNTAIN DIVIDE
+
+BY
+
+FRANK H. SPEARMAN
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY
+
+ARMAND BOTH
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+NEW YORK :: 1912
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1912, by
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+Published September, 1912
+
+
+
+
+THIS STORY WITHOUT LOVE,
+
+IS NONE THE LESS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED
+
+TO
+
+MY YOUNGEST SON
+
+ARTHUR DUNNING SPEARMAN
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  As Buck's straining eye followed the movement, the
+      second Indian struck the club down.               _Frontispiece_
+  It was only after a moment that the lineman could be
+      seen to gain.                                                 92
+  "Let that gate alone or I'll brain you," he cried.               250
+  For Scott to draw and fire was but one movement.                 300
+
+
+
+
+THE MOUNTAIN DIVIDE
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Night had fallen and a warm rain drifting down from the mountains hung
+in a mist over the railroad yards and obscured the lights of Medicine
+Bend. Two men dismounting from their drooping horses at the foot of
+Front Street threw the reins to a man in waiting and made their way on
+foot across the muddy square to the building which served the new
+railroad as a station and as division head-quarters. In Medicine Bend,
+the town, the railroad, everything was new; and the broad, low pine
+building which they entered had not yet been painted.
+
+The public waiting-room was large, roughly framed, and lighted with
+hanging kerosene lamps. Within the room a door communicated with the
+agent's office, and this was divided by a wooden railing into a
+freight office and a ticket and telegraph office.
+
+It could be seen, as the two men paused at the door of the inner room,
+that the first wore a military fatigue-cap, and his alert carriage as
+he threw open his cape-coat indicated the bearing of an American army
+officer. He was of medium height, and his features and eyes implied
+that the storms and winds of the plains and mountains were familiar
+friends. This was Park Stanley, charged at that time with the
+construction of the first transcontinental railroad.
+
+The agent's office, which he and his companion now looked into, was
+half-filled with a crowd of frontiersmen, smoking, talking, disputing,
+asking questions, and crowding against the fence that railed off the
+private end of the room; while at the operator's table next to the
+platform window a tall, spindling boy was trying in the confusion
+behind him to get a message off the wire.
+
+Stanley, eying the lad, noticed how thin his face was and what a bony
+frame spread out under the roundabout jacket that he appeared already
+to have outgrown. And he concluded this must be the new operator,
+Bucks, who for some days had been expected from the East.
+
+The receiver clicked insistently and Bucks endeavored to follow the
+message, but the babel of talking made it almost impossible. Stanley
+heard the boy appeal more than once for less noise, but his appeals
+were unheeded. He saw symptoms of fire in the operator's eyes as the
+latter glared occasionally at the crowd behind him, but for what
+followed even Stanley was unprepared. Bucks threw down his pen and
+coming forward with angry impatience ordered the crowd out of the
+room.
+
+He pushed the foremost of the intruders back from the rail and
+followed up his commands by opening the wicket gate and driving those
+ahead of him toward the door of the waiting-room. "Get out where you
+belong," he repeated, urging the crowd on. Stanley turned to the man
+at his side. "I will go upstairs to write my message. This must be the
+new boy, Bob," he added; "he acts as if he might make things go."
+
+His companion, Bob Scott, smiled as he followed Stanley out upon the
+platform and up the narrow stairway leading to the division offices.
+But Bob Scott was conservative. He never spoke above an undertone and
+naturally took the conservative side: "If he only doesn't make them go
+too fast, Colonel," was his comment.
+
+A tall young man, spare but almost gigantic in stature, standing back
+in one corner of the agent's office as the men about him were hustled
+along, likewise regarded Bucks with surprise as he saw him start
+single-handed to expel the intruders. This was the mountain telegraph
+lineman, Bill Dancing, as simple as he was strong, and ready at any
+time to be surprised, but not often disconcerted. In this instance,
+however, he was amazed, for almost before he realized it the energetic
+operator was hustling him out with the others.
+
+When Bucks thought the room cleared he turned to go back to his table,
+but he saw that one man had been overlooked. This man was still
+sitting on a stool in the farthest corner of the dimly lighted room.
+The spindling operator without hesitation walked over to him and laid
+his hand on the man's shoulder. Dancing, looking back through the
+door, held his breath.
+
+"Move out of here, please," said Bucks, "into the public waiting-room."
+The man rose with the utmost politeness. "Sorry to be in your way,"
+he returned mildly, though there was a note not quite pleasant in his
+voice.
+
+"Your place is outside," continued the operator. "I can't do anything
+with a mob in here all talking at once."
+
+"I haven't done my talking yet," suggested the man, with a shade of
+significance. This, however, was lost on Bucks, who looked sharply at
+the stool from which the man had risen.
+
+"I think this stool is mine," said he, picking it up and examining it.
+"It is mine," he added, after a moment's inspection. "Please move
+on."
+
+"Perhaps before I go," returned the man with the same unpleasant
+irony, "you will tell me whether you have an express package here for
+Harvey Levake."
+
+"Of course I will, Harvey," responded the operator in a matter-of-fact
+way. "Just wait a minute."
+
+Levake's lips stretched into a ghost of a smile, and his white-lashed
+gray eyes contracted with an effort at amiability.
+
+The operator, going inside the railing, ran over the express way-bills
+which, not yet entered up, lay on the freight desk.
+
+"There is a package here for you," he announced a moment later, and
+turning to a heap of parcels thrown under the desk he searched among
+them until he found and produced the one he sought.
+
+"Here it is--a box of cartridges."
+
+"What are the charges?" asked the man.
+
+"Four dollars and sixty cents."
+
+The man laid down a twenty-dollar bank-bill. The operator hesitated:
+"I haven't the change."
+
+Levake showed no sympathy: "That is not my fault," he returned.
+
+The operator looked at him: "Do you want the package to-night?"
+
+"If I didn't, do you suppose I would waste an hour here waiting for
+it?"
+
+The boy considered a moment and made a decision, but it chanced to be
+the wrong decision. "Take the package along. Bring me the charges in
+the morning."
+
+Levake made no response beyond a further glance at the boy somewhat
+contemptuous; but he said nothing and picking up his package walked
+out. No one opposed him. Indeed, had the operator been interested he
+would have noticed with what marked alacrity every man, as he passed
+through the waiting-room, got out of Levake's way. Dancing, standing
+at the door and with his hair on end, awaited the close of the
+incident. He now re-entered the inner office and shut the waiting-room
+door behind him with an audible bang. Bucks, who had returned to his
+table, looked around. "Well, who are you?" he demanded as he regarded
+Dancing. "And what are you doing here?"
+
+"Who are you?" retorted Dancing bluntly. "And what are you doing
+here?"
+
+"My name is Bucks and I am the new night operator."
+
+"You look new. And you act all-fired new. My name is Bill Dancing and
+I am the telegraph lineman."
+
+"Why, you are the man I am looking for."
+
+"So I thought, when you pushed me out of here with the rest of your
+visitors."
+
+"Why didn't you speak up, Bill?" demanded Bucks calmly.
+
+A quizzical expression passed over Dancing's face. "I didn't want to
+break the calm. When I see a man walking around a powder magazine I
+hate to do anything that might set it off.
+
+"So your name is Bucks," continued Dancing, as he walked through the
+wicket and threw his wet hat among the way-bills on the freight desk.
+"Well, Mr. Bucks, do you know what was most likely to happen to you
+any minute before you got through with that crowd, just now?"
+
+"No, I don't know. Why?" asked Bucks, busy with his messages.
+
+"Have you ever seen a shooting mix-up in Medicine Bend?" demanded
+Dancing in a tone of calculated indifference.
+
+"No," answered Bucks in decided but off-hand manner, "I never saw a
+shooting mix-up anywhere."
+
+"Never got shot up just for fun?" persisted Dancing. "Do you know," he
+continued without waiting for an answer, "who that polite man was,
+the last one you shouldered out of here?" Dancing pointed as he
+spoke to the corner from which Levake had risen, but the operator,
+straightening out the papers before him, did not look around.
+
+"No, Bill, I don't know anybody here. You see I am a stranger."
+
+"I see you are a stranger," echoed Dancing. "Let me tell you
+something, then, will you?"
+
+"Tell it quick, Bill."
+
+"There is no cemetery in this town."
+
+"I have understood it is very healthy, Bill," returned the operator.
+
+"Not for everybody." Bill Dancing paused to let the words sink in, as
+his big eyes fixed upon the young operator's eyes. "Not for
+everybody--sometimes not for strangers. Strangers have to get used to
+it. There is a river here," added the lineman sententiously. "It's
+pretty swift, too."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean you have got to be careful how you do things out in this
+country."
+
+"But, Bill," persisted the lad, "if there is going to be any business
+done in this office we have got to have order, haven't we?" The
+lineman snorted and the operator saw that his appeal had fallen flat.
+"My batteries, Bill," he added, changing the subject, "are no good at
+all. I sent for you because I want you to go over them now, to-night,
+and start me right. What are you going to do?"
+
+Dancing had begun to poke at the ashes in the stove. "Build a fire,"
+he returned, looking about for material. He gathered up what waste
+paper was at hand, pushed it into the stove, and catching up the
+way-bills from the desk, threw them in on the paper and began to feel
+in his wet pockets for matches.
+
+"Hold on," cried Bucks. "What do you mean? You must be crazy!" he
+exclaimed, running to the stove and pulling the way-bills out.
+
+"Not half so crazy as you are," replied Dancing undisturbed. "I'm only
+trying to show you how crazy you are. Burning up way-bills isn't a
+circumstance to what you did just now. You are the looniest operator I
+ever saw." As he looked at Bucks he extended his finger impressively.
+"When you laid your hand on that man's shoulder to-night--the one
+sitting on your stool--I wouldn't have given ten cents for your
+life."
+
+Bucks regarded him with astonishment. "Why so?"
+
+"He's the meanest man between here and Fort Bridger," asserted
+Dancing. "He'd think no more of shooting you than I would of
+scratching a match." Bucks stared at the comparison. "He is the worst
+scoundrel in this country and partners with Seagrue and John Rebstock
+in everything that's going on, and even they are afraid of him."
+
+Dancing stopped for breath. "Talk about my making a fire out of
+way-bills! When I saw you lay your hand on that man, I stopped
+breathing--can't breathe just right yet," he muttered, pulling at his
+shirt collar. "Do you know why you didn't get killed?"
+
+"Why, no, Bill, not exactly," confessed Bucks in embarrassment.
+
+"Because Levake was out of cartridges. I heard him tell Rebstock so
+when they walked past me."
+
+"Thank you for posting me. How should I know he was Seagrue's partner,
+or who Rebstock is? Let's make a bargain. I will be more careful in
+clearing out the office, and you be more careful about building fires.
+There's wood in the baggage-room. I couldn't get out to get it for
+fear the crowd would steal the tickets."
+
+"Well, you are 'out' four dollars and sixty cents charges on the
+cartridges," continued Dancing, "and you had better say nothing about
+it. If you ever ask Levake for the money he will kill you."
+
+Bucks looked rebellious. "It's only right for him to pay the charges.
+I shall ask him for them the next time I see him. And what is more he
+will have to pay, I don't care whose partner he is."
+
+Dancing now regarded the operator with unconcealed impatience. "I
+suppose there are more where you came from," he muttered. "They will
+need a lot of them here, if they carry on like that. How old are you?"
+he demanded of Bucks abruptly.
+
+"Seventeen."
+
+"How long have you been in this country?"
+
+Bucks looked at the clock. "About five hours, Bill."
+
+"Reckon time close, don't you?"
+
+"Have to, Bill, in the railroad business."
+
+Dancing reflected a moment. "Five hours," he repeated. "If you don't
+get killed within the next five you may live to be a useful citizen of
+Medicine Bend. Where are you from, and how did you happen to come away
+out here on the plains?"
+
+"I am from Pittsburgh. I had to quit school and go to work."
+
+"Where did you go to school?"
+
+"Well, I didn't go----"
+
+"Quit before you went, did you?"
+
+"I mean, I was preparing for Van Dyne College. One of my brothers
+teaches there. I couldn't start there after I lost my father--he was
+killed in the Wilderness Campaign, Bill. But when I can earn money
+enough, I am going back to Van Dyne and take an engineering course."
+
+"Got it all figured out, have you?"
+
+"Then I heard they were building the Union Pacific, and I knew
+something about telegraphing--Jim Foster and I had a line from the
+house to the barn."
+
+"Had a line from the house to the barn, eh?" chuckled Dancing.
+
+"So I bought a railroad ticket to Des Moines from Pittsburgh and
+staged it to Omaha, and General Park gave me a job right away and sent
+me out on the first train to take this office, nights. I didn't even
+know where Medicine Bend was."
+
+"Don't believe you know yet. Now that's right, I don't believe you
+know yet. You're a good boy, but you talk too much."
+
+"How old are you, Bill?"
+
+"I am twenty."
+
+"Twenty!" echoed Bucks, as if that were not very much, either.
+
+"Twenty!" repeated the lineman. "But," he added, drawing himself up in
+his tremendous stature, with dignity, "I have been on the plains
+driving wagons and building telegraph lines for seven years----"
+
+"Seven years!" echoed Bucks, now genuinely admiring his companion.
+
+"My father was a Forty-niner. I was a line foreman when I was
+seventeen, for Edward Creighton, and we put the first telegraph line
+through from the Missouri River to the Pacific," continued Dancing,
+ready to back his words with blows if necessary.
+
+"You _are_ an old-timer," cried Bucks enviously. "Any good rabbit-shooting
+around here, Bill?"
+
+"Rabbit-shooting?" echoed Dancing in scorn. "The only rabbits they
+shoot around here, young fellow, are Pittsburgh rabbits, that
+don't keep their ears hid proper. When we go hunting, we go
+antelope-hunting, buffalo-hunting, grizzly-bear hunting, elk-hunting.
+Now I don't say I don't like you and I don't say you won't do. What I
+say is, you talk too much. I'll tell you what I've learned. I've
+learned not to say too much at a time. And when I say it, I don't
+say it very loud. And if you don't get killed, in advance, you will
+learn the same thing in the same way I learned it. Where are your
+blamed batteries?"
+
+"Bill, you are all right."
+
+"I am, am I?"
+
+"First help me enter these way-bills and check up the express packages
+so I can deliver them to this mob."
+
+"My business isn't checking up express; but I like you, young fellow,
+so, go ahead. Only you talk too much."
+
+"Just a moment!"
+
+At these words coming from the other end of the office, the lineman
+and the operator looked around. The military-looking man and his
+companion had entered the room unobserved and stood at the
+counter listening to the colloquy between the Eastern boy and the
+plainsman--for neither of the two were more than boys. Dancing
+saluted the new-comers. "It's Colonel Stanley and Bob Scott," he
+exclaimed.
+
+Bucks walked forward. Stanley handed him a message. "You are the night
+operator? Here is a despatch for General Park. Get it out for me right
+away, will you?"
+
+Dancing came forward to the railing. "How are you, Bill?" said
+Stanley, greeting the lineman as Bucks read the long message. "I am
+going up into the mountains next week, and I am just asking General
+Park for a cavalry detail."
+
+"Going to need me, Colonel?"
+
+"Better hold yourself ready. Can you read that, young man?" he asked,
+speaking to Bucks.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Lose no time in getting it off."
+
+With the words he turned on his heel and leaving the office went
+upstairs to the despatcher's rooms. During the interval that the
+message was being sent, Dancing worked at the express matter. While
+the two were busy, Bob Scott, moving so quietly that he disturbed no
+one, laid carefully upon the smouldering paper in the stove such chips
+as he could pick from the wood-box, nursing and developing a little
+blaze until, without noise or fuss, he soon had a good fire going. In
+all of the mountain country there was but one kind of men who built
+fires in that way and these were Indians.
+
+Such was Bob Scott, who, wet to the skin from his ride down the hills
+with Stanley, now stood slowly drying himself and watching Dancing and
+the new operator.
+
+Scott was a half-blood Chippewa Indian, silent as a mountain night and
+as patient as time. He served Colonel Stanley as guide and scout
+wherever the railroad man rode upon his surveys or reconnoissances.
+Dancing, emerging presently from the batteries, greeted Scott again,
+this time boisterously. The Indian only smiled, but his face reflected
+the warmth of his friendship for the big lineman. And at this juncture
+Dancing, slapping him on the shoulder, turned to introduce him to
+Bucks. The three stood and talked a moment together, though, perhaps,
+without realizing what they were almost at once to go through
+together. The outgoing Eastern passenger train now pulled up to the
+platform and Bucks was kept busy for some time selling tickets.
+
+His buyers were all sorts and conditions of men. And one forlorn-looking
+woman, with a babe in her arms and a little girl clinging to her
+skirt, asked the price of a ticket to Omaha. When told, she turned away
+to count her money. Among the men were traders and frontiersmen
+going to Missouri River markets with buffalo robes; trappers from the
+Big Horn country with furs; Mormon elders on their way from Utah to
+their Eastern settlements; soldiers on furlough and men from the
+railroad-construction camps on the front; adventurers, disgusted with
+the hardships of frontier life, and gamblers and desperadoes,
+restless and always moving.
+
+Bucks needed his wits to watch the money that was pushed under his
+little wicket and to make change without mistake. There was elbowing
+and contention and bad language, but the troublesome crowd was
+finally disposed of, and when the last of the line had left the ticket
+window the waiting-room was pretty well cleared. There remained only a
+black-bearded man half-asleep in a chair by the stove, and in one
+corner on a bench the woman, who was trying to quiet the child she
+held in her lap.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+As Bucks looked through his embrasure to see if all had been served,
+his eye fell on the group in the corner and he heard the woman
+suppressing the sobbing of her little girl. He walked out into the
+waiting-room to ask what the trouble was. He learned afterward that
+she was the wife of a gambler, but she told him only that she had
+followed her husband to Medicine Bend and was now trying to get back
+with her two children to her parents in Iowa. When she had ascertained
+the price of the railroad ticket she found that she lacked five
+dollars of the sum needed to make up the fare. Bucks had just a little
+money of his own, but he had counted on using that for his meals.
+While he was debating what to do, the elder child tugging still at the
+mother's dress asked for something to eat, and while the mother tried
+to quiet it Bucks felt he could manage somehow without the price of
+the ticket better than this woman could.
+
+"Give me what money you have," he said. "I will get you a ticket."
+
+"But isn't the train gone?"
+
+"No."
+
+The black-bearded man dozing near the stove had his ears open although
+his eyes were closed. He had heard fragments of the talk and saw the
+boy dig into his own pocket, as he would have expressed it, to start
+the woman home. After Bucks had given her the ticket and she was
+trying to thank him and to quiet again the tired child, the drowsy man
+rose, picked up the woman's hand-bag and told her gruffly he would put
+her on the train. As he started with her out into the drizzling rain,
+he carried her little girl, and, stopping down the platform at a
+sheltered lunch-counter, he bought a bag of doughnuts big enough to
+sink a ship. He offered no money to the man at the counter, but his
+credit seemed unquestioned. In the train the seats appeared all to be
+taken, but the drowsy man again showed his authority by rolling a
+tipsy fellow out of a seat and piling him up in a corner near the
+stove--which fortunately had no fire in it.
+
+During all this time he had not said a word. But at the last, having
+placed the woman and the children in two seats and made them
+comfortable, he asked the mother one question--her husband's name. She
+told him, and, without any comment or good-bys, he left the car and
+started through the rain uptown.
+
+After the train pulled out, the wind shifted and the rain changed
+into a snow which, driven from the mountains, thickened on the wet
+window in front of the operator's table. A message came for the
+night yardmaster, and the operator, seeing the head-light of the
+switch-engine which was working close by, put on his cap and stepped
+out to deliver the message. As he opened the waiting-room door, a man
+confronted him--the bearded man who had taken the woman and children
+to the train. Bucks saw under the visor of a cloth cap, a straight
+white nose, a dark eye piercingly keen, and a rather long, glossy,
+black beard. It was the passenger conductor, David Hawk. Without
+speaking, Hawk held out his hand with a five-dollar bank note in it.
+
+"What is this?" asked Bucks.
+
+"The money you gave the woman."
+
+Bucks, taking the bill, regarded his visitor with surprise. "Where did
+you get this?"
+
+"What's that to you?"
+
+"But----"
+
+"Don't ask questions," returned Hawk brusquely. "You've got your
+money, haven't you?"
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"That's enough." And with Bucks staring at him, Hawk, without a word
+or a smile, walked out of the station.
+
+But Bill Dancing had seen the incident and was ready to answer Bucks's
+question as he turned with the money in his hand. "That is Dave Hawk,"
+explained Dancing. "Dave hates a sneak. The way he got the money from
+the woman's husband was probably by telling him if he didn't pay for
+his wife's ticket and add enough to feed her and her babies to the
+river he would blow his head off. Dave doesn't explain things
+especially."
+
+Bucks put the money in his pocket and started on with his message. The
+yards covered the wide flat along the river. Medicine Bend was then
+the western operating point for the railroad and the distributing
+point for all material used in the advancing construction through the
+mountains.
+
+Not until he left the shelter of the station building did he realize
+the force of the storm that was now sweeping across the flat. The wind
+had swung into the northwest and blew almost a gale and the snow stung
+his face as he started across the dark yard. There were practically no
+lights at all beyond the platform except those in the roundhouse, too
+far away to be seen, but the operator saw the moving head-light of the
+switch-engine and hastened across the slippery tracks toward it. The
+crew were making up a material train to send west and the engine was
+snorting and puffing among long strings of flat cars loaded with
+rails, ties, stringers, and bridge timbers.
+
+As Bucks neared the working engine it receded from him, and following
+it up he soon found his feet slipping in the wet mud and the wind at
+times taking his breath. Conscious of the folly of running farther, he
+halted for a moment and turning his back to the storm resolved to wait
+till the engine returned. He chose a spot under the lee of a box-car,
+and was soon rewarded by hearing a new movement from the working
+engine. By the increasing noise of the open cylinder cocks he
+concluded it was backing toward him. He stepped across the nearest
+track to reach a switch-stand, a car-length away, whence he thought he
+could signal the engine with his lantern. He had nearly reached the
+switch when his foot slipped from a rail into a frog that held him
+fast. Holding his lantern down, he saw how he was caught and tried to
+free his heel. It seemed as if it might easily be done, but the more
+he worked the faster caught he found himself. For a moment he still
+made sure he could loosen his foot. Even when he realized that this
+was not easy, he felt no alarm until he heard the switch-engine
+whistle. Through the driving snow he could see that it was coming
+toward him, pushing ahead of it a lead of flat cars.
+
+Bucks was no stranger to railroad yards even then, and the realization
+of his peril flashed across his mind. He renewed his efforts to loosen
+his imprisoned heel. They were useless. He stood caught in the iron
+vice. A sweat of fear moistened his forehead. He hoped for an instant
+that the moving cars were not coming on his track; but almost at once
+he saw that they were being pushed toward the very switch he was
+trying to reach. Even where he stood, struggling, he was not six feet
+away from the switch-stand and safety. It seemed as if he could almost
+reach it, as he writhed and twisted in his agony of apprehension.
+
+He swung his lantern frantically, hoping to catch the eye of one of
+the switching crew. But the only answer was the heavy pounding of the
+loaded cars over the rail joints as they were pushed down upon the
+helpless operator. Worst of all, while he was swinging his lantern
+high in the air, the wind sucked the flame up into the globe and it
+went out and left him helpless in the dark. Like the hare caught in
+the steel teeth of a trap, the boy stood in the storm facing impending
+death.
+
+The bitterest feelings overwhelmed him. After coming hundreds of miles
+and plunging into his work with the most complacent self-confidence,
+he stood before the close of the first day about to be snuffed out of
+existence as if he were no more than the flame of his useless lantern.
+A cruel sense of pain oppressed his thoughts. Each second of
+recollection seemed to cover the ground of years. The dull, heavy
+jolting of the slow-coming cars shook the ground. He twisted and
+writhed this way and that and cried out, knowing there were none to
+hear him: the wind swept away his appeal upon its heedless wings; the
+nearest car was almost upon him. Then a strange feeling of calm came
+over him. He felt that death was knocking at his heart. Hope had gone,
+and his lips were only moving in prayer, when a light flashed out of
+the darkness at his very side and he felt himself seized as if by a
+giant and wrenched away from where he stood and through the air.
+
+He heard a quick exclamation, saw a lighted lantern fall to the
+ground, felt a stinging pain in his right foot, and knew no more.
+
+When he recovered consciousness, three lanterns shone in his eyes. He
+was lying in the mud near the switch with the engine crew standing
+over him. One of the men knelt at his side and he saw the thin, strong
+features of a face he had seen among the railroad men, but one that he
+knew then he was never to forget--the face of the yardmaster,
+Callahan. Callahan knelt in the storm with a good-natured expression.
+The men about the yardmaster were less kindly.
+
+"Who are you, tar heels?" demanded the engineman angrily.
+
+Resentment, which would have been quick in the operator a little
+earlier, had died in the few moments in which he had faced death. He
+answered only in the quietest way:
+
+"I am the night operator."
+
+"The deuce you are!" exclaimed the man bending over him.
+
+"Who are you?" demanded the operator, in turn.
+
+"I am Callahan, the night yardmaster."
+
+"I have an order for you to send a car of spikes on No. 7, Callahan. I
+was trying to find you when I got caught in the frog." The pain in his
+foot overcame Bucks as he spoke. Another dread was in his mind and he
+framed a question to which he dreaded to hear the answer. "Is my foot
+gone?" he faltered.
+
+The yardmaster hesitated a moment and turned to an older man at his
+side wearing a heavy cap. "How about it, doctor?" he asked.
+
+Doctor Arnold, the railway surgeon, a kindly but stern man, answered
+briefly, "We won't take it off this time. But if he is that careless
+again we will take his head off."
+
+"How old are you, boy?" demanded Callahan.
+
+"Seventeen."
+
+"Well, your foot isn't hurt," he continued gruffly. "But it's only
+God's mercy that I got here in time to pull you out of the frog."
+
+The operator was already up. "I hope I shan't forget it," he said,
+putting out his hand. "Will you remember the spikes?"
+
+"I will," responded Callahan grimly. "And I guess----"
+
+"Say it," said the operator gamely, as the yardmaster hesitated.
+
+"I guess you will."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Bucks, after his eventful first night on duty, slept so heavily that
+on the following afternoon he had only time to eat his supper, walk
+haltingly up the main street of Medicine Bend and back to the square,
+when it was time to relieve the day man at the station.
+
+But the few minutes in the narrow business street filled him with
+interest and at times with astonishment. Medicine Bend, still very
+young, was a mushroom railroad town of frame store buildings hastily
+thrown together, and houses, shanties, and tents. It was already
+the largest and most important town between the mountains and the
+Missouri River. The Union Pacific Railroad, now a double-tracked,
+transcontinental highway, laid with ninety and one hundred pound
+steel rails, and ballasted with disintegrated granite, a model of
+railroad construction, equipment, and maintenance, was, after the
+close of the Civil War, being pushed with light iron rails and heavy
+gradients across what was then known to geographers as the Great
+American Desert, and the project of a transcontinental railroad was
+meant at that time to unite the chief port of the Pacific coast,
+San Francisco, with the leading cities of the Atlantic seaboard.
+
+A railroad in building across a country considers first the two
+uttermost cities (its principal terminals), or those two portions of
+the country which it seeks to connect for the interchange of traffic.
+
+The Union Pacific and its companion road, the Central Pacific,
+afforded, too, the first and last instance of the United States
+Government's becoming responsible for the building of a railroad.
+Although the project of aiding a railroad to be built somewhere
+between and connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean ports had been
+discussed by Congress for thirty years before the fall of Fort Sumter,
+the extraordinary feeling caused by the Civil War alone made possible
+so unusual an undertaking. President Lincoln himself had given the
+subject careful thought, and when, after much controversy and
+discouraging political intrigue, the Union and Central Pacific
+Railroad bills were ready to pass Congress, Abraham Lincoln was
+appealed to to decide a long-standing controversy concerning the
+gauge, or width of track, for the new lines.
+
+After painstaking consideration, he decided on a gauge of five feet,
+but the promoters of the line then persuaded Congress to reduce the
+figures to four feet eight and one-half inches, and that gauge is now
+the standard gauge for all American railroads. It would have been
+better if the railroad builders had followed Lincoln's suggestion,
+since the traffic of American railroads has outgrown the possibilities
+of their gauges. And within a few years one of the greatest of
+present-day railroad builders has declared with emphasis that a
+six-foot gauge must one day come to provide our railroads with the
+necessary facilities for handling the enormous and constantly
+expanding volume of American railroad traffic.
+
+The young operator, who, in spite of his efforts to conceal his hurt,
+now limped a little as he walked up the street of the new railroad
+town might well look with curiosity and amazement on what he saw. The
+street he walked in was no more than a long assemblage of saloons,
+restaurants, boarding-houses, gambling-houses, dance-halls and shops.
+Nearer the station and fronting on the open square, there were
+barber-shops and so-called hotels. Up and down the side streets he saw
+livery-stables and roughly built warehouses for contractors' supplies,
+army supplies, and stage-line depots.
+
+The main street was alive with strange-looking frontiersmen, trappers,
+hunters, scouts, soldiers, settlers, railroad laborers, outlaws,
+prospectors, and miners. Every face that Bucks looked into presented a
+study. They were sometimes faces bronzed with the clear, dry sunshine
+of the plains and mountains, rugged with adventure and keen with
+dangers met and passed, but others were furrowed with dissipation and
+seamed with vice, or merely vacant with the curiosity of the
+wanderer.
+
+Nearly every man carried a fire-arm of some sort. Indians were a
+continual menace upon the frontier to the north and west and on the
+front where the road was being built; and in the train-service and
+construction work railroad men usually went armed. Moreover, when the
+frontiersmen were not arming against the Indians they were arming
+against one another; it being difficult at times to tell whether the
+white men or the savages were the more dangerous to the peaceful
+pursuit of happiness. As Bucks, returning down Front Street, neared
+the square that opened before the station a group of army officers
+were walking across it. They were the first regular officers he had
+ever seen and he regarded them with interest. At the station the chief
+despatcher, Baxter, met him at the door. "Bucks, I've been waiting for
+you. Can you ride a horse?"
+
+Bucks smiled.
+
+"Colonel Stanley," continued Baxter, "is going to the front to-night.
+He wants to take an operator with him. Giddings isn't well enough to
+go, but he can take your key to-night; you can go with the colonel
+instead. He will take Dancing and a detail of cavalrymen with Leon
+Sublette and Bob Scott for guides."
+
+The suddenness of the call was not unpleasant. It was such continual
+excitement and new adventure that Bucks liked and he said he was
+ready. The despatcher told him to hunt up Bill Dancing, who would give
+him the details.
+
+Within an hour the cavalry horses were being loaded into a box-car up
+at the stock chute, and while Bucks and big Bill Dancing watched them
+an engine and the chief engineer's car were backed down the yard to
+make up the special train. At the same moment, the two saw Stanley
+walking across the yard with two engineers who were going to the front
+with him.
+
+Bucks looked with admiration at the soldier-constructionist. He was
+slight in figure, wore the precise-looking military cap, and was
+dressed with extreme care. He stepped with a light briskness that
+implied an abundance of native energy, and his manner as he greeted
+the two railroad men was intimate and gracious, putting them at once
+at their ease. His smooth-shaven face, bronzed with service, and his
+brown eyes, were alive every moment. Whatever the enterprise, Stanley
+could call forth the loyalty and the best in those under him, and in
+Dancing and Scott he had two men that worked well together and had in
+their chief the unquestioning faith that insures devotion.
+
+To these two more experienced men was now to be added a third, Bucks.
+The train started almost at once, and Oliver, the colonel's cook,
+prepared supper in his box-like kitchen and chopped his potatoes, for
+frying, in muffled ragtime, as the puffing engine slowly drew the
+train up the long gorge into the mountains. Bucks sat down at table
+with the engineers and Stanley asked him many questions. He wanted to
+know where Bucks had gone to school, why he had quitted at fifteen,
+and what had brought him away out on the Desert to begin railroading.
+
+When it appeared that Stanley as well as he himself was from
+Pittsburgh, and even that Bucks had been named after the distinguished
+officer--John Stanley Bucks--Bucks was happier than at any time since
+he had left home.
+
+The talk went on till very late. Stanley and General Park, who also
+had been a regular-army man, told stories of the Civil War, just then
+ended, and the giant lineman, Dancing, entertained the company with
+stories of adventure incurred in the mountains and on the plains in
+building the first transcontinental telegraph line.
+
+Bucks sat for hours in silence while the three men talked; but he had
+good ears and was a close listener. All the adventure books of his
+boyhood reading had been bound up with this very country and with
+these rugged mountains through which they were riding. The tales of
+the people all about him during his youth had been of the far and
+mysterious West--of the overland trail and the gold seekers, of Pike's
+Peak and California, of buffaloes and trappers and Indians, and of the
+Mormons and the Great Salt Lake. These had been his day-dreams, and at
+last he was breathing the very air of them and listening to men who
+had actually lived them.
+
+The sleeping-bunks in the car could hardly be called berths, but they
+served to lessen the fatigues of the night, and when Bucks woke in the
+morning he saw from his window a vast stretch of rough, desert country
+bordered by distant mountain peaks, some black, some brown, some
+snow-capped in the morning sun. The train stopped in a construction
+camp, near the end of the rails, and after a hasty breakfast Bucks
+walked with the engineers up the track to the head-quarters of the
+rail-laying gang.
+
+The air was frosty. During the night snow had fallen, and as Bucks
+followed his party the sun burst over the plain that they had crossed
+in the night and lighted the busy camp with a flood of gold. It was a
+camp such as few American boys had ever seen and of a type that no boy
+will ever see again. Everywhere along the cuts and hillsides and in
+sheltered spots the men had made temporary quarters by burrowing into
+the clay or soft rock and making dugouts and canvas-roofed huts, with
+earthen sides for walls.
+
+But not all were so enterprising as this. Some laborers were camping
+in old hogsheads. Even packing-boxes served others for shelter, but
+were all so disposed within the cuts and among the ridges of the
+railroad grade as to be safe from Indian forays. And along the
+completed railroad, all the way from the Missouri River, material and
+supply trains were moving to supply this noisy, helter-skelter camp,
+which seemed to Bucks all confusion, yet was in reality all energy.
+
+General Jack Casement, in charge, came forward to greet Stanley.
+
+"And they tell me, general," said Stanley, "you are laying a mile a
+day."
+
+"If you would give us the ties, colonel," returned Casement,
+short-bearded and energetic, "we should be laying two miles a day."
+
+"I have turned the Missouri River country upside down for timber,"
+returned Stanley. "The trouble is to get the material forward over a
+single track so many hundred miles. However, we shall be getting ties
+down the Spider Water within two weeks. I am on my way up there now to
+see what the contractors are doing."
+
+It was the first intimation Bucks had had as to the object of the
+trip. Casement had a number of subjects to lay before his superior
+while within consulting distance, and Bob Scott, an hour later,
+announced that Stanley would not move on for two days. This left his
+attendants free, and when Scott, low-voiced and good-natured, asked
+Bucks if he wanted to go out on the Sweet Grass Plains with him after
+an antelope, Bucks accepted eagerly. The two saddled horses and Bucks,
+with a rifle borrowed from Sublette, followed Scott across a low-lying
+range of hills broken by huge stone crags and studded with wind-blown
+and stunted cedars, out upon the far-reaching expanse of an open
+plain. The scene was inspiring, but impressions crowded so fast one
+upon another that the boy from the Alleghanies could realize only that
+he was filled with sensations of delight as his wiry buckskin
+clattered furiously along the faint trail that carried him and his
+guide to the north and west. The sun was high when Scott reined up
+and, dismounting, tethered his horse in a glade hidden by a grove of
+aspens and bade Bucks do the same.
+
+"Getting hungry?" asked Scott, smiling at his companion. An answer
+was written pretty plainly on Bucks's face.
+
+"Didn't bring anything to eat, did you?" suggested Scott.
+
+Bucks looked blank. "I never thought of it," he exclaimed. "Did you
+bring anything?"
+
+"Nothing but this," answered Scott, holding up a small buckskin sack
+fitted with drawing strings.
+
+"What is that, Bob?"
+
+"It is what I carry wherever I ride. I carry nothing else. And it is
+only a little bag of salt."
+
+"A bag of salt!" cried Bucks. "Do you eat salt?"
+
+"Wait and see," answered the scout. "Pull your belt up a notch. We've
+got a little walking to do."
+
+Scott, though of Chippewa blood, had been captured when a boy by the
+Sioux and, adopted into the tribe, had lived with them for years. He
+knew the mountains better than any man that served Stanley, and the
+latter trusted him implicitly--nor was the confidence ever betrayed.
+
+Walking rapidly over a low-lying divide beyond which lay a broad
+valley marking the course of a shallow creek, Scott paused behind a
+clump of cedars to scan the country. He expected to find antelope
+along the creek, but could see none in any direction. Half a mile more
+of scouting explained the absence of game, and Scott pointed out to
+Bucks the trail of an Indian hunting party that had passed up the
+valley in the morning. They were Cheyennes, Scott told his companion,
+three warriors and two squaws--reading the information from signs that
+were as plain to him as print--though Bucks understood nothing of it.
+In the circumstances there was nothing for it but a fresh venture,
+and, remounting, the Indian led the boy ten miles farther north to
+where the plains stretched in a succession of magnificent plateaus,
+toward the Sleepy Cat Mountains.
+
+"We are in real Sioux country now," observed Scott, as he again
+dismounted. "And we are as likely now to uncover a war party as a herd
+of antelope."
+
+"What should you do, Bob, if we met Sioux?"
+
+"Run," smiled Bob, with Indian terseness. Yet somehow the boy felt
+that Bob, in spite of what he said, would not run, and he realized for
+a moment the apprehension of one but newly arrived on the frontier,
+and still subject to tremors for his scalp. The scout took his stand
+near a thicket of quaking asp and almost at once sighted a band of
+antelope. Taking Bucks, he worked around the wind toward the band, and
+directed him how and when to shoot if he got a chance. Bucks, highly
+wrought up after the long crawl to get within range, did get a chance,
+and with his heart beating like a trip-hammer, covered a buck and
+fired. The scout shot immediately afterward, and the herd broke
+swiftly for the timber along the creek. But Bucks, as well as his
+experienced companion, had brought down an antelope.
+
+Scott, as he joined his companion, looked at him with curiosity.
+"Where did you learn to shoot?"
+
+"I couldn't do it again, Bob," exclaimed Bucks frankly. "The only
+shooting I've ever done is rabbit-shooting, or squirrel-shooting. I
+was lucky for once, that's all."
+
+"I hope your luck stays with us. If it does we may get back with all
+of our hair," returned Scott. "The thing to do now is to lose no time
+in leaving here. We are farther from camp than we ought to be. When I
+get to running antelope I am apt to go as far as they do."
+
+The two hunters got the carcasses across their horses, and acting on
+Scott's admonition started to cover a good bit of the distance toward
+camp before stopping.
+
+The sun was already low in the west and Bucks realized that they had
+been out all day. The hunters rode due southeast, to put every mile
+possible between them and the Indian country before dark. They were
+riding along in this manner at dusk, when Scott, leading, pointed to a
+canyon that offered a hiding-place for the night, and directed his
+horse into it. Scarcely had the two passed within the canyon walls
+when Scott halted and, with a quick, low command to the boy, sprang
+from his horse. Bucks lost no time in following suit: they had ridden
+almost into an Indian camp, and when Bucks's feet touched the ground
+Scott was covering with his rifle a Sioux brave who with two squaws
+rose out of the darkness before him. Quick words passed between Scott
+and the Indian in the Sioux tongue. Bucks's hair rose on end until the
+confab quieted, and the scout's rifle came down. In an instant it was
+all over, but in that instant the Easterner had lived years.
+
+"It is all right," said Bob, turning to reassure his charge. "He is a
+young chief--Iron Hand. I know his father. These three are alone.
+Eight of them went out after buffalo five days ago. The second day
+they fell in with Turkey Leg and a Cheyenne war party. Two of Iron
+Hand's warriors were killed. The rest got separated and these three
+lost their horses. Iron Hand," Scott nodded toward the silent Indian,
+"was hit in the arm, and with his squaw and her sister has been trying
+to get north, hiding by day and travelling by night. He can't shoot
+his rifle; he thinks his arm is broken; and the squaws haven't been
+able to kill anything. They are hungry, I guess."
+
+"And did they tell you all this in those few words?" demanded Bucks
+incredulously.
+
+"It doesn't take many words to tell stories in this country. If a man
+talked much he would be dead and buried before he got through."
+
+"Bob, if they are hungry, give them some antelope."
+
+Scott, who had meant to suggest the same thing, was pleased that the
+offer should come from his companion, and so told the wounded Indian.
+The latter drew himself up with dignity and spoke a few rapid words.
+"He says he is glad," translated Bob, "that your heart is big. And
+that it will be safer to go farther into the canyon. The Cheyennes are
+hunting for them all around here, and if you are not afraid to camp
+with the Sioux, we will stay with them here to-night. While the
+Cheyennes are hunting them, they might find us. It will be about the
+safest thing we can do."
+
+"You know best," said his companion. "Can you trust this man?"
+
+"Trust him?" echoed Bob mildly. "I wish I could trust the word of a
+white man half as far as I can that of a Sioux. He understands
+everything you say."
+
+"Can he talk English?" asked Bucks in surprise.
+
+"Better than I can."
+
+It was with queer sensations that Bucks found himself in a hostile
+country and with the deadliest enemies of the white man going into
+camp for the night. Within a minute or two after Scott and the wounded
+brave had picked a defended camp near a rivulet of water, the two
+squaws had a fire going, and they set to work at once dressing an
+antelope.
+
+Savory morsels were cut from choice spots on the carcasses and these
+were broiled by impaling them on long sticks over the fire. Bucks,
+learning very fast with his eyes, saw how surprisingly small an affair
+an Indian camp-fire is, and how much could be done with a few buffalo
+chips, if one understood how to keep them renewed. Both safety and
+convenience were served by the tiny blaze, and meat never tasted as
+good to Bucks as it did on that clear, frosty night, broiled by the
+two women and garnished from Bob Scott's provident salt bag.
+
+After satisfying his ravenous hunger, which the Indians considered not
+even a fair appetite, Bucks asked to look at the warrior's injured
+arm, explaining that his father had been an army surgeon in the great
+white man's war, as Bob Scott designated the Civil War in translating
+for the Sioux. The arm, which was badly swollen, he found had indeed
+been broken by a bullet near the wrist, but only one bone was
+fractured, and, finding no trace of the bullet, the confident young
+surgeon offered to set the fracture.
+
+Iron Hand, nothing loath, accepted the offer, and after cleansing the
+wound as well as it could be cleansed in running water hard by, Bucks
+took the rough splints handily supplied by Scott's hunting-knife, and
+pulling the bone into place with the scout's aid--though the brave
+winced a little at the crude surgery--he soon had the forearm set and
+was rewarded with a single guttural, "Wa-sha-ta-la!" from the stalwart
+warrior, which, Bob explained, meant, "Heap good."
+
+Sitting afterward by the camp-fire, Scott and Iron Hand, since the
+young chief would not talk English, conversed in the Sioux tongue,
+the scout translating freely for his younger companion, while the
+squaws dressed the second antelope and cut it up for convenience in
+carrying on the horses to Casement's camp. Scott reserved only the
+hind-quarters of each animal for himself and Bucks, giving the rest to
+their hosts.
+
+When it was late, Scott showed the boy how to pillow his head on his
+saddle and then stretched himself out to sleep. Bucks lay a long time
+looking up at the stars. When he fell asleep, he woke again very soon.
+His companion was sleeping peacefully beside him, and he saw Iron Hand
+sitting by the fire. Bucks easily imagined his arm would keep him
+awake. The squaws were still broiling pieces of antelope over the
+little blaze, which was neither bigger nor smaller than before, and
+together with the chief they were still eating. Bucks slumbered and
+woke again and again during the night, but always to see the same
+thing--the three Indians sitting about the fire, broiling and eating
+the welcome and wholly unexpected venison.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Before daybreak the scout roused his companion, and, after breakfast
+with the three Sioux, who, according to Bob, were still eating supper,
+the two hunters left their chance companions in the canyon, rode
+rapidly south, and, with their antelope haunches as trophies, reached
+Casement's camp about ten o'clock.
+
+Stanley, who was conferring with Casement, came out of the tent
+greatly amazed at his scout's venturing so far on a hunt as to expose
+himself and his companion to danger.
+
+"We were safe every minute, colonel," declared Scott.
+
+"Safe?" echoed Stanley incredulously. "No man is safe, Bob, a mile
+from the track-layers. The Sioux killed and scalped one of our
+engineers not ten miles from here, when we were running this very line
+last winter."
+
+"This lad," nodded Scott, "is as good a shot as I am. He brought down
+the first antelope. We get along with the Sioux all right, too, don't
+we, Bucks?" he demanded, appealing to his fellow-hunter. "We ate
+supper with them last night," he added to mystify his listeners, "and
+camped with Iron Hand."
+
+Even General Casement stared at this and waited to hear Scott tell
+Stanley the story of their night's adventure. "However, colonel,"
+concluded Scott, "there is a war party of Cheyennes near here. It is a
+good time to be careful."
+
+"All right, Bob," retorted Stanley, looking at his scout keenly,
+though no one could be angry at Scott long. "You set the example."
+
+The words were hardly out of his mouth when an operator came running
+down the track from the telegraph tent with a message for General
+Casement. It contained word from the operator at Peace River that
+section men reported a war party of Indians, crossing the railroad
+near Feather Creek, had attacked an emigrant party camped there.
+
+In an instant the whole construction camp had the news and the work
+was thrown into confusion. Feather Creek was twenty miles away. Orders
+flew fast. A special train was made up, and Stanley taking command,
+with Casement to aid, made ready instantly to leave for the scene of
+the disaster.
+
+The men running from the grade fell into line like veteran soldiers.
+Indeed, most of them had seen service in the war just closed and the
+smell of powder was no novelty. Bob Scott turned the venison over to
+Oliver and loaded his horse in the car with those of the cavalrymen.
+Under Stanley's orders he himself rode as pilot in the cab with the
+engine crew. Bucks also reported to Stanley, and within twenty minutes
+the relief train carrying two hundred men was plunging down the long
+hill toward Feather Creek. Heads were craned out of the car windows,
+and in rounding every curve Bucks, with the scout Leon Sublette,
+sitting greatly wrought up behind Stanley and Casement, expected
+momentarily to see Cheyenne war bonnets spring up out of the stunted
+cedars that lined the hills along the right of way.
+
+But not a sign could be seen of any living thing. The train reached
+Feather Creek, and slowly crossed the bridge before Scott signalled
+the engineman to stop. His eye had detected the scene of the fight,
+and the ground beyond--a low cut--was favorable for getting the men
+safely out of the cars.
+
+As the engine slowed, a little scene of desolation beside the right of
+way met Bucks's eye, and he caught sight of the ghastly battle-field.
+A frightened section crew emerged from the wild-plum thickets along
+the creek bottom, as the cavalrymen, followed by Casement's armed men,
+poured out of the three cars. Stanley with his scouts led the way to
+the emigrant camp, where the fight had taken place. The wagons had
+been burned, the horses run off, and the three unfortunate men
+butchered.
+
+Bucks experienced a shock when Scott came upon the three dead men
+whose mutilated bodies had been dragged from the scene by the section
+men and who lay with covered faces side by side under a little
+plum-tree, fragrant with blossoms and alive with the hum of bees. The
+sunshine and the beauty of the spot contrasted strangely with the
+revolting spectacle upon the grass.
+
+Stanley gave the orders by which the bodies were conveyed to the train
+and with the scouts and cavalrymen reconnoitering the surrounding
+country, Casement's men lay on their arms in the shade of the cut.
+Dancing rigged a pony instrument to the telegraph wires, which had not
+been disturbed, and Bucks transmitted messages to Fort Kearney
+advising the commanding officer of the murders and adding afterward
+the report of Scott and Sublette as to the direction the marauders had
+taken in flight.
+
+"Who were the beasts, Bob, that could treat men like that?" demanded
+Bucks in an angry undertone, when he had clicked the messages over the
+wires.
+
+"Bad Indians," answered Scott sententiously. "You have that kind of
+white men, don't you? These fellows are probably Turkey Leg's thieving
+Cheyennes. We shall hear more of them."
+
+In the meantime the scouts and the cavalry detail rode out again
+trying to unmask the Cheyennes, but without success. It was a week
+before they were even heard of, and after an all-day attempt to do
+something, the train backed up to camp and work was resumed as if
+nothing had happened.
+
+After waiting a few days, Stanley, always restive under idleness,
+determined to push on across the Sweet Grass country with horses, to
+learn how the timber cutters on the river were faring with their
+slender military guard. The party, consisting of the detail of ten men
+and the two scouts and Bucks, started one morning at sunrise and made
+their way without molestation into the little-known mountain range
+called then, as far south as Colorado, the Black Hills.
+
+Stanley explained to Bucks during the morning how the chief
+engineering difficulty of the whole transcontinental line confronted
+the engineers right where they were now riding. Here the mountains
+were thrown abruptly above the plain to a great height and the
+locating engineers were still at their wits' ends to know how to
+climb the tremendous ascent with practicable grades. Stanley became
+so interested in studying the country during the day, as the
+difficulties of the problem presented themselves afresh to him, that
+the party made slow progress. Camp was pitched early in the afternoon
+under a ridge that offered some natural features for defence. Here the
+cavalrymen were left, and Stanley, taking Scott, started out after
+some venison for supper. Bucks stood by, looking eager as the two made
+ready for the hunt.
+
+"Come along if you like," said Stanley at length. "You won't be happy,
+Bucks, till you get lost somewhere in this country."
+
+Sublette lent Bucks a rifle, and the three men set out together,
+riding rapidly into the rough hills to the northwest. Scott covered
+the ground fast, but he searched in vain for sign of antelope.
+"Indians have been all over this divide," he announced after much hard
+riding and a failure to find any game. "It doesn't look like venison
+for supper to-night, colonel. Stop!" he added suddenly.
+
+His companions, surprised by the tone of the last word, halted.
+Leaning over his pony's neck the scout was reading the rocky soil. He
+dismounted, and walking on, leading his horse, he inspected, very
+carefully, the ground toward a dry creek bed opening to the east.
+
+He was gone perhaps five minutes. "Colonel," he said, smiling
+reassuringly, when he returned, "this is no place for us."
+
+"Indians," said Stanley tersely.
+
+"Cheyennes. Back to camp."
+
+"Down the creek?" suggested Stanley.
+
+"The bottom is alive with Indians."
+
+"Up then, Bob?"
+
+"Their camp is just above the bend. They have spotted our trail, too,
+somehow. It may be they are riding easy to close in on us," smiled
+Scott, while Bucks's hair began to pull. "Our way out is over this
+divide." He indicated the rough country east of the creek as he
+spoke.
+
+"Divide!" exclaimed Stanley, looking up at the practically sheer walls
+of rock that hedged the course of the creek. "We can't climb those
+hills, if we never get out."
+
+"They're not quite so bad as they look. Anyway, colonel, we've got
+to."
+
+"They can pick us off our horses like monkeys all the way up!"
+
+"It's a chance for our scalps, colonel. And it will be as hard riding
+for them as it is for us."
+
+Stanley looked at Bucks with perplexity. "This boy!"
+
+"I can make it, Colonel Stanley," exclaimed Bucks, who felt he must
+say something.
+
+Stanley still hesitated.
+
+"We've no time to lose," smiled Scott significantly.
+
+"Then go ahead, Bob."
+
+They had half a mile of comparatively level ground to cross before
+they began their climb, and this strip they rode very hard. When they
+reached the hills, Scott headed for a forbidding-looking canyon and
+urged his horse without ceasing through the rocky wash that strewed
+its floor. Stanley, with an excellent mount, could have kept well up,
+but he had put Bucks ahead of him in the safe place of the little
+procession, and the boy had difficulty in keeping within call of
+their active leader. The minute they were out of sight of the creek
+bottoms, Scott, choosing an apparently unscalable ascent, urged his
+horse up one of the canyon walls and the three were soon climbing in
+order.
+
+Happily, Bucks's scrub horse gave a better account of himself in
+climbing than he had done in covering better ground. As their horses
+stumbled hurriedly along the narrow ledges, they made noise enough to
+wake the Indian dead and the loose rock tumbled with sinister echoes
+down the canyon wall. But progress was made, and the white men felt
+only anxious lest pursuit should catch them exposed on the uncovered
+height up which they were fast clambering.
+
+Secure in their escape, the three were nearing the coveted top when a
+yell echoed through the canyon from below. There was no mistaking such
+a yell. Bucks, who had never heard anything so ferocious, had no need
+to be told what it was--it, so to say, introduced itself. And it was
+answered by another yell, more formidable still, and again by a
+chorus of yells. Then it seemed to Bucks's unaccustomed ears as if a
+thousand lusty throats were opened, and scared rigid he looked behind
+him and saw the canyon below alive with warriors.
+
+They were riding helter-skelter to reach a range where they could pick
+the fugitives off the crest of the canyon side. Within a minute,
+almost, their rifles were cracking. Scott had already reached a point
+of concealment, and above the heads of Bucks and Stanley fired his
+rifle in answer. An Indian brave, riding furiously to a rock that
+would have commanded Stanley and Bucks as they urged their horses on,
+started in his saddle as Scott fired and clutched his side instantly
+with his rifle hand. His pony bolted as the half-hitch of the rawhide
+thong on its lower jaw was loosened and the rider, toppling, fell
+heavily backward to the ground. The riderless horse dashed on. The
+yelling Indians had had their blunt warning and now scurried for
+cover. The interval, short as it was, gave Bucks and Stanley a
+chance.
+
+Spurring relentlessly and crouching low on their horses' necks, they
+made a dash across the exposed wall of rock near the top, that lay
+between them and safety. A renewed yell echoed the rage and chagrin of
+their pursuers, and a quick fire of scattering shots followed their
+rapid flight, but the Indians were confused, and Bucks, followed by
+his soldier champion, flung himself from his saddle in the clump of
+cedars behind which Scott, safely hidden, was reloading his rifle.
+Choosing his opportunity carefully, Stanley fired at once at an
+exposed brave and succeeded in disabling him. Bucks was forbidden to
+shoot and told to hold his rifle, if it were needed, in readiness for
+his companions. With the bullets cutting the twigs above their heads,
+Stanley and Scott held a council of war. Scott insisted on remaining
+behind to check their pursuers where they were, while the two with him
+rode on to safety.
+
+"I can hold this bunch, colonel," declared Scott briefly. "There may
+not be a second chance as good. Get on with the boy before another
+party cuts you off. They can cross below us and save two or three
+miles. Get away."
+
+"But how will you get away?" demanded Bucks.
+
+Stanley laughed. "Never mind Bob. He could crawl through a Cheyenne
+village with a camp-fire on his back. It's what to do with you, Bucks,
+that bothers us."
+
+"Just you get on, colonel," urged Bob. "I'll manage all right. Leave
+your horse," he added, turning to Bucks, "and you take mine."
+
+Bucks protested and refused to leave Scott with an inferior mount, but
+his protests were of no avail. He was curtly directed by Stanley to do
+as he was told, and unwillingly he turned his horse over to Scott and
+took the scout's better steed. Scott added hurried and explicit
+directions to Stanley as to the course to follow back to camp, and
+without loss of time Stanley and Bucks crouching behind friendly rocks
+led their horses up the inner canyon wall and, remounting at the top,
+galloped hurriedly down a long ridge.
+
+At intervals, shots from the Indians reached their ears, and
+long-drawn yells, followed by the sharper crack of Scott's rifle,
+echoed from the west as the scout held the wall against the enemy.
+Bucks did not understand the real danger that the scout feared for
+his party. It was that other parties of the marauding Cheyennes might,
+by following the creek, gain the divide in time to cut off the
+railroad men from their line of escape. The sounds of the stubborn
+contest behind them died away as their straining horses gradually put
+miles between them and the enemy. The fugitives had reached the summit
+of the hills and with a feeling of safety were easing their pace when
+Bucks discerned, almost directly ahead of them, dark objects moving
+slowly along the foot of a wooded hill. The two men halted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+"Indians," announced Stanley after a brief moment of inspection.
+
+"We are cut off," he added, looking alertly over the landscape about
+them. "This way, Bucks. Ride as low as you can." Without further words
+he made an abrupt turn to the right, striking south to get behind a
+friendly butte that rose half a mile away.
+
+"The question now is," said Stanley, as they held their horses up a
+little after getting somewhat farther out of sight, "whether they have
+likewise seen us."
+
+The harried pair were not long in doubt. They had hardly changed their
+course when there was immediate activity on the hill-side. The
+railroad men spurred on; the distant horsemen, now on their flank,
+dashed out upon the broad slope that lay between the two parties and
+rode straight and hard after the fleeing men. Stanley steadied his
+inexperienced companion as the latter urged his horse. "Not too hard
+just now. Your pony will need all his wind. It's a question of getting
+away with our scalps and we must be careful. Follow me."
+
+Bucks's heart, as he looked back, crowded up into his throat. A long
+skirmish line of warriors had spread across the unbroken plateau to
+the east, and Stanley, with nothing but instinct for a guide, was
+making at top speed to the south to get away from them.
+
+As the two dashed on, they found to their consternation that the
+country was growing smoother and affording fewer hiding-places from
+the sharp eyes behind them. Stanley knew they must either ride through
+the hills ahead or perish. He sought vainly for some break in the
+great black wall of low-lying mountains toward which they were riding,
+yet from what he knew of the country he hardly dared hope for one.
+
+He had reconnoitred these hills time after time when running the
+railroad lines and knew pretty well where he was. The pursuers, too,
+apparently sure of their prey, rode hard, gradually lessening the
+distance that separated them from the wary soldier and his companion.
+The Indians had ceased yelling now. It was beyond that. But even in
+his excitement and fear the inexperienced boy could not but admire the
+composure and daring of his companion.
+
+As Stanley glanced now and again back at his enraged enemies he was
+every inch a soldier. And he watched the distance between the
+Cheyennes and himself as coolly as if calculating a mere problem in
+geometry. While saving every possible breath for his horses, he yet
+managed to keep the Cheyennes at a distance. The Indians, bent on
+overhauling the fleeing men before they could reach even the scant
+protection of the scattered timber they were now approaching,
+redoubled their efforts to cut off the escape.
+
+Forced by the desperation of his circumstances, Stanley bent more and
+more to the west of south, even though in doing so he seemed to be
+getting into a more hopeless country. The veteran campaigner eyed
+Bucks's horse carefully as he turned in his saddle, but Scott's wiry
+beast appeared quite fresh, and Stanley, turning his eyes, again swept
+the horizon for a friendly break in the black walls ahead. As he did
+so he was startled to see, directly in front, Indians riding at full
+speed out of the hills he was heading for. He reined his galloping
+horse and turned straight into the west.
+
+"Bucks," he exclaimed, looking with concern at the rider now by his
+side, "it's a case of obey orders now. If I stop at any time, you ride
+straight on--do you understand? You've got a revolver?" Bucks tapped
+the big Colt at his side. "Don't let them take you alive. And hold
+your last shot till a buck rides in for your scalp."
+
+The straining horses seemed to understand the sharp words that passed
+from saddle to saddle. The Indians were already within gunshot, but
+too sure of their game to lose any time in shooting; nor was Stanley
+willing to waste a shot upon them. As he dodged in between a broken
+wall of granite and a scrubby clump of cedars, closely followed by
+Bucks, their pursuers could have picked either man from his saddle.
+
+Stanley had no longer any fixed purpose of escape. He meant merely to
+dismount when he could ride no farther and sell his life as best he
+could, while Bucks took such further chance of escape as his
+companion's last stand might afford. The hard-driven fighter was even
+looking for a well-placed rock to drop behind, when the horse plunging
+under him lurched to one side of the cedars and a gulf in the walls
+suddenly opened before his surprised rider.
+
+A rotten ledge of burned granite seemed to head a mountain wash
+directly in their path. There was a sheer drop of twenty feet to the
+crumbling slope of disintegrated stone under the head of the draw
+itself, but Stanley, without looking back, never hesitated. Urging his
+panting horse, he made a flying leap down into space, and horse and
+rider landed knee-deep in the soft, gravelly granite below them.
+
+Bucks's mustang shied on the brink. He spurred him excitedly, and the
+trembling beast, nerving himself, leaped far out over the ledge,
+following Stanley so closely that he almost struck him with his hoofs
+as he went flying over the engineer's head. Bucks rolled headlong as
+his horse plunged into the loose debris. He scrambled to his feet and,
+spitting the gravel from between his bruised lips, caught the bridle
+of his horse as the latter righted himself.
+
+No legs were broken and much was already gained.
+
+"Quick!" cried Stanley. "Ride for your life!" he shouted as Bucks
+regained his saddle. The two spurred at the same time and dashed down
+the draw at breakneck speed just as the Indians yelling on the brink
+of the ledge stopped to pour a volley after the desperate men. Unable
+to land an effective shot, the Cheyennes, nothing daunted, and
+hesitating only a moment, plunged over the precipice after their
+quarry.
+
+But they had lost their great advantage. The dry watercourse proved
+unexpectedly good riding for the fleeing railroad men. It was a
+downhill run, with their hopes rising every moment. Moreover, the draw
+soon turned sharply to the south and put a big shoulder of granite
+between the pursuers and the pursued. The horses of the latter were
+now relieved, and the wary Stanley, riding with some reserve speed,
+held his rifle ready for a stern shot should one become necessary. He
+found himself riding between two almost perpendicular walls washed by
+the same granite gravel into which they had plunged on the start, but
+with the course again turning, to his surprise, to the east. Once,
+Stanley checked the flight long enough to stop and listen, but the two
+heard the active Indians clattering down the canyon after them, and
+rode on and on.
+
+As they could see by the lengthening shadow on the mountain-sides far
+above them, the sun was setting.
+
+"Cheer up," cried Stanley, who had put his companion ahead of him.
+"We've got the best of them. All we need is open country."
+
+He did not mention the chances of disaster, which were that they might
+encounter an obstacle that would leave them at bay before their
+tireless pursuers. Mile after mile they galloped without halting again
+to see whether they were being chased. Indeed, no distance seemed too
+considerable to put between them and the active war-paint in the
+saddles behind.
+
+A new turn in the canyon now revealed a wide valley opening between
+the hills before them. Far below, golden in the light of the setting
+sun, they saw the great eastern slope of the Black Hills spreading out
+upon a beautiful plain.
+
+Stanley swung his hat from his head with an exulting cry, and Bucks,
+without quite understanding why, but assuming it the right thing to
+do, yelled his loudest. On and on they rode, down a broad, spreading
+ridge that led without a break from the tortuous hills behind them
+into the open country far below. Stanley put full ten miles between
+himself and the canyon they had ridden out of before he checked his
+speed. The Indians had completely disappeared and, disappointed in
+their venture, had no doubt ridden back to their fastnesses to wait
+for other unwary white men. Stanley chose a little draw with good
+water and grass, and night was just falling as they picketed their
+exhausted horses and stretched themselves, utterly used up, on the
+grass.
+
+"We are safe until morning, anyway," announced Stanley as he threw
+himself down. "And this Indian chase may be the luckiest thing that
+has ever happened to me in the troublesome course of an unlucky life.
+
+"You don't understand," continued the engineer, wiping the sweat and
+dust from his tired face. Bucks admitted that he did not.
+
+"No matter," returned his companion; "it isn't necessary now. You will
+sometime. But I think I have done in the last hour something I have
+been trying to do for years. Many others have likewise failed in the
+same quest."
+
+Bucks listened with growing interest.
+
+"Yes, for years," Stanley went on, "incredible as it may sound, I have
+been searching these mountains for just such a crevice as we have this
+moment ridden down. You see how this range"--the exhausted engineer
+stretched flat on his back, but, with burning eyes, pointed to the
+formidable mountain wall that rose behind them in the dusk of the
+western sky--"rises abruptly from the plains below. Our whole grade
+climb for the continental divide is right here, packed into these few
+miles. Neither I nor any one else has ever been able to find such a
+pass as we need to get up into it. But if we have saved our scalps, my
+boy, you will share with me the honor of finding the pass for the
+Union Pacific Railroad over the Rocky Mountains."
+
+They were supperless, but it was very exciting, and Bucks was
+extremely happy. Stanley watched that night until twelve. When he woke
+Bucks the moon was rising and the ghostly peaks in the west towered
+sentinel-like above the plains flooded with silver. The two were to
+move at one o'clock when the moon would be high enough to make riding
+safe. It was cold, but fire was forbidden.
+
+The horses were grazing quietly, and Bucks, examining his revolver,
+which he had all the time felt he was wretchedly incompetent to shoot,
+sat down beside Stanley, already fast asleep, to stand his watch. He
+had lost Sublette's rifle in falling into the wash-out. At least he
+had found no leisure to pick it up and save his hair in the same
+instant, and he wondered now how much he should have to pay for the
+rifle.
+
+When the sun rose next morning the two horsemen were far out of the
+foot-hills and bearing northeast toward camp--so far had their ride
+for life taken them from their hunting ground. They scanned the
+horizon at intervals, with some anxiety, for Indians, and again with
+the hope of sighting their missing guide. Once they saw a distant herd
+of buffalo, and Bucks experienced a shock until assured by Stanley
+that the suspicious objects were neither Cheyennes nor Sioux.
+
+By nine o'clock they had found the transcontinental telegraph line and
+had a sure trail to follow until they discovered the grade stakes of
+the railroad, and soon descried the advance-guard of the graders busy
+with plough and shovel and scraper. As they rode into camp the very
+first man to emerge from Casement's tent, with his habitual smile, was
+Bob Scott.
+
+Casement himself, who had heard Scott's story when the latter had come
+in at daybreak, was awaiting Stanley's return with anxiety, but this
+was all forgotten in the great news Stanley brought. Sublette and
+Scott now returned to the hunting camp for the cavalry detail, and,
+reinforced by these, the two heroes of the long flight rode back to
+reconnoitre their escape from the mountains. Bucks rode close to Bob
+Scott and learned how the scout had outwitted his assailants at the
+canyon, and how after they had all ridden out of it, he had ridden
+into it and retraced with safety in the night the path that the
+hunters had followed in riding into the hill country.
+
+The second ride through the long defile, which itself was now the
+object of so much intense inspection, Bucks found much less exciting
+than the first. The party even rode up to where the first flying leap
+had been made, and to Bucks's joy found Sublette's rifle still in the
+wash; it had been overlooked by the Indians.
+
+What surprised Bucks most was to find how many hours it took to cover
+the ground that Stanley and he had negotiated in seemingly as many
+minutes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+After a week in Casement's camp, Stanley and his cavalrymen,
+accompanied by Dancing, Scott, and Bucks, struck north and east toward
+the Spider Water River to find out why the ties were not coming down
+faster. Rails had already been laid across the permanent Spider Water
+Bridge--known afterward as the first bridge, for the big river
+finished more than one structure before it was completely subdued--and
+the rail-laying was hampered only by the lack of ties.
+
+The straggling bands of Cheyennes had in the interval been driven out
+of the foot-hills by troops sent against them, and Stanley and his
+little escort met with no trouble on his rapid journey.
+
+Toward evening of the second day a broad valley opened on the plain
+before them, and in the sunset Bucks saw, winding like a silver thread
+far up toward the mountains, the great stream about which he had
+already heard so much. Camp was pitched on a high bluff that
+commanded the valley in both directions for many miles, and after
+supper Scott and Bucks rode down to the river.
+
+In its low-water stage nothing could have looked more sluggish or more
+sleepily deceptive than the mighty and treacherous stream. Scott and
+his companions always gave the river the name the Sioux had long ago
+given it because of its sudden, ravening floods and its deadly traps
+laid for such unwary men or animals as trusted its peaceful promise
+and slept within reach of its cruel power.
+
+Standing in the glow of the evening sky in this land where the clear,
+bright light seemed to lift him high above the earth, Bucks looked at
+the yellow flood long and thoughtfully--as well he might--for the best
+of his life was to be spent within ken of its flow and to go in doing
+battle with it himself, or in sending faithful men to its battling,
+sometimes to perish within its merciless currents.
+
+Next morning as the party, following a trail along the bluffs, rode up
+in the direction of the contractors' camps they discerned out on the
+river bottom a motley cluster of tents and shanties pitched under a
+hill. A number of flatboats lay in the backwater behind the bend and a
+quantity of ties corded along the bank indicated a loading-place, but
+no one seemed to be doing any loading. The few men that could be seen
+in the distance appeared to be loafing in the sunshine along the
+straggling street-way that led to the river. Stanley checked his
+horse.
+
+"What place is that?" he demanded of Scott.
+
+"That," returned the guide, "is Sellersville."
+
+"Sellersville," echoed Stanley. "What is Sellersville?"
+
+"Sellersville is where they bring most of the ties for the boats."
+
+"Have they started a town down there on the bottoms?"
+
+"They have started enough saloons and gambling dens to get the money
+from the men that are chopping ties."
+
+Stanley contemplated for a moment the ill-looking settlement. A mile
+farther on they encountered a number of men following the trail up
+the river.
+
+A small dog barked furiously at the Stanley party as they came up, and
+acted as if he were ready to fight every trooper in the detail. He
+dashed back and forth, barking and threatening so fiercely that every
+one's attention was drawn to him.
+
+Stanley stopped the leader and found he was a tie-camp foreman from
+up-river taking men to camp. "Is that your dog?" demanded Stanley,
+indicating the belligerent animal who seemed set upon eating somebody
+alive.
+
+"Why, yes," admitted the foreman philosophically. "He sort o' claims
+me, I guess."
+
+"What do you keep a cur like that around for?"
+
+"Can't get rid of him," returned the foreman. "He is no good, but the
+boys like his impudence. Down, Scuffy!" he cried, looking for a stick
+to throw at his pet.
+
+Bucks surveyed the company of men. They were a sorry-looking lot. The
+foreman explained that he had dragged them out of the dens at
+Sellersville to go back to work. When remonstrated with for the poor
+showing the contractors were making, the foreman pointed to the
+plague-spot on the bottoms.
+
+"There's the reason you are not getting any ties," said he lazily.
+"We've got five hundred men at work up here; that is, they are
+supposed to be at work. These whiskey dives and faro joints get them
+the minute they are paid, and for ten days after pay-day we can't get
+a hundred men back to camp."
+
+The foreman as he spoke looked philosophically toward the canvas
+shanties below. "I spend half my time chasing back and forth, but I
+can't do much. They hold my men until they have robbed them, and then
+if they show fight they chuck them into the river. It's the same with
+the flatboat men." He turned, as he continued, to indicate two
+particularly wretched specimens. "These fellows were drugged and
+robbed of every dollar they brought here before they got to work at
+all."
+
+Stanley likewise gazed thoughtfully upon the cluster of tents and
+shacks along the river landing. He turned after a moment to Scott.
+"Bob," said he, looking back again toward the river, "what gang do you
+suppose this is?"
+
+Scott shook his head. "That I couldn't say, Colonel Stanley."
+
+"Suppose," continued Stanley, still regarding the offending
+settlement, "you and Dancing reconnoitre them a little and tell me who
+they are. We will wait for you."
+
+Scott and the lineman swung into their saddles and started down the
+trail that led to the landing. Stanley spoke again to the foreman.
+"Can those men use an axe?" he demanded, indicating the two men that
+the foreman asserted had been robbed.
+
+"They are both old choppers--but this gang at Sellersville stole even
+their axes."
+
+"Leave these two men here with me," directed Stanley as he watched
+Scott and Dancing ride down toward Sellersville. "I may have something
+for them to chop after a while."
+
+The foreman assented. "I don't like the bunch," he murmured; "but
+nobody at our camp wants to tackle them. What can we do?"
+
+While the foreman continued to talk, Stanley again looked over the
+human wrecks that he had rounded up and brought out of Sellersville.
+"What can we do?" echoed Stanley, repeating the last question tartly.
+"Well, I'll tell you one thing we can do. We can throw Sellersville
+into the river."
+
+Dancing and Scott were gone half an hour. The report, when they
+returned, was not encouraging. "It is a bunch of cutthroats from
+Medicine Bend, colonel," said Bob Scott.
+
+"All friends of yours, I presume, Bob," returned Stanley.
+
+The scout only smiled. "John Rebstock is there with his following. But
+the boss, I think, is big George Seagrue. He is mean, you know. George
+has got two or three men to his credit."
+
+"Are we enough to clean them out, Bob?" inquired Stanley impatiently.
+
+Scott looked around and his eye rested for a moment on Dancing. He
+hitched his trousers. "There's about thirty men down there. I expect,"
+he continued reflectively, "we can take care of them if we have to."
+
+Stanley turned to the sergeant of his troopers. "Pitch a permanent
+camp, sergeant. There will be nothing to take us any farther up the
+river."
+
+As Stanley gave the order Bucks noticed that Dancing winked at Scott.
+And without the meaning glances exchanged by the lineman and the
+scout, Bucks would have understood from Stanley's manner that he meant
+strong measures. Stanley sent a further message to the contractor, and
+the foreman, followed by his convoy of humanity, started on. The
+soldiers, foreseeing a lively scene, stripped their pack-horses and
+set at work pitching their tents.
+
+Leaving four men in camp, the engineer, accompanied by his escort,
+rode down the bluffs and, striking a lumber road, galloped rapidly
+through the poplar bottom-lands toward the gamblers' camp. It was an
+early tour for human wolves to be stirring, and the invaders clattered
+into Sellersville before they attracted any attention.
+
+A bugler, however, riding into the middle of the settlement, sounded a
+trumpet call, and at the unwonted notes frowsy, ill-shaped heads
+appeared at various shanty doors and tent-flaps to see what was
+doing. Stanley sent one man from door to door to notify the inmates of
+each shelter to pack up their effects and make ready to move without
+delay.
+
+Five troopers were detailed to guard three gambling tents that stood
+together in the middle of the camp, each of these being flanked by
+smaller dens. Word was then passed to the gamblers and saloon-keepers
+to line up on the river front.
+
+Stanley regarded the gathering crowd with a cold eye. Scott, who stood
+near Bucks, pointed out a square-shouldered man with a deep scar
+splitting one cheek. "Do you know that fellow, Bucks?" he asked in an
+undertone.
+
+"No; who is he?"
+
+"That is a Medicine Bend confidence man, Perry. Do you remember the
+woman you helped out with a ticket to Iowa? Perry is her husband--the
+man that Dave Hawk made pay up."
+
+Perry was a type of the Sellersville crowd now being evicted. There
+was much talk as the soldiers urged and drove the gang out of one
+haunt after another and a good deal of threatening as the leaders
+marched out in front of Stanley.
+
+"Who is running this camp?" demanded the officer curtly. The men
+looked at one another. A fat, slow-moving man with small blue eyes and
+a wheezy voice answered: "Why, no one in particular, colonel. We're
+just a-camping in a bunch. What's a-matter? Seagrue here," he nodded
+to a sharp-jawed companion, "and Perry," he added, jerking his thumb
+toward the scarred-faced man, "and me own these two big tents in
+partners."
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+"My name's Rebstock."
+
+"Produce the axes stolen here from these two men," said Stanley,
+indicating the choppers behind him. There was a jangle of talk between
+Rebstock and his associates, and Perry, much against his inclination,
+was despatched to hunt up the axes. It was only a moment before he
+returned with them.
+
+Rebstock, with a show of virtue, reprimanded Perry severely for
+harboring the men that had stolen the axes. "Sorry it happened,
+colonel," he grumbled, after he had abused the thieves roundly in a
+general way, "and I'll see it doesn't happen again. We can't watch
+everybody in a place like this. Tell your men," he continued,
+expanding his chest, "to leave their axes with me when they come to
+Sellersville--what?"
+
+The assurances were lost on Stanley. "Rebstock," said he, in a tone
+that Bucks had not heard before from him, "take your personal effects,
+all of you--and nothing else--and load them on a flatboat. I will give
+you one hour to get-out of here."
+
+Rebstock almost fell over backward. He wheezed in amazement. There was
+an outburst of indignant protests. A dozen men clamored at once. Perry
+rushed forward to threaten Stanley; others cursed and defied him.
+
+"Who are you, and what do you mean giving orders like that?" demanded
+Seagrue, confronting him angrily.
+
+"No matter who I am, you will obey the orders. And you can't take any
+tents or gambling apparatus or liquors. Pack up your clothes and camp
+stuff--nothing else--and get out."
+
+If a bombshell had dropped into Sellersville, consternation could not
+have been more complete. But it became quickly apparent that not all
+of the gang would surrender without a fight. The leaders retreated for
+a hurried consultation.
+
+Rebstock walked back presently and confronted Stanley. "What's your
+law for this?" he demanded, breathless with anger.
+
+Stanley pointed to the ground under their feet.
+
+"What's your title to this land, Rebstock? It belongs to the railroad
+that those ties belong to. Where is your license from the United
+States Government to sell whiskey here? You are trespassers and
+outlaws, with no rights that any decent man ought to respect. You and
+your gang are human parasites, and you are going to be stripped and
+sent down the river as fast as these flatboats will carry you."
+
+Without waiting for any rejoinder, Stanley turned on his heel and
+walked away, leaving Rebstock speechless. The threats against the
+intruders continued, but Stanley paid no attention to any of them.
+Scott and the five troopers faced the gamblers. Stanley called to the
+two wood-choppers, who stood near with their axes, and pointed to the
+gambling tents.
+
+"Chop up every wheel and table in there you can find," said he.
+
+A cry went up from Perry when he heard the order, but the axemen,
+nothing loath, sprang inside to their work, and the crashing of the
+gambling furniture resounded through the alarmed camp. Stanley made no
+delay of his peremptory purpose. The tent attacked belonged to
+Seagrue, who, common report averred, feared nothing and nobody, while
+the gambling implements were Perry's.
+
+Seagrue rushed to his property, revolver in hand. Bill Dancing, who
+stood at Stanley's side, stepped into his way.
+
+"Hold on, Seagrue," he said. The gambler, fully as large a man as
+Dancing, faced his opponent with his features fixed in rage. "Get
+away," he shouted, "or I will knock your head off."
+
+All eyes centred on the two men. Every one realized that open war was
+on and that it needed only a spark to start the shooting. The
+gamblers, rallying to Seagrue, backed him with oaths and threats.
+
+"Seagrue, put down that pistol or I'll wring your neck," returned the
+lineman, baring his right arm as he sauntered toward the outlaw.
+Bucks, beside Stanley, stood transfixed as he watched Dancing. The
+lineman's revolver was slung in the holster at his side.
+
+Seagrue hesitated. He saw Bob Scott standing in the doorway of the
+gambling tent with his rifle lying carelessly over his arm. He was
+actually covering Seagrue where he stood--and Seagrue knew that Bob
+Scott was deadly with a rifle. But Dancing was walking directly up to
+him and Seagrue dared not be shamed before his own associates. He
+jumped back to fire, but it was too late.
+
+Dancing caught his wrist. Both were men of great strength, and their
+muscles knotted as they grappled. It was only after a moment that the
+lineman could be seen to gain. Then, as he bent the gambler's arm
+back, he suddenly released it and struck the revolver out of his hand.
+Seagrue, with a curse, sprang back, and drawing a knife rushed for the
+second time at the lineman. Dancing jumped to one side. As he did so
+he seized an axe from the hand of one of the choppers and turned again
+on Seagrue. The gambler made a lunge at his throat, but as he threw
+himself forward, Dancing, springing away, brought the axe around like
+a flash and laid it flat across his assailant's forearm. The knife
+flew twenty feet, and before the gambler could recover himself the
+railroad man with one hand like a vice on his throat bore him to the
+ground.
+
+"Give me a piece of rope," muttered Dancing as Stanley ran up.
+
+[Illustration: IT WAS ONLY AFTER A MOMENT THAT THE LINEMAN COULD BE SEEN
+TO GAIN.]
+
+Bob Scott slashed a tent guy and handed it to him. In another minute
+Dancing, in spite of Seagrue's struggles, had lashed his prisoner hand
+and foot. Picking him up bodily, he walked unopposed to the landing,
+and to the astonishment of the spectators heaved Seagrue with scant
+ceremony into a flatboat. There a trooper kept him quiet. Walking
+back, the lineman brushed the dust of the encounter from his arms as
+if to invite any further Sellersville champion to come forward. But
+John Rebstock, the really responsible head of the place, showed no
+desire to meet Dancing, and Perry, the sneak of the trio, only ranted
+while Rebstock stood at a respectable distance wheezing his surprise
+at the tremendous exhibition of strength. And the work of destruction
+went forward.
+
+Adjoining the Seagrue tent stood a saloon in which the men were now
+ordered to demolish the stock. This renewed the excitement among
+Rebstock's followers.
+
+"Don't waste any time," was Stanley's order. "They may rush us. Knock
+in the head of a keg of whiskey, pour it over the bar, and burn the
+shanty."
+
+The gamblers were, in fact, mustering for a charge on the invaders.
+Before they could act the saloon was ablaze and the flames, rising
+amid the yells and execrations of its owners, leaped to the big tent
+adjoining. In front of this the soldiers in a skirmish line held back
+the scurrying outlaws. Within a few moments Sellersville was ablaze
+from end to end and its population, including Perry and Rebstock,
+driven to the flatboats, were floating with threats and curses down
+the muddy current of the Spider Water.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Stanley's next camp was pitched down the river where the overland
+telegraph line crossed the Spider Water, and Bucks, installed in a
+smart army tent with a cracker-box for a stool and a packing-case for
+an instrument table, was, through Dancing's efforts, put in
+communication by wire with Medicine Bend and the west country as far
+as Sleepy Cat, where the War Department was establishing an army
+post.
+
+Stanley, with Bob Scott, now spent a great deal of time in the saddle
+between the bridge and the upper tie-camps, and his presence made
+itself felt in the renewed energy everywhere apparent among the
+contractors and their men. Bucks, chained to a wire, as he expressed
+it, found the days dragging again and would much rather have been at
+liberty to ride with Scott, who, when free, hunted in the foot-hills.
+
+One day Bucks was sitting alone in his tent, looking for the
+hundredth time over a worn copy of _Harper's Weekly_ that he had
+picked up at Casement's camp, when a dog put his nose in the tent
+door. A glance revealed merely a disconsolate, unpromising cur, yet
+Bucks thought he had seen the dog before and was interested. He seemed
+of an all-over alkali-brown hue, scant of hair, scant of tail, and
+with only melancholy dewlap ears to suggest a strain of nobler blood
+in an earlier ancestry. He looked in with the furtive eye of the
+tramp, and as if expecting that a boot or a club would most probably
+be his welcome.
+
+But Bucks at the moment was lonely--as lonely as the dog himself--and
+as the two fixed their eyes intently on each other, Bucks remembered
+that this was the tie foreman's dog, Scuffy.
+
+Scuffy had appeared at the psychological moment. Bucks regarded him in
+silence, and the dog perceiving no immediate danger of assault stood,
+in silence, returning Bucks's stare. Then watching the boy's eye
+carefully, the dog cocked his head just the least bit to one side. It
+was a mute appeal, but a moving one. Bucks continued, however, his
+non-committal scrutiny, recalling that the foreman had said nothing
+good of Scuffy, and the homeless cur stood in doubt as to his
+reception. But realizing, perhaps, that he had nothing to lose and
+everything to gain, the little vagabond played his last card--he
+wagged his stubby tail.
+
+A harder heart than Bucks's might have been touched. The operator held
+out his hand. No more was needed; the melancholy tramp stepped
+cautiously forward waving his alert flag of truce. He sniffed long and
+carefully as he neared Bucks, looked solicitously into the boy's eyes,
+and then smelt and licked the proffered hand. It was a token of
+submission as plainly expressed as when Friday, kneeling, placed
+Robinson Crusoe's foot on his head. Bucks reached into a paper bag
+that Bill Dancing had left on the table and gave the dog a cracker.
+
+Scuffy snapped up the offering like one starving. A second cracker and
+a third disappeared at single gulps. For the length of the dog, the
+size of his mouth appeared enormous. In a moment the cracker-bag was
+emptied and Scuffy again licked the friendly hand. It did not take
+Bucks long to decide what to do. In another moment he had resolved to
+adopt his tramp visitor. The day happened to be Friday, and Bucks at
+once renamed him Friday. When Dancing, who had been with Bob Scott
+hunting, came in late that night he found Bucks asleep and Scuffy
+lying in Dancing's own bed, from which he was ejected only after the
+most vigorous language on his own part as well as on that of the
+lineman. Even then, Scuffy retreated only as far as Bucks's feet,
+where he slept for the rest of the night undisturbed.
+
+"Where did he come from?" growled Dancing in the morning as he sat
+with his pipe regarding the intruder, who acted quite at home, with a
+critical eye.
+
+Bucks explained that this was the tie foreman's runaway dog, Scuffy,
+and beyond Scuffy's first appearance at the tent door he could tell
+him nothing. Scuffy simply and promptly assumed a place in camp and
+Bucks became, willy-nilly, his sponsor. But his effort to rename him
+came to nothing. Scuffy gave no heed when called "Friday," but for
+"Scuffy" he sprang to attention instantly.
+
+Bill Dancing decided, off-hand, that "the pup" was worthless. Scott,
+whose smile was kindly even when sceptical, only corrected Bill to the
+extent of saying that Friday or Scuffy, whoever or whatever he might
+be, was no pup; that he was a full-grown dog and in Bob's judgment he
+would need no guardian.
+
+One day, shortly after Scuffy had been put upon the pay-roll, Scott
+came in from a trip after venison with word that there were black
+bears in the hill canyons. The thought of bear's meat aroused every
+one, and Stanley suggested a bear hunt. Scott had to send down to
+Stanley's ranch at Medicine Bend for his dogs and some delay followed.
+But when the three hounds arrived there was excitement enough to
+compensate for it. One of the dogs was a big black fellow and his
+companions were brown full-bloods. The hounds, one and all, set on
+Scuffy the moment they reached camp, and it was only by the most
+dexterous manoeuvres that the strange dog escaped being eaten alive.
+Indeed, Bob Scott remarked at once that if Scuffy should survive the
+greetings of his new comrades he would prove his right to live. The
+hounds always set upon him at meal-times, usually chewed him at
+bed-time, and harried him at all times.
+
+To a less hopeful temperament than Scuffy's, life would not have
+seemed worth living. It was only Bucks who insured him anything at all
+to eat, and the enmity of the big, rangy hounds for the lean and
+hungry tramp dog left him no peace save when they were fighting in
+dreams. To accept life under such conditions indicated that Scuffy was
+a philosopher, and he accepted the conditions cheerfully, filching
+what he could of sustenance from the common pot and licking his
+troublesome wounds at night after his truculent companions had gone to
+sleep.
+
+As soon as the tie-supply trouble had been lessened Stanley took
+things more leisurely and the interval afforded the opportunity for
+the delayed bear hunt. Bob Scott and Dancing were to go with Stanley,
+and Bucks being freed for one day from his key was invited to be of
+the party. All hands were in the saddle by daybreak, and Scott's
+hounds were baying and tearing around camp wild with excitement.
+
+At the last moment a complication arose. Scuffy, who until the moment
+of starting had for prudential reasons--that is, to avoid being eaten
+up--remained in obscurity, joined the hunters. Every one in turn tried
+to drive him back, but long practice had made him expert in dodging
+missiles and had rendered him insensible to reproach. The hounds were
+too filled with the prospect of sport to pay any attention to Scuffy.
+In vain, Bob Scott tried to set them on him and drive him back to
+camp. On this occasion, when bullying would plainly have been
+justified, no hound would assail Scuffy. Bucks drove him again and
+again from the flank of the advance only to have the mortification of
+seeing him reappear a mile or two farther along the trail, and it was
+at last decided to leave him to his fate at the paw of a bear--which
+no one made doubt he was certain to suffer. At that moment Bucks and
+Bill Dancing, riding together, saw a deer frightened from a thicket
+running toward the river. Bucks jumped from his horse and lifted his
+rifle to take a shot, but by the time he was ready to fire the deer
+had vanished.
+
+Led by Scott, the hunters rode at once into the rough country to the
+west, where in the mountain fastnesses the bears loved to feed. The
+hounds gave tongue vigorously, and Scuffy, who had by this time not
+only established himself but had impudently taken the lead and was
+heading the pack, barked loudest and longest.
+
+"Did anybody ever see conceit equal to that?" demanded Stanley. "Look
+at that cur leading the hounds."
+
+Bucks was mortified and expressed his regret.
+
+"Don't mind him, Bucks," remarked Dancing consolingly. "That dog won't
+bother long. The first time the hounds run in, the bear will finish
+_him_."
+
+Bucks did not know precisely what Bill meant by "running in," but he
+was not to be long in doubt. The pack struck a fresh trail almost at
+once and the hunters had a long ride along a mountain-side covered
+with fallen timber and cut by innumerable wash-outs that made the
+riding hard and dangerous. Scott found intervals to encourage Bucks,
+whose youth and inexperience made his task of keeping up with the
+others a difficult one. "Take it easy," said Scott encouragingly as
+the operator tried to urge his mount.
+
+"I am keeping you all back, Bob."
+
+"Plenty of time. You are doing wonders for mountain-riding. When we
+close in on the bear don't be too keen to get near him. You wouldn't
+be safe for a minute on your horse if the dogs didn't keep the bear
+busy. As long as the dogs worry the bear you are safe. A bear will
+never chase a man as long as a dog keeps at him. It's only when the
+dogs refuse to go in any longer that the danger begins. When that
+happens, look out. Keep a respectful distance all the time and a road
+open behind you. That's all there is to a bear fight."
+
+As he spoke, the hounds yelped sharply and Scott spurred forward. The
+hunters were threading a grove of quaking asp and the dogs had come
+up with the bear on an opening of shale rock surrounded by down
+timber. Throwing his reins and advancing cautiously on foot, Stanley,
+followed by his companions, who spread themselves in a wide
+semicircle, took his place, the others, as they best could, choosing
+their own.
+
+The bear, a full-grown male, met the onset of the hounds with grim
+confidence. The dogs encircled him with a ring of ferocious teeth,
+running in from behind whenever they could to nip the huge beast in
+the haunches or on the flank. But the surprise of the encounter was
+Scuffy.
+
+"Look," cried Bill Dancing, under whose wing Bucks had taken his post.
+"Look at him! Why, the pup is a world-beater!"
+
+In truth, Scuffy was the liveliest and most impudent dog in the pack,
+and when the fight was fully on, managed to worry the angry bear more
+than the hounds did. Within a moment the black hound, over-bold,
+imprudently rushed the bear in front. A paw darting from the huge
+beast caught him like a trip-hammer and stretched him helpless. In
+that moment the bear exposed himself to Stanley's rifle and a shot
+rang across the mountain-side. Scott watched the result anxiously. But
+the slug instead of dropping the bear served only to enrage him. For
+an instant the two hounds lost their heads and the infuriated bear
+charged Bucks and Bill Dancing.
+
+The shale opening became a scene of confusion. Exposing himself
+recklessly, Scott tried to urge the dogs forward, but they had lost
+their nerve. It needed only this to upset everything. The hunters
+closed in together, and the critical moment had come; deaf alike to
+command and entreaty, the two hounds refused to go in, and Scuffy,
+flying wildly about the bear, seemed unable to check him. Dancing
+stopped long enough to take one shot, and ran--with Bucks, who had
+found no chance to shoot, following. The bear gained fast on the
+long-legged lineman and his boy companion. A wash-out, hidden by a
+clump of bushes, lay directly in the path of flight. Dancing,
+perceiving it, dashed to the left and escaped. He shouted a warning to
+Bucks, who, not understanding, plunged straight over the declivity
+and sprawled into the wash-out with the bear after him. Catching his
+rifle, the boy scrambled to his feet with his pursuer less than twenty
+feet away. Between the two there was only open ground, and the bear
+was scrambling for Bucks when Scuffy sprang down the shale bank and
+confronted the enemy.
+
+It looked like certain death for Scuffy, but the tramp dog did not
+hesitate. He rushed at the bear with a fury of snapping, though not
+without a lively respect for the sweep of the brute's fore paws. The
+little dog, freeing himself forever in that moment from the stigma of
+cur, put up a fight that astonished the big brute.
+
+Scuffy raced at him first on one side and then on the other, bounding
+in and out like a rubber ball, dashing across his front and running
+clear around the circling bear, nipping even an occasional mouthful of
+hair from his haunches. He made noise enough for a pack of dogs and
+simulated a fury that gave the bear the surprise of his life. Bucks
+realized that only his four-legged friend stood between him and
+destruction and that so unequal a contest could not endure long.
+Skilful as the little fellow was, he was pitted against an antagonist
+quite as quick and wary. The clumsiness of the bear was no more than
+seeming, and any one of the terrific blows he dealt at Scuffy with his
+huge paw would have stretched a man lifeless. Bucks, collecting his
+disordered faculties, raised his rifle to help his champion with a
+shot. His heart beat like a hammer in his throat, but he knew there
+was only one thing to do, that was to get the rifle-sights carefully
+lined in his eye and shoot when Scuffy gave him an opening.
+
+It came in a moment when the bear turned to smash Scuffy on his flank.
+Bucks fired. To his amazement, no result followed. The failure of the
+bear to show any sign of being hit stunned him, and he drew his
+revolver, never expecting to escape alive, when two shots rang across
+the wash as close together as if fired by the same hand. The bear sank
+like a falling tree. Yet he rallied and again rushed for Bucks,
+despite Scuffy's stout opposition and the yells from above, and
+finally halted only when Bob Scott, jumping into the wash-out,
+confronted him with a knife. There was an instant of apprehension,
+broken by a third shot from Dancing's rifle across the gully, and the
+bear crumpled lifeless almost at Scott's feet.
+
+The scout turned to Bucks as he stood dazed by his narrow escape.
+Stanley, above, shouted. And Bill Dancing, carrying his empty rifle,
+and with his face bleeding from the briers, made his way down the
+opposite side of the wash. Scuffy, mounting the body of his dead foe,
+barked furiously.
+
+The little dog was the real hero of the encounter. He had paid
+his keep and earned his way as a member of the family and as a
+bear-fighter. When Bucks picked up his rifle he told Scott of his
+bad miss in the critical moment of the fight. Bob took the gun from
+his hands and examined the sights good-naturedly. Bucks had
+neglected to change the elevation after he had aimed at the deer
+an hour earlier.
+
+"Next time you shoot at a bear twenty feet away, don't leave your
+sights set for two hundred yards," was all Scott said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The bruises that Bucks nursed were tender for some days, and Scott
+tried out some bear's grease for an ointment.
+
+Scuffy, who had come out of the fight without a scratch, took on new
+airs in camp, and returned evil for evil by bullying the two wounded
+hounds who were too surprised by his aggressiveness to make an
+effective defence.
+
+Bucks, when he was alone with the dog and time dragged heavily, turned
+for diversion to the only book in the camp, a well-thumbed copy of
+"The Last of the Mohicans." He had brought it with him to read coming
+out from Pittsburgh, and had thrown it into his bag when leaving
+Medicine Bend. In camp it proved a treasure, even the troopers, when
+they were idle, casting lots to get hold of it.
+
+One day, when Bucks was absorbed in the romance, Bob Scott asked him
+what he was reading. Bucks tried to give him some idea of the story.
+Scott showed little apparent interest in the resume, but he listened
+respectfully while cleaning his rifle. He made no comment until Bucks
+had done.
+
+"What kind of Indians did you say those were," he asked, contracting
+his brows as he did when a subject perplexed him, "Uncas and
+Chingachgook?"
+
+"Delawares, Bob. Know anything about Delaware Indians?"
+
+Scott shook his head. "Never heard of Delawares in our country. I saw
+a Pottawottamie Indian once, but never any Delawares. Is this story
+about Uncas a true story?"
+
+"As true as any story. Listen here." Bucks read aloud to him for a
+while, his companion at intervals asking questions and approving or
+criticising the Indian classic.
+
+"If you could only read, Bob, you ought to read the whole book," said
+Bucks regretfully, as he put the volume aside.
+
+"I can read a little," returned Scott, to Bucks's surprise. "All
+except the long words," added the scout modestly. "A man down at
+Medicine Bend tried to sell me a pair of spectacles once. They had
+gold rims, and he told me that a man with those spectacles could read
+any kind of a book. He thought I was a greenhorn," said the scout.
+
+"Where did you learn to read?"
+
+"A Blackrobe taught me."
+
+Bucks held out the book. "Then read this, Bob, sure."
+
+Scott looked at the worn volume, but shook his head doubtfully. "Looks
+like a pretty big book for me. But if you can find out whether it's
+true, I might try it sometime."
+
+Stanley, after a few days, started up the river with Scott and
+Dancing, leaving his men in camp. Bucks, who was still too stiff to
+ride, likewise remained to receive any messages that might come.
+
+There was an abundance of water-fowl in the sloughs and ponds up and
+down the river, and Bucks, the morning after Stanley's departure,
+leaving the troopers lounging in camp, started out with a shot-gun to
+look for ducks. He passed the first bend up-stream, and working his
+way toward a small pond thickly fringed with alders, where he had
+often seen teal and mallards, attempted to crawl within gunshot of
+it.
+
+He was working his way in this fashion toward the edge of the water
+when he heard a clatter of wings and the next moment a flock of
+mallards rushed in swift flight over his head. He impulsively threw up
+his gun to fire but some instinct checked him. He was in a country of
+dangerous enemies and the thought of bears still loomed large in his
+mind. An instant's reflection convinced him that it was not his
+movement that had frightened the ducks, and he was enough of a hunter
+to look further than that for the cause. As caution seemed, from the
+soreness of his legs and arms, plainly indicated, he lay still to
+await developments.
+
+Soon he heard a movement of trampling feet, and, seemingly, across the
+pond from him. Bucks thought of buffaloes. His heart beat fast at the
+thought of getting a shot at one until he reflected that he had no
+rifle. The next instant his heart stopped beating. Not ten feet from
+where he lay in the thick willows, an Indian carrying a rifle, and in
+war-paint, stole noiselessly along toward the camp. No sooner had he
+disappeared than a second brave followed, and while Bucks was
+digesting this fright a third warrior, creeping in the same stealthy
+manner and almost without a sound, passed the staring boy; the
+appearance of a fourth and a fifth raised the hair on Bucks's head
+till he was almost stunned with fright, but he had still to count
+three more in the party, one more ferocious-looking than another,
+before all had passed.
+
+What to do was the question that forced itself on him. He feared the
+Indians would attack the troopers in camp, and this he felt would be a
+massacre, since the men, not suspecting danger, would be taken wholly
+unawares. Should he fire his gun as a signal? It would probably bring
+the Indians back upon him, but the thought of allowing the troopers to
+be butchered was insupportable. His hammers were cocked and his
+finger was on one trigger when he considered how useless the alarm
+would be. The troopers knew that he had gone duck hunting. They would
+expect to hear him shoot and would pay no attention to it. To rush out
+after the Indians would only invite his instant death.
+
+There seemed nothing he could do and a cold sweat of apprehension
+broke over him. But if he fired his gun he might, at least, surprise
+the Indians. The report of a gun in their rear would alarm them--since
+they knew nothing of his presence or his duck hunting and might take
+fright. Without more ado he fired both barrels one after the other,
+careful only to shoot low into the willows, hoping the smoke would not
+rise so quickly as to betray him before he could make a dash for a new
+hiding-place.
+
+His ruse worked and he ran at top speed for twenty yards before he
+threw himself into a clump of cotton-woods close to the camp trail and
+began to reload. While he was doing so a shout came from the direction
+of the railroad bridge. Not until then did Bucks understand what the
+Indians were after. But had he not understood, he would have known a
+moment later when he heard a sharp exchange of shots toward the camp,
+heard the dogs barking furiously, and saw the Indians, now on their
+ponies, running the troopers' horses past him at a breakneck gallop.
+The Indians yelled lustily at the success of their raid, the stampeded
+horses dashed panic-stricken before them, and the braves shouted back
+in derision at the vain efforts of the troopers to stop them with
+useless bullets. Bucks's own impulse was to empty a charge of birdshot
+into the last of the fleeing warriors, but this he knew might cost him
+his life, and he resisted the temptation. When he was sure all were
+past he ran toward the bluffs, and gaining a little eminence saw the
+fleeing Indians, a dozen in all, making their way jubilantly up the
+river. At the camp the discomfited cavalrymen were preparing for a
+siege, and in their excitement almost shot Bucks as he hove in sight.
+
+Bucks gave a good description of the marauders, and, following him up
+to the pond, six of the troopers attempted some pursuit. This, to
+unmounted men, was useless, as they well knew. Indeed, they used
+caution not to come unawares on any friends of the escaping braves
+that might have lingered behind.
+
+Colonel Stanley returned in the morning to hear that his escort had
+been unhorsed. Bob Scott grinned at the cavalrymen as they told the
+story. He assured them that they had got off lightly, and that if
+Bucks's signals had not alarmed the little war-party they might have
+carried away scalps as well as horses.
+
+"We shall be in luck if we don't hear more of those fellows," said he
+to Bucks afterward. There was now manifestly nothing to do but to go
+in, and later in the day a freight train was flagged and the whole
+party, with Scuffy and the hounds, returned to Casement's camp. Scott
+sent his dogs thence to the ranch in Medicine Bend, and at Bucks's
+urgent request Scuffy was sent with them to await his own return to
+head-quarters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The foray of the Indians at the Spider Water Bridge proved, as Bob
+Scott had feared, only a forerunner of active hostilities. Casement
+had already taken all necessary measures of defence. His construction
+camp was moved steadily westward, though sometimes inside the picket
+lines of troops, despite the warring Indians and the difficulties of
+his situation. Alarms, however, were continual and the graders, many
+of whom were old soldiers, worked at all times with their muskets
+stacked on the dump beside them. In the construction camp Bucks saw
+also many negroes, and at night the camp-fires of their quarters were
+alive with the singing and dancing of the old plantation life in the
+South.
+
+While waiting for Stanley's inspection of the grading and track-laying,
+Bucks relieved at times the camp operator, whose principal business
+was the rushing of emphatic demands to Omaha for material and
+supplies.
+
+During other intervals Bucks found a chance to study the system that
+underlay the seemingly hopeless confusion of the construction work.
+The engineers moving far in advance had located the line, and
+following these came the graders and bridge- and culvert-builders,
+cutting through the hills, levelling the fills, and spanning the
+streams and water-ways with trestles and wooden bridges, miles in
+advance of the main army. Behind these came Casement's own big camp
+with the tiemen, the track-layers, and the ballast gangs.
+
+Every Eastern market was drawn upon for materials, and when these
+reached Omaha, trains loaded with them were constantly pushed to the
+front. The chief spiker of the rail gang, taking a fancy to Bucks,
+invited him to go out with the rail-layers one day, and Bucks took a
+temporary commission as spike-dropper.
+
+To do this, he followed Dancing up the track past a long construction
+train in which the men lived. The big box-cars contained sleeping-bunks,
+and those men who preferred more air and seclusion had swung
+sleeping-hammocks under the cars; others had spread their beds on top
+of the cars. Climbing a little embankment, Bucks watched the sturdy,
+broad-shouldered pioneers. A light car drawn by a single, galloping
+horse was rushed to the extreme end of the laid rails. Before it had
+fairly stopped, two men waiting on either side seized the end of a rail
+with their trap and started forward. Ten more men, following in twos, at
+a run, lifted the two rails clear of the car and dropped them in place on
+the ties. The foreman instantly gauged them, the horse moved ahead, and
+thirty spikers armed with heavy mauls drove the spikes furiously and
+regularly, three strokes to the spike, into the new-laid ties. The
+bolters followed with the fish-plates, and while Bucks looked the
+railroad was made before his eyes.
+
+The excitement of the scene was unforgettable. In less than sixty
+seconds four rails had gone down. The moment a horse-car was emptied
+it was dumped off one side of the track, and a loaded car with its
+horse galloping to the front had passed it. The next instant the
+"empty" was lifted back on the rails, and at the end of a sixty-foot
+rope the horse, ridden by a hustling boy, was being urged back to
+where the rails were transferred from the regular flat cars. The clang
+of the heavy iron, the continuous ring of the spike mauls, the
+shouting of the orders, the throwing of each empty horse-car from the
+track to make way for a loaded one, these things were all new and
+stimulating to Bucks. The chief spiker laughed when the young operator
+told him how fine it was. He asked Bucks to look at his watch and time
+the work. In half an hour Bucks looked at his watch again. In the
+interval the gang had laid eight hundred feet of track.
+
+"I don't see how you can work so fast," declared Bucks.
+
+"Do you know how many times," demanded the spiker, "those sledges have
+to swing? There are eighteen ties and thirty-six spikes to every rail,
+three hundred and fifty-two rails to every mile, and eighteen hundred
+miles from Omaha to San Francisco--those sledges will swing
+sixty-eight million times before the rails are full-spiked--they have
+to go fast."
+
+The words were hardly out of the chief spiker's mouth when a cry of
+alarm rang from the front. Bucks, looking eagerly, saw in the west a
+cloud of dust. At the same time he saw the tie gang running in dozens
+for their lives from the divide where they were working toward the
+camp. The men beyond them on the grade had scrambled into the wagons,
+dumped any ties they might contain helter-skelter to the ground, and
+were clinging to the wagon boxes. In these, the drivers standing up,
+lashed their horses with whip and line for life, and death, while
+everywhere beside and behind them other men on foot were racing back
+to safety.
+
+New clouds of dust rose along the grade from the flying wagon wheels,
+the horses tore madly on, and as the heavy wagons jolted over the
+loose stones, the fugitives, yelling with excitement and alarm and
+clinging to one another as they bounced up and down, looked anxiously
+behind.
+
+There was no uncertainty as to the cause of the panic. "Indians!" was
+the cry everywhere. Every man in camp had dropped his working
+implement and was moving somewhere on the double-quick. Every one, it
+seemed to Bucks, was shouting and running. But above the confusion of
+the surprise and the babel of voices, Bucks heard the sharp tones of
+Jack Casement giving orders.
+
+The old soldiers in the working gang needed no further discipline. The
+timid and the skulkers scurried for the box-cars and the dugouts. On
+the other hand, the soldiers ran for the dumps where the arms were
+stacked, and seizing their muskets hurried back and, trained for the
+emergency, fell into line under their foremen.
+
+Casement, musket in hand, taking the largest company of men as they
+formed in fours behind him, started forward at the double-quick,
+yelling now for the moral effect, to protect the retreat of the
+wagons. The men, scattering as they reached the edge of the camp,
+dropped into every spot of shelter, and at the same moment Stanley,
+mounted and alive with the vim and fire of the soldier, led a smaller
+body of men rapidly back to guard the rear of the camp, deploying his
+little force about the box-cars and flat cars as they hastened on. In
+an instant the construction camp had become a fortress defended by a
+thousand men.
+
+It was none too soon. Stirring the yellow plain with the fury of a
+whirlwind, a band of Sioux warriors rode the fleeing railroaders
+furiously down. They appeared phantom-like out of every slip and
+canyon, and rode full-panoplied from behind every hill. The horizon
+that had shown five minutes before only the burning sunshine and the
+dull glare of the alkali sinks, danced now with the flying ponies of
+the Indians, and the hills echoed with ominous cries.
+
+Without a word of warning, the few fleeing men who had been working
+too far from camp to reach it in safety were mercilessly cut down.
+Their comrades under arms, with an answering cry of defiance poured a
+volley of cartridge balls into the thin, black circle that rode ever
+closer and closer to the muzzles of the muskets. Jack Casement and his
+brother Dan recklessly urged their men to the most advanced posts of
+defence, and from behind scrapers, wagons, flat cars, and friendly
+hillocks the railroad men poured a galling fire into their active
+foe.
+
+The Indians, seeking with unerring instinct the weakest point in the
+defence, converged in hundreds upon the long string of box-cars that
+made up the construction train at the rear of the camp, where Stanley,
+extending his few men in a resolute skirmish line, endeavored to
+prevent the savages from scalping the non-combatant cooks and burning
+the sleeping-cars. Bucks saw, conspicuous in the attack, a slender
+Sioux chief riding a strong-limbed, fleet pony with a coat of
+burnished gold and as much filled with the fire of the fight as his
+master was. Riding hither and thither and swinging a long, heavy
+musket like a marshal's baton, the Sioux warrior, almost everywhere at
+once, urged his men to the fighting, and the fate of the few white men
+they were able to cut down or scalp before Stanley could cover the
+line of box-cars seemed to add vigor to their onslaught.
+
+Stanley himself, attacked by ten braves for every man he could muster
+at that point with a gun, dashed up and down the old wagon roads along
+the right of way, a conspicuous target for the Indians. His hat, in
+the melee, had disappeared, and, swinging a heavy Colt's revolver,
+which the Indians shrank from with a healthy instinct of danger, he
+pressed back the hungry red line again and again, supported only by
+such musketry fire as the men crouching under, within, and between the
+box-cars could offer.
+
+Wherever he rode his wily foes retreated, but they closed in
+constantly behind him, and one brave, more daring than his fellows,
+succeeded in setting fire to a box-car. A shout of triumph rose from
+the circling horsemen, but it was short-lived. Stanley, wheeling like
+a flash, gave chase to the incendiary. The Sioux rode for his life,
+but his pony's pace was no match for the springing strides of
+Stanley's American horse.
+
+For an instant the attention of the whole fight in the rear of the
+camp was drawn upon the rash brave and his pursuer. Bucks, with
+straining eyes and beating heart, awaited the result. He saw Stanley
+steadily closing the gap that separated him from his fleeing enemy.
+Then the revolver was thrown suddenly upward and forward, and smoke
+flashed from the muzzle. The echo of the report had hardly reached
+Bucks's ears when the revolver, swung high again to balance the rhythm
+of the horse's flight, was fired again, and a third time, at the
+doomed man.
+
+The Indian, bending forward on his horse, caught convulsively at his
+mane, then rising high in his seat plunged head-foremost to the
+ground, and his riderless horse fled on. His pursuer, wheeling, threw
+himself flat in his saddle to escape the fire bent upon him from
+behind as he rode back. At that moment Dan Casement and his men
+hurried up on the double-quick. With him came Bucks, who had secured a
+rifle and fallen in. Some men of the welcome reinforcement were set at
+putting out the fire. Others strengthened Stanley's scattered skirmish
+line.
+
+Convinced by the determined front now opposed to him of the
+impossibility of rushing the camp, the Sioux chief gave the signal to
+retire.
+
+As if the earth had opened to swallow them up, the warriors melted
+away, and as suddenly as the plain had borne them into life it now
+concealed their disappearance. In twenty minutes they had come and
+gone as completely as if they had never been. But in that short
+interval they had left death and consternation in their wake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Stirred by the increasing boldness of the Indians, Stanley returned
+with his party to Medicine Bend to take further measures for the
+defence of the railroad men.
+
+Bucks, when he reported to Baxter, the train despatcher, found new
+orders waiting for him. He was directed to take charge of the station
+at Goose Creek. The train did not leave till night, and Bucks took
+advantage of the interval to go uptown to make some necessary
+purchases of linen and clothing. On his way back to the station,
+with his package under his arm, he saw, on the edge of the broad
+sidewalk, Harvey Levake. Levake was standing near a wooden-Indian
+cigar-store sign, looking directly at Bucks as the latter walked
+toward him. The operator, nodding as he came up, asked Levake,
+without parley, whether he would give him the money for the
+express charges on the cartridges.
+
+If Bucks had exploded a keg of powder on the sidewalk there could not
+have been a greater change in the outlaw's manner. He stared at Bucks
+with contempt enough to pierce the feelings of the wooden Indian
+beside which he stood.
+
+"What's that?" he demanded, throwing his head menacingly forward.
+
+Bucks repeated his request, but so mildly that Levake took additional
+umbrage at his diffidence.
+
+"See here," he muttered in a voice beginning like a distant roll of
+thunder and gathering force and volume as he continued, "don't insult
+me."
+
+Bucks ventured to urge that he intended no insult.
+
+"Don't insult me!" bellowed Levake in violent tones.
+
+Again Bucks attempted to protest. It was useless. Levake insisted with
+increasing wrath upon hugging the insult to himself, while Bucks
+struggled manfully to get it away from him. And as Levake's loud words
+did not attract as much attention up and down the street as he sought,
+he stamped about on the sidewalk. Bucks's efforts to pacify him made
+matters momentarily worse.
+
+Meantime a crowd such as Levake desired had gathered and Bucks found
+himself a target for the outlaw's continued abuse, with nobody to take
+his part. Moreover, the expressions on the faces about him now made
+him realize his peril quite as much as anything in Levake's words. It
+was becoming painfully evident that the onlookers were merely waiting
+to see Levake shoot him down.
+
+"No man in Medicine Bend can insult me and live," cried Levake,
+winding up a tirade of abuse. "I'm known from one end of this street
+to the other. Nobody can spread lies in it about me."
+
+He drew and flourished a revolver as he spoke. None in the crowd
+interfered with so much as a word. But even before the outlaw had
+finished what he was saying, a man of medium size and easy manner
+elbowed his way quietly through the circle of spectators, and, taking
+Bucks by the arm, drew him back and faced Levake himself. It was Bob
+Scott.
+
+"What's all this about, Levake?" demanded Scott gently.
+
+Levake had no alternative but to turn his wrath upon the Indian scout.
+Yet those who knew him perceived that it was done without much stomach
+for the job. Instead of growing momentarily greater the violence of
+his abuse now grew steadily less, and the thunder in his tones rolled
+further and further from the subject.
+
+Half-turning to Bucks, Scott laid his hand on his arm again. "Excuse
+me," said he, deliberately and quietly, "but you are wanted quick at
+the station. They are waiting for you. Go right along, will you?"
+
+Only too glad to get away and comprehending Scott's ruse, Bucks
+exclaimed, "Why, of course, certainly," and stepping quickly into the
+crowd walked away.
+
+Turning again to Levake, Scott made no effort to check the torrent of
+his words. In consequence, the gambler found himself embarrassed by
+the prospect of talking himself out. This would not have been so bad
+except that his circle of admirers would, when he stopped talking,
+expect him to do something and he was now at a loss to decide just
+what to do. To shoot down Bucks was rather a different matter from a
+pistol duel with Scott.
+
+None of the street loafers about the two men knew Scott, nor did any
+of them know that Levake had a prudent respect for Scott's trigger. As
+for Scott himself, a smile of contempt gradually covered his face as
+he listened to Levake's outbreak. He only waited patiently for the
+moment, which he knew must come, when Levake should cease talking.
+
+"Your tongue, Levake," returned Scott at last, "is longer than a
+coyote's. Why do you stand here and bellow about being insulted? What
+is all this noise about, anyway? These fellows," a contemptuous nod
+indicated the men standing around, "all know, if you don't. You've
+been talking loud so you could get a crowd together and advertise
+yourself by shooting an unarmed boy, haven't you?"
+
+The desperado broke out in fresh denials and curses, but he feared
+the ridicule of the Indian would bring the laughter of his admirers
+down on him. Nor was he keen to try a pistol duel. He remembered too
+well the attack he had once headed on an emigrant train that Scott was
+guarding, and from which the outlaws with Levake had carried away some
+unexpected and unwelcome bullets.
+
+Scott, now taunting Levake openly, stepped directly in front of him.
+But the latter waved him away. "I'll settle my differences with you
+when I'm ready," he muttered. "If that fellow," he added, indicating
+Bucks, who was making record time across the square, "behaves himself,
+I'll let this go. If he doesn't, I'll fill him full of lead."
+
+"When you do," retorted Scott, "remember just one thing--that I'm
+going to fill you full, Levake. Don't forget that."
+
+Scott stepped backward. The crowd parted to let him through and Levake
+walked sullenly toward the cigar store.
+
+Bucks wiped the perspiration from his forehead when he reached the
+station and drew a long breath. He waited until Scott crossed the
+square and joined him. The Indian only laughed when Bucks tried to
+thank him. "It is nothing," he said, "you are getting experience. Only
+don't tackle that man again till you give me notice beforehand."
+
+The next morning Bucks installed himself at Goose Creek.
+
+Goose Creek was a mere operating point and besides the rough wooden
+station, with an attic sleeping-room for the operator, boasted only a
+house for the section crew--six men taken care of by a China boy cook.
+East of the station stood an old road ranch belonging to Leon
+Sublette. For this, freight was at times unloaded and an Indian trail
+to the south led through the sand-hills as far as the Arickaree
+country. North of the river greater sand-hills stretched as far as the
+eye could reach. The long, marshy stretches of the Nebraska River lost
+themselves on the eastern and the western horizon and at times clouds
+of wild fowl obscured the sun in their flight across the sky.
+
+Dancing came down to the new station to complete the instalment of the
+instruments and this broke for a day or two the loneliness of the new
+surroundings. Indeed, there was hardly time to be lonely. The constant
+round of interest attending the arrival of trains with their long
+halts, visits from trappers living at the ranch who were always ready
+to talk, and occasional calls from friendly Pawnees from the south,
+together with abundance of time for hunting the geese and ducks, made
+the days go.
+
+But one early summer morning Bucks woke to an adventure not upon his
+daily programme. He walked downstairs after dressing, and as he
+stepped out on the platform the sand-hills touched by the rising sun
+shone in the northwest like mountains of gold. Looking at them he saw
+to his surprise they were covered with black objects that appeared to
+be moving.
+
+Indians were first in his mind, and in his alarm he ran all the way to
+the section-house where the foreman, after a hasty study of the hills,
+explained that the suspicious-looking objects were buffaloes.
+
+This information only added to Bucks's excitement. The China boy cook,
+Lee Ong, at the section-house appeared equally stirred at the
+situation and, after running in and out of the kitchen with much
+fluttering of cue and clattering of wooden shoes, promised Bucks a
+buffalo steak for dinner if he would bring in a hindquarter.
+
+By the time Bucks had finished breakfast the whole country to the
+north was black with buffaloes. For hours they poured over the divide
+to the delight of the astonished boy, and after a time he wired Baxter
+at Medicine Bend that a herd of at least one million buffaloes was
+crossing the railroad at Goose Creek. As the grave despatcher seemed
+not greatly excited by this intelligence, Bucks followed up the story
+at intervals with vivid details. A wag on the wire in Medicine Bend
+played upon his enthusiasm by demanding frequent bulletins, even going
+so far as to ask the names of the leading buffaloes in the herd. When
+he had got all the laughs possible for the office out of the youthful
+operator, he wired Bucks that if the herd should linger too long on
+the right-of-way he must notify them that they would be held as
+trespassers.
+
+This message had hardly reached Goose Creek when the China boy came
+running into the telegraph office. His eyes were staring, and his face
+was greenish-white with fright. "Indians!" he exclaimed, running to
+Bucks's side and dashing back again to the west window.
+
+Bucks sprang to his feet. "Where?"
+
+Lee Ong pointed to the northern sand-hills. Riding the broad slopes
+that led toward the river, Bucks saw a long string of braves,
+evidently a hunting party. The cook, beside himself with fear, ran out
+of the station before Bucks could stop him.
+
+"Hi there, Lee," cried the operator, running after him. "Where are the
+section men?"
+
+"Gone," cried Lee Ong, not ceasing to run, "all gone!" He pointed,
+with the words, to the east.
+
+"Tell them to bring the hand-car down here!"
+
+"Too much gone," shouted Ong. "Omaha!"
+
+"Lee! Stop! Where are you going?"
+
+Lee stopped only long enough to throw his right arm and forefinger
+with an excited gesture toward the west.
+
+"San Francisco, San Francisco!" he cried.
+
+"Why, Lee," exclaimed Bucks running after him, "hold on! You are
+crazy! San Francisco is fifteen hundred miles from here." This
+information did not visibly move Ong. "Indian no good," he cried,
+pausing, but only long enough to wave both hands wildly toward the
+sand-hills. "San Francisco good. No some more cook here. Indian come
+too quick"--Ong with his active finger girdled the crown of his head
+in a lightning-like imitation of a scalping knife--"psst! No good for
+Ong!"
+
+It would have seemed funny to Bucks if he had not been already
+frightened himself. But if the section men had fled with the hand-car
+it meant he would have to face the Indians. Lee Ong, running like mad,
+was already out of hearing, and in any event Bucks had no wish to
+imperil the poor China boy's scalp with his own.
+
+He turned an anxious eye toward the sand-hills. Then realizing that on
+the platform he was exposing himself needlessly, he hastened inside to
+his key and called up Medicine Bend. It was only a moment, but it
+seemed to the frightened operator a lifetime before the despatcher
+answered. Bucks reported the Indians and asked if there were any
+freight trains coming that he could make his escape on.
+
+The despatcher answered that No. 11, the local freight, was then due
+at Goose Creek and would pick him up and carry him to Julesburg if he
+felt in danger. Bucks turned with relief to the east window and saw
+down the valley the smoke of the freight already in sight. Never had a
+freight train looked so good to his eyes as it did at that moment. He
+hailed its appearance with a shout and looked apprehensively back
+toward the sand-hills.
+
+The activity in that direction was not reassuring. The Indians, too,
+apparently had noticed the smoke of No. 11 trailing on the horizon. A
+conference followed, illustrated by frequent pointing and violent
+gesticulating to indicate the coming train. Then with a sudden
+resolve the whole party rode rapidly out of the hills and down toward
+the railroad.
+
+Bucks's heart misgave him as he watched. But the cotton-woods growing
+along the river hid the Indians from his eyes and he could not surmise
+what they were doing. The information all went to the despatcher,
+however, who, more experienced, scented serious mischief when Bucks's
+bulletins now came in.
+
+"Watch close," he wired. "It looks as if they were going to attack the
+train."
+
+The operator's anxiety rose with the intimation. He ran out of doors
+and down the track, but he could neither hear nor see a thing except
+the slow-moving train with the smoke puffing from the awkward,
+diamond-stack locomotive moving peacefully toward the cotton-woods
+that fringed the eastern shore of Goose Creek. The very silence seemed
+ominous. Bucks knew the Indians were hidden somewhere in the
+cotton-woods and felt that they could mean nothing but mischief. He
+ran back to his key and reported.
+
+"They will surely attack No. 11," he wired. "I will run across the
+bridge and warn them."
+
+"Where are the Indians?" demanded the despatcher.
+
+"In the timber across the creek. I am starting."
+
+"Don't be an idiot," returned the despatcher, with an expression of
+Western force and brevity. "They will lift your hair before you get
+half-way to the train. Stick to your key as long as you can. If they
+start to cross the creek, leg it for the ranch. Do you get me?"
+
+Bucks, considerably flurried, answered that he did, and the despatcher
+with renewed emphasis reiterated his sharp inquiry. "Do you
+understand, young fellow? If they start to cross the creek, leg it for
+the ranch or you'll lose your hair."
+
+Bucks strained his eyes looking for a sign of movement across the
+bridge. The cotton-woods swayed gently in the light breeze, but
+revealed nothing of what they hid.
+
+The freight train continued to crawl lazily along, its crews quite
+unconscious of any impending fate. Bucks, smothering with excitement
+and apprehension, saw the engine round the curve that led to the
+trestle approach of the bridge. Then the trees hid the train from his
+sight.
+
+"What are they doing?" demanded the despatcher, growing apprehensive
+himself. An appalling crash from the woods electrified Bucks, and the
+key rattled fast.
+
+"They have wrecked the train," he wired without an instant's
+hesitation. "I can hear the crash of cars falling from the trestle."
+
+Before he could finish his message he heard also the screech of an
+engine whistle. The next instant the locomotive dashed out of the
+woods upon the bridge at full speed and with cries of disappointment
+and rage the savages rode out to the very bank of the creek and into
+the water after it. Bucks saw the sudden engine and thought at first
+that the train had escaped. The next moment he knew it had not. The
+engine was light: evidently it had passed in safety the trap laid for
+its destruction, but the cars following had left the rails.
+
+If confirmation of this conclusion had been needed, it came when he
+ran out upon the platform as the engine approached. Bucks waved
+vigorous signals at it, but the ponderous machine came faster instead
+of slower as it neared the station, and, with Bucks vainly trying to
+attract the attention of the engineman or fireman, the locomotive
+thundered past at forty miles an hour.
+
+He caught one glimpse through the tender gangway as the engine dashed
+by and saw both men in the cab crouching in front of the furnace door
+to escape the fancied bullets of the savages. Bucks shouted, but knew
+he had been neither seen nor heard, and, as the engine raced into the
+west, his best chance of escape from an unpleasant situation had
+disappeared almost before he realized it.
+
+Each detail was faithfully reported to the despatcher, who answered at
+once.
+
+"Relief train," he wired, "now making up with a hundred men. Hold on
+as long as you can, but take no chances. What are they doing? Can you
+see or hear them?"
+
+"They are yelling so you could hear them a mile."
+
+"Scout around a little," directed the despatcher, "but don't get
+caught."
+
+Bucks scouted around the room a little, but did not venture this time
+farther than the windows. He was growing very nervous. And the
+Indians, unrestrained in their triumph, displayed themselves
+everywhere without concealment. Helpless to aid, Bucks was compelled
+to stand and see a fleeing white man, the brakeman of the doomed
+train, running for his life, cut down by the pursuers and scalped
+before his eyes.
+
+The horror and savagery of it sank deeply into the boy's heart and
+only the realization of his utter inability to help kept him quiet.
+Tears of fury coursed down his cheeks as he saw in the distance the
+murdered man lying motionless on the sand beside the track, and with
+shaking fingers he reported the death to Medicine Bend.
+
+"The relief train has started," answered the despatcher, "with
+Stanley, Scott, Sublette, Dancing, and a hundred men."
+
+As the message came, Bucks heard shooting farther up the creek and
+this continued at intervals for some moments. It was sickening to
+hear, for it meant, Bucks surmised, that another trainman was being
+murdered.
+
+Meantime the Indians that he could see were smashing into the wrecked
+merchandise cars and dragging the loot out upon the open prairie.
+Hats, clothing, tobacco, provisions, camp supplies of every sort, and
+musical instruments, millinery, boots, and blankets were among the
+plunder. The wearing apparel was tumbled out of the broken cases and,
+arrayed in whatever they could seize, the Indians paraded on their
+horses up and down the east bank of the creek in fantastic show.
+
+Some wore women's hats, some crinoline hoop-skirts over their
+shoulders; others brandished boots and shirts, and one glistening
+brave swung a banjo at arm's-length over his flying horse's head.
+Another party of the despoilers discovered a shipment of silks and
+satins. These they dragged in bolts from the packing-cases and, tying
+one end of a bolt of silk to their ponies' tails, they raced,
+yelling, in circles around the prairie with the parti-colored silks
+streaming behind, the bolts bobbing and jerking along the ground like
+rioting garlands of a crazy May-pole dance. And, having exhausted
+their ingenuity and robed themselves in this wise in all manner of
+plunder, they set fire to the wrecked train, singing and dancing in
+high glee as the flames rose crackling above the trees.
+
+Bucks, with clenched hands, watched and prayed for the arrival of the
+speeding relief train. The moments passed with leaden feet and the
+train had many miles to come. The despatcher continued his encouraging
+messages, but did not cease his words of caution, and, as the wreckage
+burned, Bucks perceived the Indians were riding in great numbers up
+the creek. Too late he realized what it meant. They were looking for
+the ford and were about to cross to his side.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+He lost no time in sending a final word to the despatcher before he
+started for safety, and his call was sounding when he ran back to the
+key.
+
+"Stanley's train has passed Chimney Butte," said the despatcher. "Soon
+be with you."
+
+Words over the wire never sounded better to the frightened boy than
+those words.
+
+"The Indians are crossing the creek," Bucks answered. "Am off for the
+ranch."
+
+He closed the circuit and ran out on the platform. The warriors had
+found the ford and the horses of the head braves were already leading
+a file across. Bucks threw one hurried look at them; then, summoning
+his strength for an endurance run, he started, with the station
+building between him and the enemy, for the ranch.
+
+He had hardly got under way when, as he reached higher ground, he saw
+to his consternation a party of Indians in the bottom land between him
+and safety.
+
+He was cut off. Hoping that he had not been seen, he threw himself
+flat on the ground and, turning about, crawled, behind a slight ridge
+that afforded concealment, stealthily back toward the station. The
+Indians up the creek had crossed, but were riding away from the
+station and toward the ranch, evidently bent on attacking it next. The
+flames from the burning train rose high above the creek. There seemed
+no place to escape to and Bucks, creeping through the sedge grass, got
+back to his key and called the despatcher.
+
+"Cut off from the ranch by a second party of Indians. Will wait here
+for the train--where is it?"
+
+A moment passed before the answer came. "Less than ten miles from you.
+Passed Driftwood Station at ten-forty."
+
+Bucks looked at his clock. Driftwood was ten miles west. The hands
+stood at ten-forty-eight. Surely, he concluded, they will be here by
+eleven o'clock. Could he hold the station for twelve minutes? Even a
+show of force he knew would halt the Indians for an interval.
+
+He hastily pushed such packages of freight as lay in the store-room up
+to the various windows, as slight barricades behind which he could
+hide to shoot, and with much effort got the largest packing-case
+against the platform door so they could not rush him from the creek
+side. For the twentieth time he looked over his revolver, placed a
+little store of cartridges behind each shelter, and peered again out
+of the windows. To his horror he perceived that the two parties had
+joined and were riding in a great half-circle down on the station.
+Evidently the Indians were coming after him before they attacked the
+ranch. He reported to the despatcher, and an answer came instantly.
+"Stanley should be within five miles. How close are they?"
+
+"Less than half a mile."
+
+"Have you got a gun?"
+
+Bucks wired, "Yes."
+
+"Can you use it?"
+
+"Expect I'll have to."
+
+"Shoot the minute they get within range. Never mind whether you hit
+anybody, bang away. What are they doing?"
+
+Bucks ran around the room to look. "Closing in," he answered briefly.
+
+"Can't you see the train?"
+
+Bucks fixed his eyes upon the western horizon. He never had tried so
+hard in his life to see anything. Yet the sunshine reflected no sign
+of a friendly smoke.
+
+"Nothing in sight," he answered; "I can't hold out much longer."
+
+Hastily closing his key he ran to the south window. A dozen Indians,
+beating the alder bushes as they advanced, doubtless suspecting that
+he lay concealed in them, were now closest. He realized that by his
+very audacity in returning to the building he had gained a few
+precious moments. But the nearest Indians had already reached open
+ground, two hundred yards away, and through their short, yelping cries
+and their halting on the edge of the brake, he understood they were
+debating how he had escaped and wondering whether he had gone back
+into the station. He lay behind some sacks of flour watching his foes
+closely. Greatly to his surprise, his panic had passed and he felt
+collected. He realized that he was fighting for his life and meant to
+sell it as dearly as possible. And he had resolved to shoot the
+instant they started toward him.
+
+From the table he heard the despatcher's call, but he no longer dared
+answer it. The Indians, with a war-whoop, urged their ponies ahead and
+a revolver shot rang from the station window. It was followed almost
+instantly by a second and a third. The Indians ducked low on their
+horses' necks and, wheeling, made for the willows. In the quick dash
+for cover one horse stumbled and threw his rider. The animal bolted
+and the Indian, springing to his feet, ran like a deer after his
+companions, but he did not escape unscathed. Two shots followed him
+from the station, and the Indian, falling with a bullet in his thigh,
+dragged himself wounded into hiding.
+
+A chorus of cries from far and near heralded the opening of the
+encounter. Enraged by the repulse, a larger number of Indians riding
+in opened fire on the station and Bucks found himself target for a
+fusillade of bullets. But protected by his barricades he was only
+fearful of a charge, for when the Indians should start to rush the
+station he felt all would be over.
+
+While he lay casting up his chances, and discharging his revolver at
+intervals to make a showing, the fire of the Indians slackened. This,
+Bucks felt, boded no good, and reckless of his store of cartridges he
+continued to blaze away whenever he could see a bush moving.
+
+It was at this moment that he heard the despatcher calling him, and a
+message followed. "If you are alive, answer me."
+
+Bucks ran to the key. The situation was hopeless. No train was in
+sight as he pressed his fingers on the button for the last time.
+
+"Stopped their first advance and wounded one. They are going to
+charge----"
+
+He heard a sharp chorus outside and, feeling what it meant, sent his
+last word: "Good-by." From three sides of the open ground around the
+building the Indians were riding down upon him. Firing as fast as he
+could with any accuracy, he darted from window to window, reaching the
+west window last. As he looked out he saw up the valley the smoke of
+the approaching train and understood from the fury of his enemies that
+they, too, had seen it. But the sight of the train now completely
+unnerved him. To lose his life with help a few moments away was an
+added bitterness, and he saw that the relief train would be too late
+to save him.
+
+He fired the last cartridge in his hot revolver at the circling braves
+and, as he reloaded, the Indians ran up on the platform and threw
+themselves against the door. Fiendish faces peered through the
+window-panes and one Indian smashed a sash in with a war club.
+
+Bucks realized that his reloading was useless. The cartridges were, in
+fact, slipping through his fingers, when, dropping his revolver, he
+drew Bob Scott's knife and backed up against the inner office door,
+just as a warrior brandishing a hatchet sprang at him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Before Bucks had time to think, a second Indian had sprung through the
+open window. A feeling of helpless rage swept over him at being
+cornered, defenceless; and, expecting every instant to be despatched
+with no more consideration than if he had been a rat, he stood at bay,
+determined not to be taken alive.
+
+For an instant his mind worked clearly and with the rapidity of
+lightning. His life swept before him as if he were a drowning man. In
+that horrible moment he even heard his call clicking from the
+despatcher. Of the two Indians confronting him, half-naked and shining
+with war-paint, one appeared more ferocious than the other, and Bucks
+only wondered which would attack first.
+
+He had not long to wait. The first brave raised a war club to brain
+him. As Bucks's straining eye followed the movement, the second Indian
+struck the club down. Bucks understood nothing from the action. The
+quick, guttural words that followed, the sharp dispute, the struggle
+of the first savage to evade the second and brain the white boy in
+spite of his antagonist--a lithe, active Indian of great strength who
+held the enraged warrior back--all of this, Bucks, bewildered, could
+understand nothing of. The utmost he could surmise was that the second
+warrior, from his dress and manner of authority perhaps a chief, meant
+to take him alive for torture. He watched the contest between the two
+Indians until with force and threats the chief had driven the warrior
+outside and turned again upon him.
+
+It was then that Bucks, desperate, hurled himself knife in hand at the
+chief to engage him in final combat. The Indian, though surprised, met
+his onset skilfully and before Bucks could realize what had occurred
+he had been disarmed and tossed like a child half-way across the
+room.
+
+Before he could move, the chief was standing over him. "Stop!" he
+exclaimed, catching Bucks's arm in a grip of steel as the latter tried
+to drag down his antagonist. "I am Iron Hand. Does a boy fight me?"
+he demanded with contempt in every word. "See your knife." He pointed
+to the floor. "When I was wounded by the Cheyennes you gave me
+venison. You have forgotten; but the Sioux is not like the white
+man--Iron Hand does not forget."
+
+A fusillade of shots and a babel of yelling from outside interrupted
+his words. The chief paid no attention to the uproar. "Your soldiers
+are here. The building is on fire, but you are safe. I am Iron Hand."
+
+So saying, and before Bucks could find his tongue, the chief strode to
+the rear window, with one blow of his arm smashed out the whole sash,
+and springing lightly through the crashing glass, disappeared.
+
+Bucks, panting with confusion, sprang to his feet. Smoke already
+poured in from the freight room, and the crackling of flames and the
+sounds of the fighting outside reminded Bucks of Iron Hand's words. He
+ran to the door.
+
+The train had pulled up within a hundred feet of the station and the
+railroad men in the coaches were pouring a fire upon the Indians,
+under the cover of which scouts were unloading, down a hastily
+improvised chute, their horses, together with those of such troopers
+as had been gathered hurriedly.
+
+Bucks ran back into the office and opening his wooden chest threw into
+it what he could of his effects and tried to drag it from the burning
+building out upon the platform. As he struggled with the unwieldy box,
+two men ran up from the train toward him, staring at him as if he had
+been a ghost. He recognized Stanley and Dancing.
+
+"Are you hurt?" cried Stanley hastening to his side.
+
+"No," exclaimed Bucks, his head still swimming, "but everything will
+be burned."
+
+"How in the name of God, boy, have you escaped?" demanded Stanley, as
+he clenched Bucks's shoulder in his hand. Dancing seized the
+cumbersome chest and dragged it out of danger. The Indians, jeering,
+as they retreated, at the railroad men, made no attempt to continue
+the attack, but rode away content with the destruction of the train
+and the station.
+
+Stanley, assured of Bucks's safety, though he wasted no time in
+waiting for an explanation of it, directed the men to save what they
+could out of the station--it was too late to save the building--and
+hurried away to see to the unloading of the horses.
+
+Bill Dancing succeeded in rescuing the telegraph instruments and with
+Bucks's help he got the wires rigged upon a cracker-box outside where
+the operator could report the story to the now desperate despatcher.
+The scouts and troopers were already in the saddle and, leading the
+way for the men, gave chase across the bottoms to the Indians.
+
+Bob Scott, riding past Bucks reined up for a moment. "Got pretty warm
+for you, Bucks--eh? How did you get through?"
+
+Bucks jumped toward him. "Bob!" he exclaimed, grasping his arm. "It
+was Iron Hand."
+
+"Iron Hand!" echoed Bob, lifting his eyebrows. "Brules, then. It will
+be a long chase. What did he say?"
+
+"Why, we talked pretty fast," stammered Bucks. "He spoke about the
+venison but never said a blamed word about my fixing his arm."
+
+Bob laughed as he struck his horse and galloped on to pass the news to
+Stanley. A detail was left to clear the cotton-woods across the creek
+and guard the railroad men against possible attack while clearing the
+wreck. The body of the unfortunate brakeman was brought across the
+bridge and laid in the baggage car and a tent was pitched to serve as
+a temporary station for Bucks.
+
+While this was being done, Bob Scott, who had ridden farthest up the
+creek, appeared leading his horse and talking to a white man who was
+walking beside him. He had found the conductor of the wrecked train,
+Pat Francis, who, young though he was, had escaped the Indians long
+enough to reach a cave in the creek bank and whose rifle shots Bucks
+had heard, while Francis was holding the Sioux at bay during the
+fight. The plucky conductor, who was covered with dust, was greeted
+with acclamations.
+
+"He claims," volunteered Scott, speaking to Stanley, "he could have
+stood them off all day."
+
+Francis's eyes fell regretfully on the dead brakeman. "If that boy had
+minded what I said and come with me he would have been alive now."
+
+The wrecking train, with a gang of men from Medicine Bend, arrived
+late in the afternoon, and at supper-time a courier rode in from
+Stanley's scouting party with despatches for General Park. Stanley
+reported the chase futile. As Bob Scott had predicted, the Brules had
+burned the ranch and craftily scattered the moment they reached the
+sand-hills. Instead of a single trail to follow, Stanley found fifty.
+Only his determination to give the Indians a punishment that they
+would remember held the pursuing party together, and three days
+afterward he fought a battle with the wily raiders, surprised in a
+canyon on the Frenchman River, which, though indecisive, gave Iron
+Hand's band a wholesome respect for the stubborn engineer.
+
+The train service under the attacks of the Indians thus repeated, fell
+into serious demoralization, and an armed guard of regular soldiers
+rode all trains for months after the Goose Creek attack. Bucks was
+given a guard for his own lonely and exposed position in the person of
+Bob Scott, the man of all men the young operator would have wished
+for. And at intervals he read from his favorite novel to the scout,
+who still questioned whether it was a true story.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+With Bob Scott to lead an occasional hunting trip, Bucks found the
+time go fast at Goose Creek and no excitement came again until later
+in the summer.
+
+Where Goose Creek breaks through the sand-hills the country is flat,
+and, when swollen with spring rains, the stream itself has the force
+and fury of a mountain river. Then summer comes; the rain clouds hang
+no longer over the Black Hills, continuing sunshine parches the face
+of the great plains, and the rushing and turbulent Goose Creek
+ignominiously evaporates--either ascending to the skies in vapor or
+burrowing obscurely under the sprawling sands that lie within its
+course. Only stagnant pools and feeble rivulets running in widely
+separated channels--hiding under osiers or lurking within shady
+stretches of a friendly bank--remain to show where in April the noisy
+Goose engulfs everything within reach of its foaming wings. The creek
+bed becomes in midsummer a mere sandy ford that may be crossed by a
+child--a dry map that prints the running feet of snipe and plover, the
+creeping tread of the mink and the muskrat, and the slouching trail of
+the coyote and the wolf.
+
+Yet there is treachery in the Goose even in its apparent repose, and
+the unwary emigrant sometimes comes to grief upon its treacherous bed.
+The sands of the Goose have swallowed up more than one heedless
+buffalo, and the Indian knows them too well to trust them at all.
+
+When the railroad bridge was put across the creek, the difficulties of
+securing it were very considerable and Brodie, the chief engineer, was
+in the end forced to rely upon temporary foundations. Trainmen and
+engineers for months carried "slow" orders for Goose Creek bridge, and
+Bucks grew weary with warnings from the despatchers to careless
+enginemen about crossing it.
+
+Among the worst offenders in running his engine too fast over Goose
+Creek bridge was Dan Baggs, who, breathing fire through his bristling
+red whiskers and flashing it from his watery blue eyes, feared nobody
+but Indians, and obeyed reluctantly everybody connected with the
+railroad. Moreover, he never hesitated to announce that when "they
+didn't like the way he ran his engine they could get somebody else to
+run it."
+
+Baggs's great failing was that, while he often ran his train too fast,
+he wasted so much time at stations that he was always late. And it was
+said of him that the only instance in which he ever reached the end of
+his division on time was the day he ran away from Iron Hand's band of
+Sioux at Goose Creek--on that occasion he had made, without a doubt, a
+record run.
+
+But when, one hot afternoon in August, Baggs left Medicine Bend with a
+light engine for Fort Park, where he was to pick up a train-load of
+ties, he had no thought of making further pioneer railroad history.
+His engine had been behaving so well that his usual charges of
+inefficiency against it had not for a long time been registered with
+the roundhouse foreman, and Dan Baggs, dreaming in the heat and
+sunshine of nothing worse than losing his scalp to the Indians or
+winning a fortune at cards--gambling was another of his failings--was
+pounding lightly along over the rails when he reached, without heeding
+it, Goose Creek bridge.
+
+There were those who averred that after his experience with Iron Hand
+he always ran faster across the forbidden bridge than anywhere else.
+On this occasion Baggs bowled merrily along the trestle and was
+getting toward the middle of the river when the pony trucks jumped the
+rail and the drivers dropped on the ties. Dan Baggs yelled to his
+fireman.
+
+It was unnecessary. Delaroo, the fireman, a quiet but prudent fellow,
+was already standing in the gangway prepared for an emergency. He
+sprang, not a minute too soon, from the engine and lighted in the
+sand. But Dan Baggs's fixed habit of being behind time chained him to
+his seat an instant too long. The bulky engine, with its tremendous
+impetus, shot from the trestle and plunged like a leviathan clear of
+the bridge and down into the wet sand of the creek-bed.
+
+The fireman scrambled to his feet and ran forward, expecting to find
+his engineman hurt or killed. What was his surprise to behold Baggs,
+uninjured, on his feet and releasing the safety-valve of his fallen
+locomotive to prevent an explosion. The engine lay on its side. The
+crash of the breaking timbers, followed by a deafening blast of
+escaping steam, startled Bucks and, with Bob Scott, he ran out of the
+station. As he saw the spectacle in the river, he caught his breath.
+He lived to see other wrecks--some appalling ones--but this was his
+first, and the shock of seeing Dan Baggs's engine lying prone in the
+river, trumpeting forth a cloud of steam, instead of thundering across
+the bridge as he normally saw it every day, was an extraordinary one.
+
+Filled with alarm, he ran toward the bridge expecting that the worst
+had happened to the engineman and fireman. But his amazement grew
+rather than lessened when he saw Delaroo and Baggs running for their
+lives toward him. He awaited them uneasily.
+
+"What's the matter?" demanded Bucks, as Baggs, well in the lead, came
+within hailing distance.
+
+"Matter!" panted Baggs, not slackening his pace. "Matter! Look at my
+engine! Indians!"
+
+"Indians, your grandmother!" retorted Bob Scott mildly. "There's not
+an Indian within forty miles--what's the matter with you?"
+
+"They wrecked us, Bob," declared Baggs, pointing to his roaring
+engine; "see for yourself, man. Them cotton-woods are full of Indians
+right now."
+
+"Full of rabbits!" snorted Bob Scott. "You wrecked yourself by running
+too fast."
+
+"Delaroo," demanded Dan Baggs, pointing dramatically at his taciturn
+fireman, who had now overtaken him, "how fast was I running?"
+
+Peter Delaroo, an Indian half-blood himself, returned a disconcerting
+answer. "As fast as you could, I reckon." He understood at once that
+Baggs had raised a false alarm to protect himself from blame for the
+accident, and resented being called upon to support an absurd story.
+
+Baggs stood his ground. "If you don't find an Indian has done this,"
+he asserted, addressing Bob Scott with indignation, "you can have my
+pay check."
+
+"Yes," returned Bob, meditatively. "I reckon an Indian did it, but you
+are the Indian."
+
+"Come, stop your gabble, you boys!" blustered the doughty engineman,
+speaking to everybody and with a show of authority. "Bucks, notify the
+despatcher I'm in the river."
+
+"Get back to your engine, then," said Scott. "Don't ask Bucks to send
+in a false report. And afterward," suggested Scott, "you and I, Dan,
+can go over and clean the Indians out of the cotton-woods."
+
+Baggs took umbrage at the suggestion, and no amount of chaffing from
+Scott disconcerted him, but after Bucks reported the catastrophe to
+Medicine Bend the wires grew warm. Baxter was very angry. A crew was
+got together at Medicine Bend, and a wrecking-train made up with a
+gang of bridge and track men and despatched to the scene of the
+disaster. The operating department was so ill equipped to cope with
+any kind of a wreck that it was after midnight before the train got
+under way.
+
+The sun had hardly risen next morning, when Bob Scott, without any
+words of explanation, ran into Bucks's room, woke him hurriedly, and,
+bidding him dress quickly, ran out. It took only a minute for Bucks to
+spring from his cot and get into his clothes and he hastened out of
+doors to learn what the excitement was about. Scott was walking fast
+down toward the bridge. Bucks joined him.
+
+"What is it, Bob?" he asked hastily. "Indians?"
+
+"Indians?" echoed Bob scornfully. "I guess not this time. I've heard
+of Indians stealing pretty nearly everything on earth--but not this.
+No Indian in this country, not even Turkey Leg, ever stole a
+locomotive."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean Dan Baggs's engine is gone."
+
+Bucks's face turned blank with amazement. "Gone?" he echoed
+incredulously. He looked at Scott with reproach. "You are joking
+me."
+
+"See if you can find it," returned Scott tersely.
+
+As they hastened on, Bucks looked to the spot where the engine had
+lain the night before. It was no longer there.
+
+He was too stunned to ask further questions. The two strode along the
+ties in silence. Eagerly Bucks ran to the creek bank and scanned more
+closely the sandy bed. It was there that the wrecked engine and tender
+had lain the night before. The sand showed no disturbance whatever. It
+was as smooth as a table. But nothing was to be seen of the engine or
+tender. These had disappeared as completely as if an Aladdin's slave,
+at his master's bidding, had picked them from their resting place and
+set them on top of some distant sand-hill.
+
+"Bob," demanded Bucks, breathless, "what does it mean?"
+
+"It means the company is out one brand-new locomotive."
+
+"But what has happened?" asked Bucks, rubbing his eyes to make sure he
+was not dreaming. "Where is the engine?"
+
+Scott pointed to the spot where the engine had lain. "It is in that
+quicksand," said he.
+
+The engine, during the night, had, in fact, sunk completely into the
+sand. No trace was left of it or of its tender. Not a wheel or cab
+corner remained to explain; all had mysteriously and completely
+disappeared.
+
+"Great Heavens, Bob!" exclaimed Bucks. "How will they _ever_ get it
+out?"
+
+"The only way they'll ever get it out, I reckon, is by keeping Dan
+Baggs digging there till he digs it out."
+
+"Dan Baggs never could dig that out--how long would it take him?"
+
+"About a hundred and seventy-five years."
+
+As Scott spoke, the two heard footsteps behind them. Baggs and
+Delaroo, who had slept at the section-house, were coming down the
+track. "Baggs," said Scott ironically, as the sleepy-looking
+engineman approached, "you were right about the Indians being in the
+cotton-woods last night."
+
+"I knew I was right," exclaimed Baggs, nodding rapidly and brusquely.
+"Next time you'll take a railroad man's word, I guess. Where are
+they?" he added, looking apprehensively around. "What have they
+done?"
+
+"They have stolen your engine," answered Scott calmly. He pointed to
+the river bed. Baggs stared; then running along the bank he looked
+up-stream and down and came back sputtering.
+
+"Why--what--how--what in time! Where's the engine?"
+
+"Indians," remarked Scott sententiously, looking wisely down upon the
+sphinx-like quicksand. "Indians, Dan. They must have loaded the engine
+on their ponies during the night--did you hear anything?" he demanded,
+turning to Bucks. Bucks shook his head. "I thought I did," continued
+Scott. "Thought I heard something--what's that?"
+
+Baggs jumped. All were ready to be startled at anything--for even
+Scott, in spite of his irony, had been as much astounded as any one at
+the first sight of the empty bed of sand. It was enough to make any
+one feel queerish. The noise they heard was the distant rumble of the
+wrecking-train.
+
+In the east the sun was bursting over the sand-hills into a clear sky.
+Bucks ran to the station to report the train and the disappearance of
+the engine. When he had done this he ran back to the bridge. The
+wrecking-train had pulled up near at hand and the greater part of the
+men, congregated in curious groups on the bridge, were talking
+excitedly and watching several men down on the sand, who with spades
+were digging vigorously about the spot which Baggs and Delaroo
+indicated as the place where the engine had fallen. Others from time
+to time joined them, as they scraped out wells and trenches in the
+moist sand. These filled with water almost as rapidly as they were
+opened.
+
+Urged by their foreman, a dozen additional men joined the toilers.
+They dug in lines and in circles, singly and in squads, broadening
+their field of prospecting as the laughter and jeers of their
+companions watching from the bridge spurred them to further toil. But
+not the most diligent of their efforts brought to light a single
+trace of the missing engine.
+
+The wrecking crew was mystified. Many refused to believe the engine
+had ever fallen off the bridge. But there was the broken track! They
+could not escape the evidence of their eyes, even if they did scoff at
+the united testimony of the two men that had been on the engine when
+it leaped from the bridge and the two that had afterward seen it lying
+in the sand.
+
+The track and bridge men without more ado set to work to repair the
+damage done the track and bridge. A volley of messages came from
+head-quarters. At noon a special car, with Colonel Stanley and the
+division heads arrived to investigate.
+
+The digging was planned and directed on a larger scale and resumed
+with renewed vigor. Sheet piling was attempted. Every expedient was
+resorted to that Stanley's scientific training could suggest to bring
+to light the buried treasure--for an engine in those days, and so far
+from locomotive works, was very literally a treasure to the railroad
+company. Stanley himself was greatly upset. He paced the ties above
+where the men were digging, directing and encouraging them doggedly,
+but very red in the face and contemplating the situation with
+increasing vexation. He stuck persistently to the work till darkness
+set in. Meantime, the track had been opened and the wrecking-train
+crossed the bridge and took the passing track. The moon rose full over
+the broad valley and the silent plains. Men still moved with lanterns
+under the bridge. Bucks, after a hard day's work at the key, was
+invited for supper to Stanley's car, where the foremen had assembled
+to lay new plans for the morrow. But Bob Scott, when Bucks told him,
+shook his head.
+
+"They are wasting their work," he murmured. "The company is 'out.'
+That engine is half-way to China by this time."
+
+It might, at least, as well have been, as far as the railroad company
+was concerned. The digging and sounding and scraping proved equally
+useless. The men dug down almost as deep as the piling that supported
+the bridge itself--it was in vain. In the morning the sun smiled at
+their efforts and again at night the moon rose mysteriously upon them,
+and in the distant sand-hills a thousand coyotes yelped a requiem for
+the lost locomotive. But no human eye ever saw so much as a bolt of
+the great machine again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+The loss of the engine at Goose Creek brought an unexpected relief to
+Bucks. His good work in the emergency earned for him a promotion. He
+was ordered to report to Medicine Bend for assignment, and within a
+week a new man appeared at Goose Creek to relieve him.
+
+There was little checking up to do. Less than thirty minutes gave
+Bucks time to answer all of his successor's questions and pack his
+trunk. He might have slept till morning and taken a passenger train to
+Medicine Bend, but the prospect of getting away from Goose Creek at
+once was too tempting to dismiss. A freight train of bridge timbers
+pulled across the bridge just as Bucks was ready to start. Pat
+Francis, the doughty conductor, who, single-handed, had held Iron
+Hand's braves at bay, was in charge of the train. He offered Bucks a
+bench and blanket in the caboose for the night, and promised to have
+him in Medicine Bend in the morning; Bucks, nothing loath, accepted.
+His trunk was slung aboard and the train pulled out for Medicine
+Bend.
+
+The night proved unseasonably cold. Francis built a blazing fire in
+the caboose stove and afterward shared his hearty supper with his
+guest. As the train thundered and rumbled slowly over the rough track,
+the conductor, while Bucks stretched out on the cushions, entertained
+him with stories of his experiences on the railroad frontier--not
+suspecting that before morning he should furnish for his listener one
+of the strangest of them.
+
+Bucks curled up in his blanket late, but, in spite of unaccustomed
+surroundings and the pitch and lurch of the caboose, which was hardly
+less than the tossing of a ship in a gale, Bucks dozed while his
+companion and the brakeman watched. The latter, a large, heavy fellow,
+was a busy man, as the calls for brakes--and only hand-brakes were
+then known--were continual. There were no other passengers, and except
+for the frequent blasts of the engine whistle the night passed quietly
+enough.
+
+Bucks dreamed of fighting bears with Scuffy, and found himself
+repeatedly rolling down precipitous mountains without landing
+successfully anywhere. Then he quieted into a heavy, unbroken sleep
+and found himself among the hills of Alleghany, hunting rabbits that
+were constantly changing into antelope and escaping him. Fatigued with
+his unceasing efforts, he woke.
+
+A gray light, half dusk, revealed the outlines of the cab interior, as
+he opened his eyes, and a thundering, rumbling sound that rang in his
+ears and seemed everywhere about him cleared his mind and brought him
+back to his situation.
+
+It was cold, and he looked at the stove. The fire was out. On the
+opposite side of the cab the brakeman lay on the cushions fast asleep.
+Outside, the thundering noises came continuously from everywhere at
+once. It did not occur to Bucks that the caboose was standing still.
+It trembled and vibrated more or less, but he noticed there was no
+longer any lurching and thought they had reached remarkably smooth
+track. They were certainly not standing still, he assured himself, as
+he rubbed his eyes to wake up. But perhaps they might be in the yards
+at Medicine Bend, with other trains rolling past them.
+
+Somewhat confused he raised the curtain of the window near him. The
+sky was overcast and day was breaking. He rose higher on his elbow to
+look more carefully. Everywhere that his eye could reach toward the
+horizon the earth seemed in motion, rising and falling in great waves.
+Was it an earthquake? He rubbed his eyes. It seemed as if everywhere
+thousands of heads were tossing, and from this continual tossing and
+trampling came the thunder and vibration. Moreover, the caboose was
+not moving; of this he felt sure. Amazed, and only half-awake, he
+concluded that the train must have left the track and dropped into a
+river. The uncertainty of his vision was due, he now saw, to a storm
+that had swept the plains. It was blowing, with a little snow, and in
+the midst of the snow the mysterious waves were everywhere rising and
+falling.
+
+Bucks put the curtain completely aside. The sound of his feet striking
+the floor aroused the conductor, who rose from his cushion with a
+start. "I've been asleep," he exclaimed, rubbing his eyes. "Where are
+we, Bucks?"
+
+"That is what I am trying to figure out."
+
+"Where is the brakeman?" demanded Francis. As he asked the question he
+saw the big fellow asleep in the corner. Francis shook him roughly.
+"That comes of depending on some one else," he muttered to Bucks. "I
+went to sleep on his promise to watch for an hour--he knew I had been
+up all last night and told me to take a nap. You see what happened.
+The moment I went to sleep, he went to sleep," exclaimed Francis in
+disgust. "Wake up!" he continued brusquely to the drowsy brakeman.
+"Where are we? What have we stopped for? What's all this noise?"
+Though he asked the questions fast, he expected no answer to any of
+them from the confused trainman and waited for none. Instead, he threw
+up a curtain and looked out. "Thunder and guns! Buffaloes!" he cried,
+and seizing his lantern ran out of the caboose door and climbed the
+roof-ladder. Bucks was fast upon his heels.
+
+The freight train stood upon a wide plain and in the midst of
+thousands of buffaloes travelling south. As far as their eyes could
+reach in all directions, the astonished railroad men beheld a sea of
+moving buffaloes. Without further delay Francis, followed by Bucks,
+started along the running boards for the head end of the train.
+
+The conductor found his train intact; but when he reached the head end
+he could find neither engine, tender, nor crew. All had disappeared.
+Running down the ladder of the head box-car, the conductor examined
+the draw-bar for evidence of an accident. The coupling was apparently
+uninjured but the tender and engine were gone. Francis, more upset
+than Bucks had ever seen him, or ever afterward saw him, walked
+moodily back to the caboose. What humiliated him more than the strange
+predicament in which he found himself was that he had trusted to a
+subordinate and gone to sleep in his caboose while on duty.
+
+"Serves me right," he muttered, knitting his brows. "Brakeman," he
+added sternly, "take your lantern and flags and get out behind. The
+minute the buffaloes get across the track, go back two hundred yards
+and protect us. I will watch the head end. While these buffaloes are
+crossing they will be protection enough. Soon as it is daylight we
+will find out where we are."
+
+The snow continued falling and the buffaloes drifted south with the
+storm, which was squally. Every moment, as the sky and landscape
+lightened, Francis, whom Bucks had followed forward, expected to see
+the last of the moving herd. But an hour passed and a second hour
+without showing any gaps in the enormous fields. And the brighter the
+daylight grew, the more buffaloes they could see.
+
+Francis stormed at the situation, but he could do nothing. Finally,
+and as hope was deserting him, he heard the distant tooting of an
+engine whistle. It grew louder and louder until Bucks could hear the
+ringing of a bell and the hissing of the open cylinder cocks of a
+slow-moving locomotive. Gaps could now be discerned in the great herds
+of buffaloes, and through the blowing snow the uncertain outlines of
+the backing engine could dimly be seen. Francis angrily watched the
+approaching engine, and, as soon as it had cleared the last of the
+stumbling buffaloes on the track, he walked forward to meet it and
+greeted the engineman roughly.
+
+"What do you mean by setting my train out here on the main track in
+the middle of the night?" he demanded ferociously, and those that knew
+Pat Francis never wanted to add to his anger when it was aroused.
+
+"Don't get excited," returned Dan Baggs calmly, for it was the
+redoubtable Baggs who held the throttle. "I found I was getting short
+of water. We are just coming to Blackwood Hill and I knew I could
+never make Blackwood Siding with the train. So I uncoupled and ran to
+the Blackwood tank for water. We are all right now. Couple us up. If I
+hadn't got water, we should have been hung up here till we got another
+engine."
+
+"Even so," retorted Francis, "you needn't have been all night about
+it."
+
+"But when we started back there were about ten million buffaloes on
+the track. If I had been heading into them with the cow-catcher I
+shouldn't have been afraid. But I had to back into them, and if I had
+crippled one it would have upset the tender."
+
+"Back her up," commanded Francis curtly, "and pull us out of here."
+
+Meantime there was much excitement at the despatchers' office in
+Medicine Bend over the lost train. It had been reported out of White
+Horse Station on time, and had not reported at Blackwood. For hours
+the despatcher waited vainly for some word from the bridge timbers.
+When the train reported at Blackwood Station, the message of Francis
+explaining the cause of the tie-up seemed like a voice from the tombs.
+But the strain was relieved and the train made fast time from
+Blackwood in. About nine o'clock in the morning it whistled for the
+Medicine Bend yards and a few moments later Bucks ran upstairs in the
+station building to report for assignment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+He found Baxter needing a man in the office, and Bucks was asked to
+substitute until Collins, the despatcher who was ill, could take his
+trick again. This brought Bucks where he was glad to be, directly
+under Stanley's eye, but it brought also new responsibilities, and
+opened his mind to the difficulties of operating a new and already
+over-taxed line in the far West, where reliable men and available
+equipment were constantly at a premium.
+
+The problem of getting and keeping good men was the hardest that
+confronted the operating department, and the demoralization of the
+railroad men from the life in Medicine Bend grew steadily worse as the
+new town attracted additional parasites. When Bucks, after his return,
+took his first walk after supper up Front Street, he was not surprised
+at this. Medicine Bend was more than ten times as noisy, and if it
+were possible to add any vice to its viciousness this, too, it would
+seem, had been done.
+
+As was his custom, he walked to the extreme end of Front Street and
+turning started back for the station, when he encountered Baxter, the
+chief despatcher. Baxter saw Bucks first and spoke.
+
+"I thought you were taking your sleep at this time," returned Bucks,
+greeting him.
+
+"So I should be," he replied, "but we are in trouble. Dan Baggs is to
+take out the passenger train to-night, and no one can find him. He is
+somewhere up here in one of these dives and has forgotten all about
+his engine. It is enough to set a man crazy to have to run trains with
+such cattle. Bucks, suppose you take one side of the street while I
+take the other, and help me hunt him up."
+
+"What shall we do?"
+
+"Look in every door all the way down-street till we find him. If we
+don't get the fellow on his engine, there will be no train out till
+midnight. Say nothing to anybody and answer no questions; just find
+him."
+
+Baxter started down the right-hand side of the long street and Bucks
+took the left-hand side. It was queer business for Bucks, and the
+sights that met him at every turn were enough to startle one stouter
+than he. He controlled his disgust and ignored the questions sometimes
+hurled at him by drunken men and women, intent only on getting his eye
+on the irresponsible Baggs.
+
+Half-way down toward the square he reached a dance hall. The doors
+were spread wide open and from within came a din of bad music,
+singing, and noise of every kind.
+
+Bucks entered the place with some trepidation. In the rear of the
+large room was a raised platform extending the entire width of it. At
+one end of the platform stood a piano which a man pounded incessantly
+and fiercely. Other performers were singing and dancing to entertain a
+motley and disorderly audience seated in a still more disorderly array
+before them.
+
+At the right of the room a long bar stretched from the street back as
+far as the stage, and standing in front of this, boisterous groups of
+men were smoking and drinking, or wrangling in tipsy fashion. The
+opposite side of the big room was given over to gambling devices of
+every sort, and this space was filled with men sitting about small
+tables and others sitting and standing along one side of long tables,
+at each of which one man was dealing cards, singly, out of a metal
+case held in his hand. Other men clustered about revolving wheels
+where, oblivious of everything going on around them, they watched with
+feverish anxiety a ball thrown periodically into the disc by the man
+operating the wheel.
+
+Bucks walked slowly down the room the full length of the bar, scanning
+each group of men as he passed. He crossed the room behind the chairs
+where the audience of the singers and dancers sat. He noticed, when he
+reached this, the difference in the faces he was scrutinizing. At the
+gambling tables the men saw and heard nothing of what went on about
+them. He walked patiently on his quest from group to group, unobserved
+by those about him, but without catching a sight of the elusive
+engineman. As he reached the end of the gambling-room, he hesitated
+for a moment and had finished his quest when, drawn by curiosity, he
+stopped for an instant to watch the scene about the roulette wheels.
+
+Almost instantly he heard a sharp voice behind him. "What are you
+doing here?"
+
+Bucks, surprised, turned to find himself confronted by the black-bearded
+passenger conductor, David Hawk. Baxter's admonition to say nothing
+of what he was doing confused Bucks for an instant, and he stammered
+some evasive answer.
+
+Hawk, blunt and stern in word and manner, followed the evasion up
+sharply: "Don't you know this is no place for you?" and before Bucks
+could answer, Hawk had fixed him with his piercing eyes.
+
+"You want to hang around a gambling-table, do you? You want to watch
+how it is done and try it yourself sometime? You want to see how much
+smarter you can play the game than these sheep-heads you are
+watching?
+
+"Don't talk to me," he exclaimed sternly as Bucks tried to explain.
+"I've seen boys in these places before. I know where they end. If I
+ever catch you in a gambling-den again I'll throw you neck and heels
+into the river."
+
+The words fell upon Bucks like a cloud-burst. Before he could return a
+word or catch his breath Hawk strode away.
+
+As Bucks stood collecting his wits, Baggs, the man for whom he was
+looking, passed directly before his eyes. Bucks sprang forward, caught
+Baggs by the arm, and led him toward the door, as he gave him Baxter's
+message. Baggs, listening somewhat sheepishly, made no objection to
+going down to take his train and walked through the front door with
+Bucks out into the street.
+
+As they did this, a red-faced man who was standing on the doorstep
+seized Bucks's sleeve and attempted to jerk him across the sidewalk.
+Bucks shook himself free and turned on his assailant. He needed no
+introduction to the hard cheeks, one of which was split by a deep
+scar. It was Perry, Rebstock's crony, whom Stanley had driven out of
+Sellersville on the Spider Water.
+
+"What are you doing around here interfering with my business?" he
+demanded of Bucks harshly. "I've watched you spying around. The next
+time I catch you trying to pull a customer out of my place, I'll knock
+your head off."
+
+Bucks eyed the bully with gathering wrath. He was already upset
+mentally, and taken so suddenly and unawares lost his temper and his
+caution. "If you do, it will be the last head you knock off in
+Medicine Bend," he retorted. "When I find trainmen in your joint that
+are needed on their runs, I'll pull them out every time. The safest
+thing you can do is to keep quiet. If the railroad men ever get
+started after you, you red-faced bully, they'll run you and your whole
+tribe into the river again."
+
+It was a foolish defiance and might have cost him his life, though
+Bucks knew he was well within the truth in what he said. Among the
+railroad men the feeling against the gamblers was constantly growing
+in bitterness. Perry instantly attempted to draw a revolver, when a
+man who had been watching the scene unobserved stepped close enough
+between him and Bucks to catch Perry's eye. It was Dave Hawk again.
+What he had just heard had explained things to him and he stood now
+grimly laughing at the enraged gambler.
+
+"Good for the boy," he exclaimed. "Want to get strung up, do you,
+Perry? Fire that gun just once and the vigilantes will have a rope
+around your neck in five minutes."
+
+Perry, though furious, realized the truth of what Hawk said. He poured
+a torrent of abuse upon Bucks, but made no further effort to use his
+gun. The dreaded word "vigilantes" had struck terror to the heart of a
+man who had once been in their hands and escaped only by an accident.
+
+"You know what he said is so, don't you?" laughed Hawk savagely.
+"What? You don't?" he demanded, as Perry tried to face him down.
+"You'll be lucky, when that time comes, if you don't get your heels
+tangled up with a telegraph pole before you reach the river,"
+concluded Hawk tauntingly.
+
+"Let him keep away from me if he doesn't want trouble," snarled the
+discomfited gambler, eying Bucks threateningly. But he was plainly
+out-faced, and retreated, grumbling, toward the dance-hall steps.
+
+Dan Baggs, at the first sign of hostilities, had fled. Bucks, afraid
+of losing him, now followed, leaving Hawk still abusing the gambler,
+but when he overtook the engineman he found he was going, as he had
+promised, straight to the roundhouse.
+
+It was almost time for the night trick. Bucks hastened upstairs to the
+despatchers' office and reported to Baxter, who had returned ahead of
+him and was elated at Bucks's success. Before the young substitute
+took up his train-sheet, he told the chief despatcher of how strangely
+the conductor, Dave Hawk, had talked to him.
+
+"He has a reason for it," responded Baxter briefly.
+
+"What reason?"
+
+"There is as good a railroad man as ever lived," said Baxter,
+referring to the black-bearded conductor. "He is the master of us all
+in the handling of trains. He could be anything anybody is on this
+line to-day that he might want to be but for one thing. If he hadn't
+ruined his own life, Dave Hawk could be superintendent here. He knows
+whereof he speaks, Bucks."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean he is a gambler. Did you hear the shooting after I left
+you?"
+
+"No, what was it?"
+
+"It must have been while you were in Perry's. Not five minutes after
+we parted, a saloon-keeper shot a woman down right in front of me; I
+was standing less than ten feet from her when she fell," said the
+despatcher, recounting the incident. "But I was too late to protect
+her; and I should probably have been shot myself if I had tried to."
+
+"Was the brute arrested?"
+
+"Arrested! Who arrests anybody in this town?"
+
+"How long is this sort of thing going on?" asked Bucks, sitting down
+and signing a transfer.
+
+"How long!" echoed the despatcher, taking up his hat to go to his
+room. "I don't know how long. But when their time comes--God help that
+crowd up Front Street!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Following Collins's return to duty, Bucks was assigned to a new
+western station, Point of Rocks. It was in the mountains and where
+Casement, now laying five and even six miles of track a day, had just
+turned over a hundred and eighty miles to the operating department.
+Bucks, the first operator ever sent to the lonely place afterward
+famous in railroad story, put his trunk aboard a freight train the
+next morning and started for his destination.
+
+The ride through the mountains was an inspiration. A party of army
+officers and their wives, preferring to take the day run for the
+scenery, were bound for one of the mountain posts, Fort Bridger, and
+they helped to make the long day journey in the cabin car, with its
+frequent stops and its laborious engine-puffing over the mountain
+grades, a pleasant one. The women made coffee on a cabin stove and
+Bucks, the only other passenger, was invited to lunch with them.
+
+When the train stopped at Point of Rocks and Bucks got off, the sun
+was setting, and though the thin, clear air brought the distant
+mountains very close, the prospect was not a cheerful one. In every
+direction mountain ranges, some brown and others snow-capped, rose
+upon the horizon. Where the railroad line made a tortuous way among
+the barren buttes that dotted the uneven plain all about, there was
+not a spear of grass nor a living thing except the stunted sage-brush
+of the alkali plain. In the midst of this desert a great upheaval of
+granite rock thrown squarely across the direct path of the railroad
+opposed its straight course and made a long reverse curve necessary.
+This was Point of Rocks.
+
+"You," said Stanley once to Bucks, "may live to see this railroad
+built across these mountains as it should be built. There will be no
+sharp curves then, no heavy grades such as these our little engines
+have to climb now. Great compound locomotives will pull trains of a
+hundred cars up grades of less than one per cent and around two and
+three degree curves. These high wooden bridges will all be replaced
+by big rock and earth fills. Tunnels will pierce the heights that
+cannot be scaled by easy grades, and electric power supplied by these
+mountain streams themselves will take the place of steam made by coal
+and hauled hundreds of miles to give us costly motive power. You may
+live, Bucks, to see all of this; I shall not. When it comes, think of
+me."
+
+But there was no thought now in Bucks's mind of what the future might
+bring to that forbidding desert. He saw only a rude station building,
+just put up, and as the train disappeared, he dragged into this his
+trunk and hand-bag, and in that act a new outpost of civilization was
+established in the great West.
+
+He called up Medicine Bend, reported, lighted a fire in the little
+stove, and the spot in the desert known now to men as Point of Rocks
+for the first time in the story of the world became a part of it--was
+linked to the world itself.
+
+But the place was lonely beyond words, and Bucks had a hard time to
+keep it from being too much so for him. He walked at different times
+over the country in every direction, and one night after a crudely
+prepared supper he strolled out on the platform, desperate for
+something to do. Desolation marked the landscape everywhere. He
+wandered aimlessly across the track and seeing nothing better to
+interest him began climbing Point of Rocks.
+
+The higher he climbed the more absorbed he became. Youth and strength
+lent ardor to the ascent, and Bucks, soon forgetting everything below,
+was scaling the granite pile that towered above him. For thirty
+minutes, without a halt, he continued to climb, and reaching after a
+while what seemed the highest ledge of the rocky spur, he walked out
+upon it to the very edge and was rewarded for his labor with a
+magnificent panorama of the mountain divide.
+
+In the west the sky was still golden and, though clouds appeared to be
+banking heavily in the north, the view of the distant peaks was
+unobstructed. From where he sat he could almost have thrown a stone
+into one tiny mountain stream that cut a silver path toward the
+setting sun, and another, a hundred yards away, that flowed gently
+toward the rising sun. And he knew--for Bill Dancing had told
+him--that the one rill emptied at last into the Pacific Ocean, and the
+other into the Atlantic Ocean. Alongside these tiny streams he could
+plainly trace the overland trail of the emigrant wagons, and, cutting
+in straighter lines, but following the same general direction, lay the
+right-of-way of the new transcontinental railroad.
+
+Beyond, in every direction, stretched great plateaus, and above these
+rugged mountain chains, lying in what seemed the eternal solitude of
+the vast desert. He was alone with the sunset, and stood for some
+moments silenced by the scene before him. When a sound did at length
+reach his ear as he sat spellbound, it brought him back to himself
+with the suddenness of a shock.
+
+At first he heard only distant echoes of a short, muffled blow,
+irregularly repeated and seeming familiar to the ear. As he speculated
+upon what the sound might be, it grew gradually plainer and came
+seemingly nearer. He bent his eyes down the valley to the west and
+scanned the wagon-trail and the railroad track as far as he could in
+the dusk, but could see nothing. Then the muffle of the sound was at
+once lifted. It came from the other direction, and, turning his eyes,
+he saw emerging from a small canyon that hid the trail to the east, a
+covered emigrant wagon, drawn by a large team of horses and driven by
+a man sitting in front of the hood, making its way slowly up the road
+toward the station.
+
+The heavy play of the wheel-hubs on the axles echoed now very plainly
+upon his ears, and he sat watching the outfit and wondering whether
+the travellers would camp for the night near him and give him what he
+craved most of all, a little human society. The horses passed the
+station, and as they did so, the driver peered intently at the new
+building, looking back around the side of the canvas cover, and
+straining his neck to see all he could see, while the horses moved
+along.
+
+This would have seemed to Bucks mere idle curiosity had he not noticed
+that some one within the wagon parted the canvas flaps at the rear as
+it went by and likewise inspected the building with close attention.
+Even this was no especial incident for wonderment, nor was Bucks
+surprised when the emigrants, after pursuing their way until they were
+well out of sight of the station itself, guided their wagon from the
+trail into a little depression along the creek as if to make camp for
+the night. The driver, a tall, thin man, wearing a slouch hat, got
+down from the front of the wagon and walked with a shambling gait to
+the head of his horses and loosened their bridles. While the horses
+were drinking, a second man, carrying a rifle, climbed down from the
+rear of the wagon. He was of a shorter and stockier build, and on one
+side the brim of his soft hat had been torn away so that it hung
+loosely over one ear, the other ear being covered only by a shock of
+dusty hair.
+
+A third man emerged from under the canvas cover, dropping down almost
+behind the second--a fat man who looked about him with suspicion as he
+slowly drew a rifle out of the wagon. The driver joined his companions
+for a brief conference, and when it was finished the three men,
+examining their rifles, walked back up the road toward the station. As
+they neared it, two of them loitered back and presently took their
+places behind convenient rocks where, without being seen, they could
+see everything. The third man, the driver, carrying his rifle on his
+arm, walked ahead, crossed the road, and, proceeding with some care,
+stepped up on the platform and pushed open the door of the station
+building.
+
+Bucks, perched high on the rocky spur above the scene, looked on, not
+knowing just what to make of it all. As he saw the two men conceal
+themselves, he wondered what sort of a call the third man intended
+making on the new agent, and why he should leave two armed men close
+at hand in ambush when calling on one lone telegraph operator. Bucks
+began to feel a bit creepy and watched the scene unfolding below with
+keen attention. The driver of the wagon getting no response as he
+opened the door, walked inside, and for a moment was not seen. He soon
+reappeared, and, stepping to the side of the building signalled his
+companions to come up. Bucks saw them emerge from their hiding-places
+and join the driver at the station door.
+
+A second conference followed. It was briefer than the first, but
+there seemed some difference of opinion among the three men, and
+the talk terminated abruptly by the driver's clubbing his rifle and
+deliberately smashing in the sash of the window before which he
+was standing.
+
+Whatever had held Bucks spellbound thus far released him suddenly for
+action when he saw the rifle-stock raised and heard the crash of the
+glass. He jumped up, and running to the edge of the ledge nearest the
+station yelled at the marauder and shook his finger at him vigorously.
+The attack on his habitation was too much for Bucks's composure, and,
+although he knew his words could not be heard from where he stood, he
+felt he could frighten the intruders.
+
+This was his second mistake. No sooner had his visitors sighted him
+than two guns were turned on him and instantly fired. He jumped back
+before the fat man, who, slower than his companions, had some
+difficulty in shooting so high above his head, could get his gun up.
+Afterward, Bucks learned how providential this was, inasmuch as the
+big fellow was the deadliest shot of the three.
+
+But at the moment, danger was the last thing the operator thought of.
+The unprovoked and murderous attack infuriated him, and again
+forgetting his caution he drew his own revolver without hesitation,
+and, running to a more protected spot, leaned over the ledge and fired
+point-blank into the group, as they looked up to see what had become
+of him.
+
+If it had been his intention to hit any one of them with his bullets,
+his shooting was a failure and some experience in after years among
+men practised in gunnery convinced him that to aim at three men is not
+the right way to hit one.
+
+But if he had meant only to create a sensation his move was successful
+beyond his greatest expectation. Had a bomb been exploded on the
+platform the marauders could not have scattered more quickly. Bucks
+never in his life had seen three men move so fast. The fat man,
+indeed, had given Bucks the impression of being heavy and slow in his
+movements. He now made a surprising exhibition of agility, and Bucks
+to his astonishment, saw him distancing his leaner companions and
+sprinting for the shelter at a pace that would have made a jack-rabbit
+take notice.
+
+Bucks, somewhat keyed up, fired twice again at the fleeing men, but
+with no more effect than to kick up the dust once behind and once
+ahead of them as they ran. The instant they reached the rocks where
+they found shelter Bucks drew back out of sight, and none too soon,
+for as he pulled himself away from the ledge, a rifle cracked
+viciously from below and the slug threw a chunk of granite almost up
+into his face; the fat man was evidently having his innings.
+
+Bucks, out of immediate danger, lay perfectly still for a few moments
+casting up the strange situation he found himself in. Why the men
+should have acted as they had, was all a mystery, but thieves or
+outlaws they evidently were, and outlaws in this country he already
+well knew were men who would stop at nothing.
+
+He realized, likewise, that he was in grave danger. The night was
+before him. No train would be through before morning. He could not
+reach his key by which he might have summoned aid instantly. For a
+moment he lay thinking. Then taking off his hat he stuck his head
+carefully forward; it was greeted at once by a bullet. The lesson was
+obvious and next time he wanted to reconnoitre he stuck his hat
+forward first on the muzzle of his gun, as he had often read of
+frontiersmen doing, and, having drawn a shot, stuck his head out
+afterward for a quick look. All that remained in the open was the team
+and wagon, but this left the outlaws at a disadvantage, for if they
+wanted to get their outfit and go on their way they must expose
+themselves to Bucks's fire. While they might feel that one operator,
+armed with a revolver he hardly knew how to use, was not a dangerous
+foe, a Colt's, even in the hands of a boy who had thus far fired first
+and aimed afterward, was not wholly to be despised. An accident might
+happen even under such conditions, and the three men, knowing that
+darkness would soon leave them free, waited in absolute silence.
+
+Night fell very soon and the light of the stars, though leaving
+objects visible upon the high ledge, left the earth in impenetrable
+darkness. Strain his eyes as he would, Bucks could perceive nothing
+below. He could hear, however, and one of the first sounds audible was
+that of the wagon moving quietly away. It was a welcome sound, even
+though he dared not hope his troublesome visitors would withdraw
+without further mischief. His chief concern at this juncture was to
+get safely, if he could, down the rocks and into the station to give
+the alarm to the despatcher; for he made no doubt that the outlaws, on
+their wagon trip west, would damage in any way they might be able
+railroad supplies and property along their way.
+
+Before Bucks had climbed down very far and after he had made one or
+two startling missteps, he began to consider that it was one thing to
+get up a rough arete in daylight and quite another to get down one in
+the darkness. The heavy clouds moving down from the north had massed
+above Point of Rocks, and he heard once in a while an ominous roll of
+thunder, as he slipped and slid along and bruised his hands and feet
+upon the rocks.
+
+He had with great care got about half-way down, when the pitch
+darkness below him was pierced by a small flame which he took at first
+for the blaze of a camp fire. In another moment he was undeceived. The
+station was on fire. It was evidently the last effort of the outlaws
+to wreak vengeance as they left. Bucks clambered over the rocks in
+great alarm. He thought he might reach the building in time to save
+it, and, forgetting the danger of being shot should his enemies remain
+lying in wait, he made his way rapidly down the Point. The flames now
+burst from the east window of the station, and he despaired of saving
+it, but he hurried on until he heard the crack of a rifle, felt his
+cap snatched from his head and fell backward against the face of the
+rock. As he lost consciousness he slipped and rolled headlong down the
+steep ledge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+How long Bucks lay in the darkness he did not know, but he woke to
+consciousness with thunder crashing in his ears and a flood of rain
+beating on his upturned face. When he opened his eyes he was blinded
+by sheets of lightning trembling across the sky, and he turned his
+face from the pelting rain until he could collect himself.
+
+While he lay insensible from the shock of the bullet, which
+providentially had only grazed his scalp, the storm had burst over the
+mountains drowning everything before it. Water fell in torrents, and
+the desert below him was one wide river. Water danced and swam down
+the rocks and ran in broad, shallow waves over the sand, and the scene
+was light as day. Thunder peals crashed one upon another like salvoes
+of artillery, deafening and alarming the confused boy, and the rain
+poured without ceasing. Continuing waves of lightning revealed the
+railroad and station building before him and he realized that he had
+fallen the rest of the way down from where he had been fired at on the
+face of the Point.
+
+He took quick stock of his condition and, rising to his feet, found
+himself only sore and bruised. He pressed his way through the flood to
+the track, gained the platform, and, judging rightly that his
+assailants had abandoned their fight, entered the half-burned building
+unafraid. Rain poured in one corner where the roof had burned away
+before the storm had put out the fire.
+
+Stumbling through the debris that covered the floor, Bucks made his
+way to the operator's table and put his hand up to cut in the
+lightning arrester. He was too late. The fire had taken everything
+ahead of him, and his hope of getting into communication with the
+despatchers was next dashed by the discovery that his instruments were
+wrecked.
+
+He sat down--his chair was intact--much disheartened. But without
+delay he opened the drawer of the table and feeling for his box of
+cartridges found that the thieves had overlooked it. This he slipped
+into his pocket with a feeling of relief, and, as he sat, rain-soaked
+and with the water dripping from his hair, he reloaded his revolver
+and made such preparations as he could to barricade the inner door and
+wait for the passing of the storm.
+
+From time to time, awed by the fury of the elements, he looked into
+the night. It seemed as if the valley as far as he could see was a
+vast lake that rippled and danced over the rocks. Bucks had never
+conceived of a thunderstorm like this. Until it abated there was
+nothing he could do, and he sat in wretched discomfort, hour after
+hour, waiting for the night to pass and listening to the mighty roar
+of the waters as they swept broadside down the divide carrying
+everything ahead of them. Before daylight the violence of the storm
+wore itself away, but the creek in the little canyon south of the
+right-of-way, dashing its swollen bulk against the granite walls,
+pounded and roared with the fury of a cataract.
+
+When day broke, ragged masses of gray cloud scudded low across the
+sky. The rain had ceased, and in the operator's room Bucks, aided by
+the first rays of daylight, was struggling to get the telegraph wires
+disentangled to send a message. His hopes, as the light increased and
+he saw the ruin caused by the fire, were very slender, but he kept
+busily at the wreckage and getting, at length, two severed strands of
+the wires to show a current, began sending his call, followed by a
+message for help to Medicine Bend. He worked at this for thirty
+minutes unceasingly, then, looking around on every side of the
+building, he satisfied himself that he was alone and, dropping down at
+his table, leaned upon it with his elbows, and, tired, wet, and
+begrimed, fell fast asleep.
+
+He was roused by the distant whistle of a locomotive. Opening his
+eyes, he saw the sun streaming through the east side of the building
+where the window casement had burned away. Shaking off the heaviness
+of his slumber he hastened out to see an engine and box-car coming
+from the east. From the open door of the car men were waving their
+hats. Bucks answered by swinging his arm.
+
+The engine stopped before the station and Bob Scott, followed by
+Dancing, Dave Hawk, and the train crew sprang from the caboose steps
+and surrounded him. They had brought two horses and Bucks saw that all
+the men were armed. It took only a minute to tell the story, and the
+party scattered to view the destruction and look for clues to the
+perpetrators.
+
+Scott and Dancing were especially keen in their search, but they found
+nothing to suggest who the vandals were. They listened again to Bucks,
+as he repeated his story with more detail, and held a hurried
+conference in which Dave Hawk took charge. Meantime the men were
+tearing up planks from the platform to make a chute for unloading the
+horses.
+
+Bucks's excitement increased as he saw the businesslike preparations
+for the chase. "Have you any idea you can catch them, Bob?" he asked
+feverishly.
+
+Bob Scott's smile was not a complete answer. "How can you catch
+anybody in _this_ country?" continued Bucks, regarding the scout
+sceptically. But Scott looked across the interminable waste of
+sage-brush and rock as if he felt at home with it.
+
+"If they stick to the wagon," he explained leisurely, "we will have
+them in an hour or two, Bucks. A man might as well travel around here
+with a brass band as to try to get away with a wagon track behind him.
+If they stick to the wagon, we are bound to have them in two or three
+hours at most. You are sure they didn't have a led horse?"
+
+"They had nothing but the team," said Bucks.
+
+"In that case if they give up the wagon, three of them will have to
+ride two horses. They can't go fast in that way. We will get some of
+them, Bucks, sure--somehow, sometime, somewhere. We have got to get
+them. How could I hold my job if I didn't get them?"
+
+That which had seemed impossible to Bucks looked more hopeful after
+Bob had smiled again. Dancing was busy installing the new telegraph
+outfit. While this was going on, Scott saddled the horses and, when he
+and Dave Hawk had mounted, the two rode rapidly down the emigrant
+trail toward Bitter Creek. The train was held until Dancing could get
+the instruments working again; then, at Hawk's request, it was sent
+down the Bitter Creek grade after himself and Scott; the trail
+followed the railroad for miles. Dancing remained with Bucks to guard
+against further attack.
+
+The two railroad men rode carefully along the heavy ruts of the
+emigrant trail, from which all recent tracks had been obliterated by
+the flood, knowing that they would strike no sign of the wagon until
+it had been started after the storm. They had covered in this manner
+less than two miles when, rounding a little bend, they saw a covered
+emigrant wagon standing in the road not half a mile from the railroad
+track.
+
+Scott led quickly toward concealment and from behind a shoulder of
+rock to which the two rode they could see that the wagon had been
+halted and the horses, strangely entangled in the harness, were lying
+in front of it. Scott and Hawk dismounted and, crawling up the
+shoulder where they could see without being seen, waited impatiently
+for some sign of life from the suspicious outfit. The description
+Bucks had given fitted the wagon very well, and the two lay for a
+time waiting for something to happen, and exchanging speculations as
+to what the situation might mean. They were hoping that the thieves
+might, if they had gone away, return, and with this thought restrained
+their impatience.
+
+"It may be a trick to get us up to shooting distance, Bob," suggested
+Hawk when Scott proposed they should close in.
+
+"But that wouldn't explain why the horses are lying there in that way,
+Dave. Something else has happened. Those horses are dead; they haven't
+moved. Suppose I circle the outfit," suggested Scott benevolently.
+
+"Take care they don't get a shot at you."
+
+"If they can get a shot at me before I can at them they are welcome,"
+returned Scott as he picked up his bridle rein. "From what Bucks told
+me I don't think a great deal of their shooting. He is a level-headed
+boy, that long-legged operator." And Scott, with some quiet grimaces,
+recounted Bucks's story of his descent of Point of Rocks the night
+before, under the fire of the three desperadoes.
+
+That he himself was now taking his own life in his hands as he started
+on a perilous reconnoissance, cost him no thought. Such a situation he
+was quite used to. But for a green boy from the East to put up so
+unequal a fight seemed to the experienced scout a most humorous
+proceeding.
+
+He mounted his horse and directing Hawk what to do if he should be
+hit, set out to ride completely around the suspected wagon. The canvas
+cover was the uncertain element in the situation. It might conceal
+nobody, and yet it might conceal three rifles waiting for an
+indiscreet pursuer to come within range. Scott, taking advantage of
+the uneven country, rode circumspectly to the south, keeping the
+object of his caution well in view, and at times, under cover of
+friendly rocks, getting up quite close to it.
+
+Before he had completed half his ride he had satisfied himself as to
+the actual state of affairs. Yet his habitual caution led him to
+follow out his original purpose quite as carefully as if he had
+reached no conclusion. When he crossed the trail west of the wagon, he
+looked closely for fresh tracks, but there were none. He then circled
+to the north and was soon able, by dismounting, to crawl under cover
+within a hundred yards of the heads of the horses. When he got up to
+where he could see without being seen he perceived clearly that his
+surmise had been correct.
+
+Both horses lay dead in the harness. From the front seat of the wagon
+a boot protruded; nothing more could be seen. Scott now, by signals,
+summoned Dave Hawk from where he lay, and when the swarthy conductor
+reached the scout, Scott called out loudly at the wagon.
+
+There was no answer, no movement, no sound. Things began to seem
+queer; in the bright blaze of sunshine, and with the parched desert
+glistening after the welcome rain, there in the midst of the vast
+amphitheatre of mountains lay the dead horses before the mysterious
+wagon. But nowhere about was any sign of life, and the wagon might
+hold within its white walls death for whoever should unwarily approach
+it.
+
+Bob Scott had no idea, however, of sacrificing himself to any scheme
+that might have occurred to the enemy to lure him within danger. He
+called out again at the top of his voice and demanded a surrender. No
+sound gave any response, and raising his rifle he sent a bullet
+through the extreme top of the canvas cover midway back from the
+driver's seat.
+
+The echoes of the report crashed back to the rocks, but brought
+nothing from the silence of the emigrant wagon. A second shot
+followed, tearing through the side board of the wagon-box itself; yet
+there was no answer. Scott, taking his horse, while Hawk remained in
+hiding and covered the scene with his own rifle, led the horse so that
+it served as a shelter and walked directly toward the wagon itself. As
+he neared it he approached from the front, pausing at times to survey
+what he saw. Hawk watched him lead his unwilling horse, trembling with
+fear, up to the dead team as they lay in the bright sunlight, and saw
+Scott take hold of the protruding boot, peer above it into the wagon
+itself and, without turning his head, beckon Hawk to come up.
+
+Under the canvas, the driver of the wagon lay dead with the lines
+clutched in his stiffened fingers, just as he had fallen when death
+struck his horses. The two frontiersmen needed no explanation of what
+they saw in the scarred and blackened face of the outlaw. A bolt of
+lightning had killed him and stricken both horses in the same instant.
+Bob crawled into the wagon and with Hawk's help dragged the dead man
+forward into the sunlight. Both recognized him. It was Bucks's
+assailant and enemy, the Medicine Bend and Spider Water gambler,
+Perry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+The two men, aided by the crew of the train that now came down the
+Bitter Creek grade, got the dead body of the outlaw back to Point of
+Rocks just as a mixed train from the east reached there, with Stanley
+and a detail of cavalry aboard. Stanley walked straight to Bucks,
+caught him by the shoulders, and shook him as if to make sure he was
+all right.
+
+"Gave you a warm reception, did they, Bucks?"
+
+"Moderately warm, colonel."
+
+Stanley shook his head. "It is all wrong. They never should have sent
+you out here alone," he declared brusquely. "These superintendents
+seem to think they are railroading in Ohio instead of the Rocky
+Mountains. Dave," he continued, turning to Hawk as the latter came up,
+"I hear you have just brought in Perry dead. What have we got here,
+anyway?"
+
+"Some of the Medicine Bend gang," returned Hawk tersely.
+
+"What are they doing?"
+
+"Evening up old scores, I guess."
+
+Stanley looked at the dead man as they laid him out on the platform:
+"And hastening their own day of reckoning," he said. "There shall be
+no more of this if we have to drive every man of the gang out of the
+country. Who do you think was with Perry, Bob?" he demanded,
+questioning Scott.
+
+"There is nothing to show that till we get them--and we ought to be
+after them now," returned the scout. "But," he added softly as he
+hitched his trousers, "I think one of the two might be young John
+Rebstock."
+
+"You need lose no time, Bob. Here are ten men with fresh horses at
+your orders." Stanley pointed to the troopers who were unloading their
+mounts.
+
+"Give Dave and me three of the best of these men," said Scott. "I will
+follow the west trail. Put a sergeant with the others on the trail
+east to make sure they haven't doubled back on us--but I don't think
+they have."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"They must have stolen that team and wagon, that is certain. More than
+likely they murdered the man they took it from. The trail is probably
+alive with men looking for them. These fellows were trying to get to
+Casement's camp for gambling, and probably they are heading that way
+fast now. We will pick those fellows up, colonel, somewhere between
+here and Bridger's Gap."
+
+The three troopers that Scott selected were told off and, after a few
+rapid arrangements for sending back information, the five men of the
+west-trail party, headed by Scott and Dave Hawk, rode down Bitter
+Creek and, scattering in a wide skirmish line wherever the formation
+of the country permitted, scanned the ground for signs of the
+fugitives.
+
+"We shan't find anything till we get to where they were when the rain
+stopped," Scott told the trooper near whom he was riding. It was, in
+fact, nearly ten miles from Point of Rocks before they picked up the
+footprints of two men travelling apart from each other, but headed
+north and west. These they followed on a long detour away from the
+regular wagon road until the two trails turned and entered, from the
+southwest, a camp made the night before by a big trading outfit on the
+regular overland trail.
+
+Here, of course, all trace of the men disappeared. It was now drawing
+toward evening. Scott resolved to follow the trading outfit, but the
+party still rode slowly to make sure the men they wanted did not sneak
+away from the wagons of their new-found friends. The pursuers rode
+steadily on, and as the sun went down they perceived in a small canyon
+ahead of them the wagons of the outfit they were trailing, parked in a
+camp for the night.
+
+Scott gave the troopers directions as to where to post themselves, at
+some distance east and west of the canyon, to provide against a sortie
+of the fugitives and, riding with Hawk directly into the camp, asked
+for the boss. He appeared after some delay and proved to be a French
+trader with supplies for Salt Lake.
+
+Hawk, whose long visage and keen eyes gave him a particularly
+stern air--and David Hawk was never very communicative or very
+warm-mannered--asked the questions. The Frenchman was civil, but
+denied having any men with him except those he had brought from
+the Missouri River. However, he offered to line up his men for the
+railroad party to look over. To this Hawk agreed, and, when the
+word had been passed, the entire force of the trader were assembled
+in front of the head wagon.
+
+Scott rode slowly up the line scrutinizing each face, and, turning
+again, rode down the line. Once he stopped and questioned a
+suspicious-looking teamster wearing a hat that answered Bucks's
+description, but the man's answers were satisfactory.
+
+When Scott had finished his inspection the men started to disband.
+Hawk stopped them. "Stay where you are," he called out curtly. Turning
+to the Frenchman, he added: "We will have to search your wagons."
+
+Again the trader made no objection, though some of his men did.
+
+The three troopers were signalled in, and posted so there could be no
+dodging from one wagon to another, and Hawk gave them orders, loud
+enough for all to hear, to shoot on sight any one leaving the wagons.
+And while he himself kept command of the whole situation, Scott
+dismounted and accompanied by the trader began the search. The hunt
+was tedious and the teamsters murmured at the delay to their camp
+work. But the search went forward unrelentingly. Not a corner capable
+of concealing a dog was overlooked by the painstaking Indian and not
+until he had reached the last wagon was his hope exhausted.
+
+This wagon stood at the extreme end of a wash-out in the side of the
+canyon itself. It was filled with bales of coarse red blankets, but no
+man was to be found among them.
+
+Scott did find something, however, in a sort of a nest fashioned among
+the bales near the middle of the wagon. What would have escaped an eye
+less trained to look for trifles attracted his at once. It was a dingy
+metal tag. Scott picked it up. It bore the name of a Medicine Bend
+saloon and the heads of three horses, from the design of which the
+saloon itself took a widely known and ill name. He laid his hand on
+the blanket from which he had picked the tag. The wool was still
+warm.
+
+Scott only smiled to himself. Both ends of the little canyon were
+guarded. From where he was searching the scout peered carefully out at
+the canyon walls. There were hiding-places, but they were hardly large
+enough to conceal a man. It was somewhere in the rocks close at hand
+that the fugitives had found a temporary refuge; but they could not
+now escape--nor could they be far from the wagon.
+
+Without losing sight of the surroundings, Scott, disclosing nothing of
+his discovery to the trader, announced that he was satisfied and that
+the men he wanted did not appear to be there. He added, however, that
+if the Frenchman had no objection his party would pitch camp close by
+and ride with him in the morning. The Frenchman maintained his
+courtesy by inviting the party to take supper with him, and Scott,
+agreeing to return, rode away with Hawk and the three troopers.
+
+They had not ridden far, when Bob dismounted the party and leaving
+the horses with one trooper set two as pickets and posted himself in
+hiding on one side the canyon, with Hawk on the other, to watch the
+camp. What he saw or whether his patience was in any degree rewarded
+no one could have told from his inscrutable face as he walked into the
+camp at dusk and sat down with the trader to supper. The moon was just
+rising and down at the creek, a little way from where Scott sat, some
+belated teamsters were washing their hands and faces and preparing
+their own supper. Scott ate slowly and with his back to the fire kept
+his eye on the group of men down at the creek. When he had finished,
+he walked down to the stream himself. A large man in the group fitted,
+in his hat and dress, Bucks's exact description. Scott had already
+spotted him an hour before, and stepped up to him now to arrest young
+John Rebstock.
+
+He laid his hand on the man's shoulder and the man turned. But to
+Scott's surprise he was not the man wanted at all. He wore Rebstock's
+clothes and fitted Rebstock's description, but he was not Rebstock.
+The scout understood instantly how he had been tricked, but gave no
+sign.
+
+Within the preceding thirty minutes the real Rebstock, whom Scott had
+already marked from his hiding-place in the canyon, had traded clothes
+with this man and, no doubt, made good his escape.
+
+If Bob was chagrined, he made no sign.
+
+"You must have made a good trade," he said, smiling at the teamster.
+"These clothes are a little big, but you will grow to them. How much
+boot did you get?"
+
+Scott looked so slight and inoffensive that the teamster attempted
+insolence, and not only refused to answer questions, but threatened
+violence if the scout persisted in asking them. His companions
+crowding up encouraged him.
+
+But numbers were not allowed for an instant to dominate the situation.
+Scott whipped a revolver from his belt, cocked it, and pressed it
+against the teamster's side. Dave Hawk loomed up in the moonlight and,
+catching by the collar one after another of the men crowding around
+Scott, Hawk, with his right hand or his left, whirled them spinning
+out of his way. If a man resisted the rough treatment, Hawk
+unceremoniously knocked him down and, drawing his own revolver, took
+his stand beside his threatened companion.
+
+Other men came running up, the trader among them. A few words
+explained everything and the recalcitrant teamster concluded to speak.
+Scott, indeed, had but little to ask: he already knew the whole story.
+And when the teamster, threatened with search, pulled from his pocket
+a roll of bank-notes which he acknowledged had been given him for
+concealing the two fugitives and providing them with clothes, Scott
+released him--only notifying the trader incidentally that the man was
+robbing him and had loot, taken from the ammunition wagon, concealed
+under his blanket bales just searched. This information led to new
+excitement in the camp, and the Frenchman danced up and down in his
+wrath as he ordered the blanket wagon searched again. But his
+excitement did not greatly interest Scott and his party. They went
+their way and camped at some distance down the creek from their
+stirred-up neighbors.
+
+Hawk and Bob Scott sat in the moonlight after the troopers had gone to
+sleep.
+
+"They can't fool us very much longer," muttered Scott, satisfied with
+the day's work and taking the final disappointment philosophically,
+"until they can get horses they are chained to the ground in this
+country. There is only one place I know of where there are any horses
+hereabouts and that is Jack Casement's camp."
+
+Hawk stretched himself out on the ground to sleep. "I'll tell you,
+Dave," continued Scott, "it is only about twenty miles from here to
+Casement's, anyway. Suppose I ride over there to-night and wire
+Stanley we've got track of the fellows. By the time you pick up the
+trail in the morning I will be back--or I may pick it up myself
+between here and the railroad. You keep on as far as Brushwood Creek
+and I'll join you there to-morrow by sundown."
+
+It was so arranged. The night was clear and with a good moon the ride
+was not difficult, though to a man less acquainted with the mountains
+it would have been a hardship. Mile after mile Scott's hardy pony
+covered with no apparent effort. Bob did not urge him, and before
+midnight the white tents of the construction camp were visible in the
+moonlight. Scott went directly to the telegraph office, and after
+sending his message hunted up food and quarters for his beast and a
+sleeping-bunk for himself.
+
+At daylight he was astir and sought breakfast before making inquiries
+and riding back to his party. On the edge of the camp stood a sort of
+restaurant, made up of a kitchen tent with a dismantled box-car body
+as an annex.
+
+In this annex the food was served. It was entered from one side door,
+while the food was brought from the kitchen through the other side
+doorway of the car.
+
+Into this crowded den Bob elbowed an unobtrusive way and seated
+himself in a retired corner. He faced the blind end of the car, and
+before him on the wall was tacked a fragment of a mirror in which he
+could see what was going on behind him. And without paying any
+apparent attention to anything that went on, nothing escaped him.
+
+Next to where he sat, a breakfast of coffee and ham and eggs had been
+already served for somebody, apparently on an order previously given.
+At the opposite end of the car a small space was curtained off as a
+wash-room. Scott ordered his own breakfast and was slowly eating it
+when he noticed through the little mirror, and above and beyond the
+heads of the busy breakfasters along the serving-counter, a large man
+in the wash-room scrubbing his face vigorously with a towel.
+
+Each time Scott looked up from his breakfast into the mirror the man
+redoubled his efforts to do a good job with the towel, hiding his face
+meantime well within its folds. The scout's curiosity was mildly
+enough aroused to impel him to watch the diligent rubbing with some
+interest. He saw, too, presently that the man was stealing glances out
+of his towel at him and yet between times intently rubbing his face.
+
+This seemed odd, and Scott, now eying the man more carefully, noted
+his nervousness and wondered at it. However, he continued to enjoy his
+own meal. The waiter who had served him, hurried and impatient, also
+noticed the waiting breakfast untouched and called sharply to the man
+in the wash-room that his ham was served and, with scant regard for
+fine words, bade him come eat it.
+
+This urgent invitation only added to the ill-concealed embarrassment
+of the stalling guest; but it interested the scout even more in the
+developing situation. Scott finished his breakfast and gave himself
+entirely over to watching in a lazy way the man who was making so
+elaborate a toilet.
+
+There was no escape from either end of the car. That could be managed
+only through the side doors, which were too close to Scott to be
+available, and the scout, now fairly well enlightened and prepared,
+merely awaited developments. He wanted to see the man come to his
+breakfast, and the man in the wash-room, combing his hair with vigor
+and peering anxiously through his own scrap of a mirror at Bob Scott,
+wanted to see the scout finish his coffee and leave the car. Scott,
+however, pounding ostentatiously on the table, called for a second cup
+of coffee and sipped it with apparent satisfaction. It was a game of
+cat and mouse--with the mouse, in this instance, bigger than the cat,
+but as shy and reluctant to move as any mouse could be in a cat's
+presence. Scott waited until he thought the embarrassed man would have
+brushed the hair all out of his head, and at last, in spite of
+himself, laughed. As he did so, he turned half-way around on his stool
+and lifted his finger.
+
+"Come, Rebstock," he smiled, calling to the fugitive. "Your breakfast
+is getting cold."
+
+The man, turning as red as a beet, looked over the heads of those that
+sat between him and his tantalizing captor. But putting the best face
+he could on the dilemma and eying Scott nervously he walked over and,
+with evident reluctance, made ready to sit down beside him.
+
+"Take your time," suggested Scott pleasantly. Then, as Rebstock, quite
+crestfallen, seated himself, he added: "Hadn't I better order a hot
+cup of coffee for you?" He took hold of the cup as he spoke, and
+looked hard at the gambler while making the suggestion.
+
+"No, no," responded Rebstock, equally polite and equally insistent, as
+he held his hand over the cup and begged Scott not to mind. "This is
+all right."
+
+"How was the walking last night?" asked Scott, passing the fugitive a
+big plate of bread. Rebstock lifted his eyes from his plate for the
+briefest kind of a moment.
+
+"The--eh--walking? I don't know what you mean, captain. I slept here
+last night."
+
+Scott looked under the table at his victim's boots. "John," he asked
+without a smile, "do you ever walk in your sleep?"
+
+Rebstock threw down his knife and fork. "Look here, stranger," he
+demanded with indignation. "What do you want? Can't a man eat his
+breakfast in this place? I ask you," he demanded, raising his right
+hand with his knife in it as he appealed to the waiter, "can't a man
+eat his breakfast in this place without interruption?"
+
+The waiter, standing with folded arms, regarded the two men without
+changing his stolid expression. "A man can eat his breakfast in this
+place without anything on earth except money. If you let your ham get
+cold because you were going to beat me out of the price, and you try
+to do it, I'll drag you out of here by the heels."
+
+These unsympathetic words attracted the attention of every one and the
+breakfasters now looked on curiously but no one offered to interfere.
+Quarrels and disputes were too frequent in that country to make it
+prudent or desirable ever to intervene in one. A man considered
+himself lucky not to be embroiled in unpleasantness in spite of his
+best efforts to keep out. Rebstock turned again on his pursuer. "What
+do you want, anyhow, stranger?" he demanded fiercely. "A fight, I
+reckon."
+
+"Not a bit of it. I want you, Rebstock," explained Scott without in
+the least raising his voice.
+
+Rebstock's throaty tones seemed to contract into a wheeze. "What do
+you want me for?" he asked, looking nervously toward the other end of
+the car. As he did so, a man wearing a shirt and new overalls rose and
+started for the door. The instinct of Scott's suspicion fastened
+itself on the man trying to leave the place as being Rebstock's wanted
+companion.
+
+Rising like a flash, he covered the second man with his pistol. "Hold
+on!" he exclaimed, pointing at him with his left hand. "Come over
+here!"
+
+The man in overalls turned a calm face that showed nothing more than
+conscious innocence. But Scott was looking at his feet. His worn shoes
+were crusted heavily with alkali mud. "What do you want with me?"
+snarled the man halted at the door.
+
+"I want you," said Scott, "for burning Point of Rocks station night
+before last. Here, partner," he continued, speaking to the waiter.
+"I'll pay for these two breakfasts; search that man for me," he
+continued, pointing to the man in the overalls.
+
+"Search him yourself," returned the waiter stolidly. Scott turned like
+a wolf.
+
+"What's that?" Another expression stole over his good-natured face.
+Holding his revolver to cover any one that resisted, he turned his
+accusing finger upon the insolent waiter. "You will talk to me, will
+you?" he demanded sharply. "Do as I tell you instantly, or I'll drive
+you out of camp and burn your shack to the ground. When I talk to you,
+General Jack Casement talks, and this railroad company talks. Search
+that man!"
+
+Before the last word had passed his lips the waiter jumped over the
+counter and began turning the pockets of the man in the new overalls
+inside out. The fellow kept a good face even after a bunch of stolen
+railroad tickets were discovered in one pocket. "A man gave them to me
+last night to keep for him," he answered evenly.
+
+"Never mind," returned Scott with indifference, "I will take care of
+them for him."
+
+The news of the capture spread over the camp, and when Scott with his
+two prisoners walked across to General Casement's tent a crowd
+followed. Stanley had just arrived from Point of Rocks by train and
+was conferring with Casement when Scott came to the tent door. He
+greeted Bob and surveyed the captured fugitives.
+
+"How did you get them?" he demanded.
+
+Scott smiled and hung his head as he shook it, to anticipate
+compliments. "They just walked into my arms. Dave Hawk and the
+troopers are looking for these fellows now away down on Bitter Creek.
+They wandered into camp here last night to save us the trouble of
+bringing them. Isn't that it, Rebstock?"
+
+Rebstock disavowed, but not pleasantly. He was not in amiable mood.
+
+"What show has a fat man got to get away from anybody?" he growled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+When Hawk saw Bob Scott, two hours later, riding into his camp on the
+Brushwood with the two prisoners, he was taciturn but very much
+surprised.
+
+Scott was disposed to make light of the lucky chance, as he termed it,
+that had thrown the two men into his way. Hawk, on the other hand,
+declared in his arbitrary manner that it was not wholly a lucky
+chance. He understood the Indian's dogged tenacity too well to think
+for a moment that the fugitives could have escaped him, even had he
+not ridden into Casement's camp as he so fortuitously had done.
+
+The scout, Hawk knew, had the characteristic intuition of the
+frontiersman; the mental attributes that combine with keen observation
+and unusually good judgment as aids to success when circumstances are
+seemingly hopeless. Such men may be at fault in details, and
+frequently are, but they are not often wholly wrong in conclusions.
+And in their pursuit of a criminal they are like trained hounds, which
+may frequently lose their trail for a moment, but, before they have
+gone very far astray, come unerringly back to it.
+
+"If they ever give you a chance, Bob, you will make a great
+thief-catcher," exclaimed Hawk with his naturally prodigal generosity
+of appreciation.
+
+"I certainly never expected to catch Rebstock and this fellow Seagrue
+as easily as that," smiled Scott, as the troopers took charge of his
+men.
+
+"If you hadn't caught them there you would have trailed them there. It
+would only have meant a longer chase."
+
+"A whole lot longer."
+
+"When you come to think of it, Bob, the railroad was their only hope,
+anyway. They did right in striking for it. Without horses, the big
+camp and the trains for Medicine Bend every day were their one chance
+to get away."
+
+Scott assented. "The trouble with us," he smiled, "was that we didn't
+think until after it was all over. Sometime a man will come to these
+mountains who thinks things out before they happen instead of after.
+Then we will have a man fit to run the secret service on this
+railroad. But we are losing time," he added, tightening up his saddle
+girths.
+
+"What are you going to do now? And why," demanded Hawk without waiting
+for an answer, "did you drag these men away down here instead of
+leaving them for Casement to lock up until we were ready to take them
+to Medicine Bend?"
+
+"I am going to drag them farther yet," announced Scott. "I am going to
+ride after the French trader and fit these two fellows out in their
+own clothes again to make it easier for Bucks to indentify them."
+
+"Don't say 'indentify,' Bob, say 'identify,'" returned Hawk testily.
+
+Bob Scott usually turned away a sharp word with silence, and although
+he felt confident Hawk was wrong, he argued no further with him, but
+stuck just the same to his own construction of the troublesome word.
+
+"You've got the right idea, Bob, if you have got the wrong word,"
+muttered Hawk. "Why didn't you think of that sooner?"
+
+They broke camp and started promptly. About noon they overtook the
+trading outfit and after some threatening forced the tricky teamster
+to rig the two gamblers out in their own apparel. Having done this,
+they started on a long ride for Casement's camp, reaching it again
+with their prisoners, and all very dusty and fatigued, long after
+dark.
+
+The hard work voluntarily undertaken by the scout to aid the boy, as
+he termed Bucks, in identifying his graceless assailants was
+vindicated when, the next morning, the party with their prisoners
+arrived on a special train at Point of Rocks, and Bucks immediately
+pointed to Seagrue as the man who had first fired at him.
+
+There were a few pretty hot moments on the platform when Bucks, among
+a group of five camp malefactors on their way to Medicine Bend,
+confronted the two men who had tried to kill him, and unhesitatingly
+pointed them out. Seagrue, tall and surly, denied vehemently ever
+having been at Point of Rocks and ever having seen Bucks. He declared
+the whole affair was "framed up" to send him to the penitentiary. He
+threatened if he were "sent up" to come back and kill Bucks if it was
+twenty years later--and did, in that respect, try to keep his word.
+
+But his threats availed him nothing, and John Rebstock who, though
+still young, was a sly fox in crooked ways, contented himself with a
+philosophical denial of everything alleged against him, adding only in
+an injured tone that nobody would believe a fat man anyway.
+
+It was he, however, rather than the less clever Seagrue, who had begun
+to excite sympathy for what he called his luckless plight and that of
+his companion, before they had left the railroad camp. Among the five
+evil-doers who had been rounded-up and deported for the jail at
+Medicine Bend, and now accompanied the two gamblers, Rebstock spread
+every story he could think of to arouse his friends at Medicine Bend
+to a demonstration in his behalf.
+
+The very first efforts at putting civil law and order into effect
+were just then being tried in the new and lawless frontier railroad
+town and the contest between the two elements of decency and of
+license had reached an acute pass when Rebstock and Seagrue were
+thrown into jail at Medicine Bend. A case of sympathy for them was not
+hard to work up among men of their own kind and threats were heard up
+and down Front Street that if the railroading of two innocent men to
+the penitentiary were attempted something would happen.
+
+Railroad men themselves, hearing the mutterings, brought word of them
+to head-quarters, but Stanley was in no wise disturbed. He had wanted
+to make an example for the benefit of the criminals who swarmed to the
+town, and now welcomed the chance to put the law's rigor on the men
+that had tried to assassinate his favorite operator. Bucks, lest he
+might be made the victim of a more successful attack, was brought down
+from Point of Rocks the first moment he could be relieved. A plot to
+put him out of the way, as the sole witness against the accused
+gamblers, was uncovered by Scott almost as soon as Bucks had returned
+to the big town and, warned by his careful friend, he rarely went up
+street except with a companion--most frequently with Scott himself.
+
+As the day set for Rebstock's trial drew near, rumors were heard of a
+jail delivery. The jail itself was a flimsy wooden affair, and so
+crude in its appointments that any civilized man would have been
+justified in breaking out of it.
+
+Nor was Brush, the sheriff, much more formidable than the jail itself.
+This official sought to curry favor with the townspeople--and that
+meant, pretty nearly, with the desperadoes--as well as to stand well
+with the railroad men; and in his effort to do both he succeeded in
+doing neither.
+
+Bucks was given a night trick on his old wire in the local station,
+and in spite of the round of excitement about him settled down to the
+routine of regular work. The constant westbound movement of
+construction material made his duties heavier than before, but he
+seemed able to do whatever work he was assigned to and gained the
+reputation of being dependable, wherever put.
+
+He had risen one night from his key, after despatching a batch of
+messages, to stir the fire--the night was frosty--when he heard
+an altercation outside on the platform. In another moment the
+waiting-room door was thrown open and Bucks turned from the
+stove, poker in hand, to see a man in the extremity of fear rush
+into his lonely office.
+
+The man, hatless and coatless and evidently trying to escape from some
+one, was so panic-stricken that his eyes bulged from their sockets,
+and his beard was so awry that it was a moment before Bucks recognized
+his old acquaintance Dan Baggs.
+
+"They are after me, Bucks," cried Baggs, closing the door in
+desperation. "They will kill me--hide me or they'll kill me."
+
+Before the operator could ask a question in explanation, almost before
+the words were out of the frightened engineman's mouth, and with Bucks
+pointing with his poker to the door, trying to tell Baggs to lock it,
+the door again flew open and Bucks saw the face of a Front Street
+confidence man bursting through it.
+
+Bucks sprang forward to secure the door behind the intruder, but he
+was too late even for that. Half a dozen more men crowded into the
+room. To ask questions was useless; every one began talking at once.
+Baggs, paralyzed with fear, cowered behind the stove and the
+confidence man, catching sight of him, tried to crowd through the
+wicket gate. As he sprang toward it, Bucks confronted him with his
+poker.
+
+"Let that gate alone or I'll brain you," he cried, hardly realizing
+what he was saying, but well resolved what to do.
+
+The gambler, infuriated, pointed to Baggs. "Throw that cur out here,"
+he yelled.
+
+Baggs, now less exposed to his enemies, summoned the small remnant of
+his own courage and began to abuse his pursuer.
+
+[Illustration: "LET THAT GATE ALONE OR I'LL BRAIN YOU," HE CRIED.]
+
+Bucks, between the two men with his poker, tried to stop the din long
+enough to get information. He drew the enraged gambler into a
+controversy of words and used the interval to step to his key. As he
+did so, Baggs, catching up a monkey-wrench that Bucks ordinarily used
+on his letter-press, again defied his enemy.
+
+It was only a momentary burst of courage, but it saved the situation.
+Taking advantage of the instant, Bucks slipped the fingers of his left
+hand over the telegraph key and wired the despatchers upstairs for
+help. It was none too soon. The men, leaning against the railing,
+pushed it harder all along the line. It swayed with an ominous crack
+and the fastening gave way. Baggs cowered. His pursuers yelled, and
+with one more push the railing crashed forward and the confidence man
+sprang for the engineer. Baggs ran back to where Bucks stood before
+his table, and the latter, clutching his revolver, warned Baggs's
+pursuers not to lay a hand on him.
+
+Defying the single-handed defender, the gambler whipped out his own
+pistol to put an end to the fight. It was the signal for his
+followers, and in another minute half a dozen guns covered Bucks and
+his companion.
+
+Seconds meant minutes then. Bucks understood that only one shot was
+needed as the signal for his own destruction. What he did not quite
+realize was that the gambler confronting him and his victim read
+something in Bucks's eye that caused him to hesitate. He felt that if
+a shot were fired, whatever else happened, it would mean his own death
+at Bucks's hand. It was this that restrained him, and the instant
+saved the operator's life.
+
+He heard the clattering of feet down the outside stairway, and the
+next moment through the open door on the run dashed Bill Dancing,
+swinging a piece of iron pipe as big as a crowbar. The yardmaster,
+Callahan, was at his heels, and the two, tearing their way through the
+room, struck without mercy.
+
+The thugs crowded to the door. The narrow opening choked with men
+trying to dodge the blows rained upon them by Dancing and Callahan.
+Before Baggs could rub his eyes the room was cleared, and half a dozen
+trainmen hastily summoned and led by a despatcher were engaged out
+upon the platform in a free fight with the Front Street ruffians.
+
+Within the office, the despatcher found Bucks talking to Callahan,
+while Baggs was trying to explain to Bill Dancing how the confidence
+men had tried to inveigle him into a "shell" game and, when they found
+they could not rob him of his month's pay in any other way, had
+knocked him down to pick his pockets.
+
+Callahan, who knew the trouble-making element better than any of the
+railroad men, went up town to estimate the feeling after the fight,
+which was now being discussed by crowds everywhere along Front Street.
+For every bruised and sore head marked by the punishment given by
+Dancing in the defence of Baggs a new enemy and an active one had been
+made.
+
+Stanley came in late from the west and heard the story of the fight.
+His comment was brief but significant. "It will soon be getting so
+they won't wait for the railroad men to draw their pay. They will come
+down here," said he ironically, "to draw it for them."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+A second and more serious disturbance followed close on the fight at
+the railroad station. A passenger alighting in the evening from a
+westbound train was set upon, robbed, and beaten into insensibility
+within ten feet of the train platform. A dozen other passengers
+hastened to his assistance. They joined in repulsing his assailants
+and were beating them off when other thugs, reinforcing their fellows,
+attacked the passengers and those railroad men that had hurried up to
+drive off the miscreants.
+
+In the melee, a brakeman was shot through the head and a second
+passenger wounded. But the railroad men rallied and, returning the
+pistol fire, drove off the outlaws.
+
+The train was hurried out of town and measures were taken at once to
+defend the railroad property for the night. Guards were set in the
+yards, and a patrol established about the roundhouse, the railroad
+hotel and the eating-house and freight-houses.
+
+Stanley, with his car attached to the night passenger train, was on
+his way to Casement's camp when the fight occurred, and had taken
+Bucks with him. The despatch detailing the disturbance reached him at
+a small station east of Point of Rocks, where he was awakened and the
+message was read to him advising the manager of the murder of the
+brakeman.
+
+A freight-train, eastbound, stood on the passing track. Stanley roused
+Bucks and, notifying the despatchers, ordered the engine cut off from
+the freight-train, swung up into the cab, and started for Medicine
+Bend. As they pulled out, light, Stanley asked for every notch of
+speed the lumbering engine could stand, and Oliver Sollers, the
+engineman, urged the big machine to its limit.
+
+The new track, laid hastily and only freshly ballasted, was as rough
+as corduroy, and the lurching of the big diamond stack made the cab
+topple at every rail joint. But Sollers was not the runner to lose
+nerve under difficulties and did not lessen the pressure on the
+pistons. If Stanley, determined and silent, his lips set and hanging
+on for dear life as the cab jumped and swung under him, felt any
+qualms at the dangerous pace he had asked for, he betrayed none. With
+Bucks, open-eyed with surprise, hanging on in front of him, Stanley
+gave no heed to the bouncing, and the freight-engine pounded through
+the mountains like a steam-roller with a touch of crushed-stone
+delirium. Hour after hour the wild pace was kept up through the Sleepy
+Cat Mountains and across the Sweet Grass Plains. There was no easing
+up until the frantic machine struck the gorge of the Medicine River
+and whistled for the long yards above the roundhouse.
+
+Things had so quieted down by the time Stanley, springing up the
+stairs two steps at a time, reached the despatchers' office, that they
+were sorry they had sent in such haste for him. Stanley himself had no
+regrets. He knew better than those about him the temper of the crowd
+he had to deal with and felt that he needed every minute to prepare
+for what he had to do. Bucks was sent to bring in Dancing, Bob Scott,
+and the more resolute among the railroad men. A brief consultation was
+held, and the attitude of the gamblers carefully discussed.
+
+Scott, who had been up town since the murder, had collected sufficient
+proof that the chief outlaw, Levake, had done the shooting, and
+Stanley now sent Scott to Brush, the sheriff, with a verbal message
+demanding Levake's arrest.
+
+Every man that heard the order given knew what it meant. Every one
+that listened realized it was the beginning of a fight in which there
+could be no retreat for Stanley; that it would be a fight to a finish,
+and that no man could say where it would end.
+
+Bob Scott hitched his trousers at the word from his sandy-haired
+chief. For Bob, orders meant orders and the terror of Levake's name in
+Medicine Bend had no effect on him.
+
+"You might as well ask a jack-rabbit to tackle a mountain lion as to
+try to get Brush to arrest Levake," declared Dave Hawk cynically.
+
+But Stanley's hand struck the table like a hammer: "We are going to
+have a show-down here. We will go through the forms; this is the
+beginning--and I am going to follow it to the end. Either Levake has
+got to quit the town or I have."
+
+Dave Hawk looked around with a new idea. He bent his eyes on Bob:
+"Better get Brush to deputize _you_ to make the arrest."
+
+"That is it!" exclaimed Stanley. "Get him to deputize you, Bob, and we
+will clean up this town as it hasn't been cleaned since the flood."
+
+Scott shook his head: "I don't believe Brush has the sand for that. We
+will see."
+
+Up Front Street, through the various groups of men still discussing
+the events of the evening, Scott, followed only by Bill Dancing, made
+his way, nodding and patiently or pleasantly grinning as the greetings
+or ridicule of the crowd were thrown at him. He went to the rooms of
+the sheriff only to find them locked, and made his way down town again
+looking through the resorts in a search for Brush.
+
+After much trouble, he found him at a gaming-table, inclined to appear
+sceptical as to the story that Levake had killed an unoffending
+brakeman. When Scott repeated Stanley's demand that Levake be
+arrested, the sheriff slammed down his cards and declared he would not
+be made a cat's-paw for any man; that the brakeman, according to
+accounts reaching him, had been killed in a fair fight and he would
+hear no more of it. Then, as if his game had been unreasonably
+interfered with and his peace of mind injured, he rose from the table
+to relieve his annoyance.
+
+Meantime Bill Dancing slipped into his vacated seat, picked up the
+discarded hand of cards and announced it was too good to throw away.
+"Will anybody," Bill asked dryly, "play the hand with me while Brush
+is arresting Levake?" The laugh of Brush's own companions at this
+proposal stung him as an imputation of his cowardice, and he made an
+additional display of rage to counteract the unconcealed contempt in
+which his cronies held him.
+
+He turned on Scott angrily. "Go arrest the man yourself, if you want
+him," he thundered.
+
+Scott snapped up the suggestion. He pointed a lean finger at the
+shifty peace officer. "Deputize me to do it, if you dare, Brush!" he
+softly exclaimed, fixing his brown eyes on the flushed face of the
+coward.
+
+Not a man in the room moved or spoke. Brush saw himself trapped.
+Scott's finger called for an answer and the sheriff found no escape.
+"I knew you hadn't the nerve to give me a deputy's badge," laughed
+Scott, to spur the man's lagging courage; "you are too afraid of
+Levake."
+
+The taunt had its effect. Brush raved about his courage, and Bill
+Dancing, slapping him ferociously on the back, convinced him that he
+really was a brave man. Taken volubly in tow by the two railroad
+emissaries, who were far from being as simple as they seemed, Brush
+returned to his lodgings at the jail to issue the coveted paper
+authorizing Scott to serve any warrants in his stead.
+
+Before the ink was dry on the certificate the word had gone down Front
+Street, and the town knew that Levake's arrest was in prospect. As
+Dancing and Scott left the jail and walked down to the station, they
+were surrounded by a curious throng of men watching for further
+developments in the approaching crisis of the struggle with outlawry
+in the railroad town.
+
+The night was far advanced, but a third element was now to make itself
+felt in the situation. The decent business men had already seen the
+approach of the storm and resolved on protecting their own interests,
+which they realized were on the side of law and order. Word had been
+passed from one to another of a proposed meeting. It was held toward
+daybreak in a secret place. One and all present were pledged to act
+together under a leadership then and there agreed upon, and after so
+organizing, with a resolute merchant named Atkinson at their head, and
+with a quiet that foreboded no good to the gamblers and outlaws, the
+men who had gone to the rendezvous as business men left it as
+vigilantes, banded together to defend their rights and property
+against the lawless element that had terrorized legitimate business.
+
+In the morning secret word was brought by Atkinson to Stanley of the
+resolve of the new allies to stand by him in his efforts to rid
+the town of its undesirables for good and all. It was welcome
+intelligence, and the railroad chief assured the plucky merchant
+of his hearty cooperation in the designs of the newly constituted
+law-and-order committee.
+
+"When the machinery of the law has miserably failed to protect our
+lives and property," he said concisely, "we have nothing left for it
+but to protect them ourselves." Arms had been telegraphed for and
+every effort made to secure troops in the emergency. But the Indian
+uprising had taken every available infantryman and trooper into the
+north and there was not now sufficient time to get them together for
+action. The railroad men, Stanley knew, must depend on themselves and
+upon such assistance as the decent element in the town could render.
+
+Meantime the outlaws were not idle. They spent the day whipping the
+gamblers and their hangers-on into line, upon the prediction that if
+they themselves were dispersed scant quarter would be shown their
+disorderly associates.
+
+Scott spent the day leisurely. Stanley had asked him not to move
+until his own arrangements for a defensive fight were completed. That
+the outlaws had secret sources of information even in the railroad
+circles, came out startlingly. A special train--an express car pulled
+by an engine--entered the railroad yard at dusk that evening, when a
+party of men running out from the cover of the freight warehouse
+attempted to rush it for arms and ammunition.
+
+They were met at the car doors by six of the best men that could be
+picked up along the line during the day run of the special across the
+plains. Stanley had wired instructions to head-quarters to send him
+six men that feared neither smoke nor powder, and six stalwarts taken
+on at Grand Island, North Platte, and Julesburg guarded the car and
+tumbled like cats out of a bag upon the surprised raiders.
+
+The encounter was spirited, but it took only a moment to convince the
+assaulting party that they had made a mistake. Clubbing their heavy
+revolvers, the guards, any one of whom in close quarters could account
+for two ordinary men, threw themselves from the car step directly
+into the crowd and struck right and left. There was no regard for
+persons, and in the half-dark the Medicine Bend ruffians, surprised
+and confused, were soon fighting one another.
+
+But one-sided as the contest was, it did not go fast enough to suit
+the guards, who, seizing the clubs thrown away by the rabble, charged
+them in a line and drove them up the street. Railroad men who came
+running from the station to help were too late. The flurry was over
+and they found nothing to do but to cheer their new aids.
+
+Nor were the gamblers asleep. Word had gone out both east and west of
+the approaching crisis between the disorderly and the law-and-order
+elements, and every passenger train into Medicine Bend brought
+mysterious men from towns and railroad camps who were openly or
+secretly allied in one or another vicious calling to the classes that
+were now making a stand for the rule or ruin of the railroad town.
+
+A mob of sympathizers gathered in Front Street to protect from
+further punishment the party that had tried to capture the express
+car. But the railroad men had no idea of pursuing the raiders beyond
+the yard limits, and indeed were restrained by strict orders from
+doing so. Stanley sent word immediately to the sheriff, demanding the
+arrest of the new peace-disturbers, but the sheriff no longer made a
+pretence of arresting law-breakers. In Front Street, the mob,
+emboldened by their apparent control of the situation and increasing
+in clamor and numbers, were now in a humor for anything that promised
+pillage or vengeance. There were still among them a few cool-headed
+criminals who counselled caution, but these were hooted down by men
+who had never tasted the rigor of vigilante rule.
+
+Out of a dozen wild schemes broached by as many wild heads of the
+excited crowd, in which were now lined up for any lawlessness all the
+idlers, floaters, the improvident, and the reckless elements of a
+frontier gambling town, one caught the popular fancy. Some one
+proposed a jail delivery to release Rebstock and Seagrue, persecuted
+by the railroad company. The idea spread like wildfire, and a score of
+men, reinforced by more at every door as they proceeded up Front
+Street, made their way to the jail.
+
+Fast as they came, time was given for word to the sheriff, who
+conveniently got out of the way, and, led by half a dozen men with
+crowbars and spike-mauls, the outlaws surrounded and overran the jail
+yard and without a show of resistance from any one began smashing in
+the entrance and battering down the cell doors.
+
+The first suggestion included only the delivery of the two men. But
+this was effected so easily that more was undertaken. The jail at
+Medicine Bend, being the only one within many miles in any direction,
+harbored the criminals of the whole mountain region, and these now
+cried to friendly ears for their own freedom. Cell after cell was
+battered open and the released criminals, snatching tools from the
+mob, led in the fight to free their fellows. In less than half an hour
+every cell had been emptied and a score of hardened malefactors had
+been added to the mob, which now proposed to celebrate the success of
+its undertaking by setting fire to the jail itself.
+
+The vigilantes down town, though taking the alarm, had moved too
+slowly. A jail delivery meant, they knew, that their stores would be
+looted, and, under the leadership of Atkinson, they attempted to avert
+the mischief impending.
+
+Gathering twenty-five determined men, they started with a shout for
+the hill, only to see the sky already lighting with the flames of the
+burning building. The mob, not understanding at first, welcomed the
+new-comers with a roar of approval.
+
+But they were soon undeceived. The vigilantes began to try to save the
+jail and their efforts brought about the first clash of a night
+destined long to be remembered in Medicine Bend. The brawlers in the
+crowd stayed to fight the vigilantes. The thieves and night-birds fell
+away in the darkness, and like black cats scurried down town to
+pillage the stores and warehouses of the fire-fighters on the hill.
+
+The few clerks and watchmen defending the stores, these knaves made
+short work of. Dancing and Scott, with Stanley, Bucks, and a party of
+railroad men, uneasy at the reports from the jail and now able to see
+the sky reddening with the flames, moved in and out of the gloom of
+side streets to keep track of the alarming situation and were the
+earliest to discover the looting movement.
+
+A convenient general store at Front and Hill Streets was the first to
+be pillaged. Dancing wanted to lead a party against the looters, but
+Stanley pointed out the folly of half a dozen men trying to police the
+whole street.
+
+"We can do nothing here, Bill. Those vigilantes have no business on
+the hill. Get word to them, if you can, that the stores are being
+robbed. They can't save the jail; they ought to come back and save
+their own property. I can't bring men up from the roundhouse. We've
+got to protect our own property first. If we could get word to
+them--but a man never could get through that mob to the jail."
+
+"I reckon I can, colonel," said Bill Dancing, throwing off his coat.
+
+"They will kill you, Bill," predicted Stanley.
+
+"No," growled the lineman, rolling up his shirt sleeves. "Not me. I
+wouldn't stand for it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Slipping away behind the long warehouses in Front Street and moving
+swiftly in and out of friendly shadows on his long journey up the
+hill, Dancing started for the jail. He was hardly more than well under
+way when he was aware of one following him and, turning to fell him
+with his fist, he started as he found it was Bucks.
+
+The latter confronted him coolly: "Go ahead, Bill; I am going with
+you."
+
+"Who said you could go?" exclaimed the lineman. "You can't. Go back!"
+
+Bucks stood his ground.
+
+"Do you want to get killed?" thundered Dancing hotly.
+
+"Two are better than one on a job like this," returned Bucks, without
+giving way. "Go on, will you?"
+
+With a volley of grumbling objections, Dancing at length directed
+Bucks to stick close to him, whatever happened, and to fight the best
+he could in case they were cornered.
+
+Ahead of them the glare of the conflagration lighted the sky and the
+air was filled with the shouts of the mob surrounding the fighting
+vigilantes. Only half a block away, men were hurrying up and down
+Front Street, while the two clambered along the obscure and
+half-opened street leading to the jail and parallel to the main
+thoroughfare.
+
+Dancing, to whom every foot of the rocky way was familiar and who
+could get over obstructions in the dark as well as if it were day, led
+the way with a celerity that kept his companion breathing fast. Both
+had long legs, but Dancing in some mysterious way planted his feet
+with marvellous certainty of effect, while Bucks slipped and
+floundered over rocks and brush piles and across gullies until they
+took a short cut through a residence yard and found themselves on the
+heels of the mob surrounding the burning jail and in the glare of the
+fire in upper Front Street.
+
+"Stick close, sonny," muttered the lineman, "we must push through
+these fellows before they reco'nize us."
+
+He stooped as he spoke and picked up a piece of hickory--the broken
+handle of a spike-maul. "Railroad property anyway," he muttered. "It
+might come handy. But gum shoes for us now till we are forced. Perhaps
+we can sneak all the way through."
+
+Without further ado Dancing, with Bucks on his heels, elbowed his way
+into the crowd. The outer fringe of this he knew was not dangerous,
+being made up chiefly of onlookers. But in another minute the two were
+in the midst of a yelling, swaying mix-up between the aggressive mob
+and a thin fringe of vigilantes, who, hard-pressed, had abandoned the
+jail to its fate and were trying to fight their way down town.
+
+Dancing, like a war-horse made suddenly mad by smoke of battle,
+throwing caution and strategy to the winds, suddenly released a yell
+and began to lay about him. His appearance in the fray was like that
+of a bombshell timed to explode in its midst. The slugging gamblers
+turned in astonishment on the new fighting man, but they were not
+long left in doubt as to which cause he espoused. In the next instant
+they were actively dodging his flashing club, and the vigilantes
+encouraged as if by an angel fought with fresh vigor.
+
+Bucks was stunned by the suddenness of Bill's change of tactics. It
+was evident that he had completely forgotten his mission and now meant
+to enjoy himself in the unequal fray that he had burst in upon. The
+vigilantes cried a welcome to their new ally. But one cry rose above
+every other and that was from Dancing's own throat as he laid about
+with his club.
+
+Consternation seized the rioters and they were thrown for a moment
+into confusion. They then recognized Dancing and a shout went up.
+
+"Railroad men!" cried a dozen of the mob at once.
+
+And above these cries came one wheezing but stentorian voice: "You've
+got 'em now; finish 'em!"
+
+Bucks knew that voice. It was Rebstock.
+
+The crowd took up the cry, but the lineman, swinging right and left
+with terrific strength and swiftness, opened a way ahead of him while
+Bucks kept close by till Dancing had cut through to the vigilantes.
+Then, turning with them as they raised their own cry of triumph,
+Dancing helped to drive the discomfited rioters back.
+
+It was only for a moment that the vigilantes held their advantage.
+Outnumbering the little band, the rioters closed in on their flanks
+and showered stones upon them. Bill Dancing was the centre of the
+fight. A piece of rock laid open his scalp, but, though the mob was
+sure of getting him, he fought like a whirlwind. They redoubled their
+efforts to bring him down. One active rioter with the seam of some
+other fight slashed across his forehead struck down a vigilante and
+ran in on Dancing. It was Seagrue. The lineman, warned by Bucks,
+turned too late to escape a blow on the head that would have dazed a
+bullock. But Dancing realized the instant he received the blow that
+Seagrue had delivered it.
+
+He whirled like a wounded bear and sprang at Seagrue, taking upon his
+shoulder a second blow hardly less terrific than the first. Before
+Seagrue could strike again, Dancing was upon him. Tearing at each
+other's throats the two men struggled, each trying to free his right
+arm. Seagrue was borne steadily backward. Then the lineman's big arm
+shot upward and down like a trip-hammer and Seagrue sunk limp to the
+ground.
+
+The vigilantes themselves, profiting by the momentary diversion, got
+away. Bucks had seen the peril of being separated from their friends,
+but he was powerless to avert it. As Dancing struck Seagrue down, his
+enemies closed in behind the moving vigilantes. Bucks fought his way
+to the lineman's side and in another instant the two were beset.
+Dancing, hard-pressed, made a dash to break through the circle to
+liberty. Half a dozen men sprang at him, and trampling Bucks
+completely under foot aimed their blows at his defender.
+
+Dancing saw Bucks fall and, clubbing his way to his side, caught Bucks
+from the ground by the coat collar, and dragging him with his left
+hand, swung with his right hand his deadly club. Nothing less would
+have saved them. The fight, moving every instant after Dancing,
+reached the broad wooden steps leading from the jail yard to the
+street. Down these the lineman, stubborn and bleeding, drove a
+desperate way. And Bucks, able again to handle himself, was putting up
+a good fight when, to his horror, Dancing, fighting down the flight of
+steps, stumbled and fell.
+
+Half a dozen men, with a yell, jumped for him. Bucks thought the
+finish had come. He sprang into the fight and, armed only with a wagon
+spoke, cracked right and left wherever he could reach a head. Dancing
+he had given over for dead, when to his astonishment the lineman rose
+out of the heap about him, shaking off his enemies like rats.
+
+Flames shooting up from the burning jail lighted the scene. Dancing,
+bare-headed, and with only a part of his shirt hanging in ribbons from
+his left arm, his hair matted in blood across his forehead and his
+eyes blazing, was a formidable sight. He had lost his club but he was
+at no loss for a weapon. It was said of Bill Dancing in later days
+that he could lift a thirty-foot steel rail. Bucks saw him now catch
+up a man scrambling in front of him and swing him by the legs like a
+battering ram. With this victim, he mowed down men like corks, and,
+flinging the man at last bodily into the faces of his friends, he
+started like a deer up Cliff Street with Bucks at his heels.
+
+Sure that they now had him, the rioters followed in a swarm. Cliff
+Street, only a block long and only half-opened, terminated then at the
+cliffs above the gorge of the Medicine River. But darkness under the
+brow of the hill helped the fleeing railroad men. Dancing dodged in
+and out of the undergrowth that fringed the street line and eluding
+his pursuers reached the brow of the cliff unseen. The rioters,
+knowing that no escape lay in that direction, beat the bushes that
+fringed the half-opened street, confident that the fugitives were in
+hiding among them.
+
+For an ordinary man, indeed, there was no escape toward the river. A
+wall of rock fell a hundred feet to the water's edge. The crowd,
+growing every moment as the word passed that Dancing was whipped,
+left the hunted man and his companion little time for decision.
+Dancing, in truth, needed but little. His purpose was fixed the
+instant he saw himself cut off from every other chance. He halted only
+on the brink of the precipice itself. Catching Bucks's arm, he told
+him hurriedly what they must do and cautioned him. "It's the last
+chance, sonny," he murmured, as his iron fingers gripped the boy's
+arm. "We can make it--if you do exactly as I tell you."
+
+The gathering cries closed in behind them while they were taking off
+their shoes. Creeping on his hands and knees along the brow of the
+cliff, Dancing felt out his location with his fingers. And with that
+sixth sense of instinct which rises to a faculty when dangers thicken
+about a resolute man, the lineman found what he sought.
+
+He caught at the root of a rock-bound cedar, swung himself over the
+cliff, and called to Bucks to follow. Bucks acted wholly on faith. The
+blackness below was impenetrable, and perhaps better so, since he
+could not see what he was undertaking. Only the roar of the river
+came up from the depths. It sounded a little ominous as Bucks,
+grasping the cedar root, swung over and after an agonizing instant
+felt a support for his feet. He stood on a ledge of rock so narrow
+that it gave only a footing even in daylight, but Bucks was called on
+to descend it in the middle of the night.
+
+For any man to have attempted the feat seemed to him, the next
+morning, sheer insanity. Dancing, however, knew the treacherous face
+of the river wall. To his gigantic size and strength he united the
+sureness of a cat in climbing up or down a mountain arete. Often he
+had crept with a telegraph wire, unaided, where his best men hung back
+even in harness. There was, in fact, no time now for halting. The
+rioters, eager on the trail, were calling for torches, and, if
+discovered before they reached the water, the lives of the two men
+would be snuffed out by dropping rocks on their heads.
+
+Flattening himself as he had been bidden to do and with his cheek laid
+to the face of the sheer rock, clasping from time to time with his
+outstretched left hand such slight uneven surfaces as he could feel,
+Bucks moved to the right after Dancing, who gripped his extended right
+hand and led him foot by foot down the perilous way. Not a word was
+spoken, hardly a breath drawn, as the lineman felt for his slippery
+foothold with the deftness of a gorilla, and, pressing Bucks's hand as
+the signal to take a follow step, he made a slow but steady descent.
+
+The roar of the river already sounded in Bucks's ears like a cataract,
+but the shock of extreme danger had numbed his apprehension. Chips of
+the sharp granite cut his feet like knives, and he knew that the
+sticky feeling upon his bare soles was blood oozing through the broken
+skin. He had already given up expectation of ever leaving the gorge
+alive and merely responded to his companion's will. The one thought
+that came to his mind was curiosity as to what Dancing ever expected
+to do if they reached the bottom without accident.
+
+Suddenly above the roar of the river he heard the muffled crack of
+fire-arms coming as if out of another world. He wondered whether they
+themselves were already being fired at, but experienced nothing more
+than curiosity in the thought. Only the pressure of the big hand that
+gripped his own impressed itself powerfully upon his consciousness,
+and at each squeeze he put his foot forward mechanically, intent on a
+dull resolve to obey orders.
+
+He presently felt a new signal from the long fingers that wound around
+his own. He tried to answer by stepping, but Dancing whose face was
+turned away, restrained him. Then it flashed on Bucks that the lineman
+was signalling Morse to him, and that the dot-and-dash squeezes meant:
+"Half-way down. Half-way down."
+
+Bucks answered with one word: "Hurrah!" But he squeezed it along the
+nerves and muscles like lightning.
+
+He could hear the labored breathing of his companion as he strained at
+intervals every particle of his strength to reach a new footing of
+safety. Every vine and scrubby bush down the cliff wall was tested for
+its strength and root, and Dancing held Bucks's hand so that he could
+instantly release it if he himself should plunge to death.
+
+Bucks had already been told that if this happened he must hang as long
+as he could without moving and if he could hold on till daylight he
+would be rescued by railroad men. All this was going through his head
+when, responding to a signal to step down, and, unable to catch some
+word that Dancing whispered, he stretched his leg so far that he lost
+his balance. He struggled to recover. Dancing called again sharply to
+him, but he was too wrought up to understand. Dizziness seized him,
+and resigning himself, with an exclamation, to death, he felt himself
+dropping into space.
+
+In the next instant he was caught in Dancing's arms:
+
+"Gosh darn it, why didn't you jump, as I told you?" exclaimed the
+lineman, setting him up on his feet. "You pretty near clean upset us
+both."
+
+"Where are we, Bill?" muttered Bucks, swallowing his shock.
+
+"Right here at the water, and them fellows up there beating the bush
+for us. There's shooting down town, too. Some new deviltry. How good a
+swimmer are you, Bucks? By gum, I forgot to ask you before you
+started."
+
+"I can swim better than I can climb, Bill."
+
+"We've only a quarter of a mile and downstream at that. And the
+current here would float a keg of nails."
+
+"How about rocks, Bill?" asked Bucks, peering dubiously toward the
+roar of the rushing river.
+
+"All up-stream from here," returned Dancing, edging down the shelving
+table toward the water. "Lock arms with me so I don't lose you, sonny.
+What in Sam Hill is that?"
+
+Far down the river the two saw a tongue of flame leaping into the sky.
+They watched it for a moment. Dancing was the first to locate the
+conflagration, which grew now, even as they looked, by leaps and
+bounds. The two stood ready to plunge into the river when a fire of
+musketry echoed up the gorge. The lineman clutched Bucks's arm.
+
+"There's fighting going on down there now. What's that smokestack? By
+Jing, the roundhouse is on fire!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+They plunged together into the river. The water, icy cold, was a
+shock, but Dancing had made no mistake. They were below the rocks and
+needed only to steady themselves as the resistless current swept them
+down toward the railroad yards.
+
+Bucks demonstrated that he could swim and the two seemed hardly in the
+water before they could fully see the burning roundhouse. A moment
+later, chilled to the bone but with his mind cleared by the sharp
+plunge, Bucks felt his companion's arm drawing him toward the farther
+shore where, in the slack water of an elbow of the stream, Dancing led
+the way across a shoal of gravel and Bucks waded after him up the
+riverbank.
+
+They hastened together across the dark railroad yard. The sound of
+firing came again from the square in front of the railroad station
+and thither they directed their fleeing feet. To the right they heard
+the shouts of the men who were fighting the fire at the roundhouse and
+the hot crackling of the flames. They reached the station together and
+entered the waiting-room by a rear door.
+
+Men were running everywhere in and out of the building and the
+waiting-room was barricaded for war. Bill Dancing caught a passing
+trainman by the arm.
+
+"What's going on here?"
+
+The man looked at the lineman and his companion in surprise: "The
+gamblers are driving the vigilantes, Bill. They've got all Front
+Street. What's the matter with you?"
+
+Dancing caught sight of Bob Scott coming down the rear stairway with
+an armful of rifles, and, without answering the question, called to
+him.
+
+"Hello!" exclaimed Scott halting. He started as he saw Bucks. "Were
+_you_ with him? And I've been scouring the town for you! Stanley will
+have a word to say to you, youngster. They thought the gamblers had
+you, Bill," he added, turning to the lineman.
+
+Dancing, a sight from the pounding he had taken, his clothing in
+tatters, and with the blood-stains now streaked by the water dripping
+from his hair, drew himself up. "I hope you didn't think so, Bob? Did
+they reckon a handful of blacklegs would get me?"
+
+Scott grinned inscrutably. "They've got the best part of your shirt,
+Bill. How did you get off?"
+
+"Swam for it," muttered Dancing, shaking himself. "Where's Stanley?"
+
+"Out behind the flat cars. He is arming the vigilantes. We've fenced
+off the yards with loaded freight-cars. They've fired the roundhouse
+on us, but the rifles and ammunition that came to-night are upstairs
+here. Take some of these guns, Bill, and hand them around in front.
+Bucks can follow you with a box of ammunition."
+
+Scott spoke hurriedly and ran out of the door facing Front Street
+Square. A string of flat cars had been run along the house-track in
+front of the station, and behind these the hard-pressed vigilantes,
+reinforced now by the railroad men, were taking up a new line of
+defence. Driven through the town in a running battle, they were in
+straits when they reached Stanley's barricade.
+
+Following a resolve already well defined, the railroad chief conferred
+with the vigilante leaders for a brief moment. He called them to his
+office and denounced the folly of half-way measures.
+
+"You see," said Stanley, pointing to two dead men whom the discomfited
+business men had brought off with them, "what temporizing has done.
+There is only one way to treat with these people." He was interrupted
+by firing from across the square. "In an hour they will have every
+store in Front Street looted."
+
+The deliberation for a few moments was a stormy one, but Stanley held
+his ground. "Desperate diseases, gentlemen," he said, addressing
+Atkinson and his companions, "require desperate remedies, and you must
+sometime come to what I propose."
+
+"What you propose," returned Atkinson gloomily, "will ruin us."
+
+Stanley answered with composure: "You are ruined now. What you should
+consider is whether, if you don't cut this cancer of gambling,
+outlawry, and murder out while you have a chance, it won't remain to
+plague you as long as you do business in Medicine Bend, and remain to
+ruin you periodically. This is always going to be a town and a big
+one. As long as this railroad is operated, this ground where we stand
+is and must be the chief operating point for the whole mountain
+division. You and I may be wiped out of existence and the railroad
+will go on as before. But it is for you to accept or reject what I
+propose as the riddance of this curse to your community.
+
+"The railroad has been drawn into this fight by assault upon its men.
+It can meet violence with violence and protect itself, or it can
+temporarily abandon a town where protection is not afforded its lives
+and property. In an emergency, trains could be run through Medicine
+Bend without stopping. The right of way could be manned with
+soldiers. But the railroad can't supply men enough to preserve in your
+town the law and order which you yourselves ought to preserve. And if
+we were compelled to build division facilities, temporarily,
+elsewhere, while they would ultimately come back here, it might be
+years before they did so. What else but your ruin would this mean?"
+
+He had hardly ceased speaking when the conference was broken in upon.
+Bob Scott ushered in two men sent under a flag of truce from the
+rioters. The offer they brought was that Rebstock and Seagrue should
+be surrendered, provided Stanley would give his personal pledge that
+the two should not be shot but sent out of town until peace was
+restored, and that they should be accorded a fair trial when brought
+back.
+
+Stanley listened carefully to all that was said:
+
+"Who sent you?" he demanded.
+
+"The committee up street," returned the envoys evasively.
+
+"You mean Levake sent you," retorted Stanley. He sat at his desk and
+eyed the two ruffians, as they faced him somewhat nervously. They at
+length admitted that they had come from Levake, and gave Stanley his
+chance for an answer.
+
+"Tell Levake for me there will be no peace for him or his until he
+comes down here with his hands behind his back. When I want Rebstock
+and Seagrue I will let him know. I want him first," said Stanley,
+dismissing the messengers without more ado.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+He had resolved that Levake was to be punished, but it was not a
+unanimous voice that backed the railroad leader in his determination.
+Weak-kneed men in the conference wanted to compromise and end the
+fight where it stood. Even Atkinson was disposed to make terms, as the
+party returned to the barricade.
+
+"No," repeated Stanley. "Levake is the head and front of this whole
+disorder. As long as he can shoot down unarmed men in the streets of
+Medicine Bend there will be no law and order here. While men see him
+walking these streets unpunished they will take their cue from him and
+rob and shoot whom they please--Levake and his ilk must go. A
+railroad, on the start, brings a lawless element with it--this is
+true. But it also brings law and order and that element has come to
+Medicine Bend to stay. If the machinery of the law is too weak to
+support it, so much worse for the machinery. I don't want to see
+blood shed or property destroyed, but the responsibility for this
+rests with the outlaws that are terrorizing this town. And I will
+spend every ounce of ammunition I have and fight them to the last man,
+rather than compromise with a bunch of cutthroats.
+
+"If any man here feels differently about this, he may step out of the
+barricade now," continued Stanley, addressing those of the townsmen
+that listened. "There will be no hard feeling. But this is the time to
+do it. Worse is ahead of us before we can clean the town up as it will
+have to be cleaned sometime. The longer you leave the job undone, the
+harder it will be when you tackle it."
+
+A movement across the square interrupted his words, and a messenger
+waving a white handkerchief came over to the barricade to ask for a
+surgeon for a wounded man. There were some who opposed sending any
+relief to men that had forfeited all claim to humane consideration.
+Doctor Arnold, however, was summoned, and Stanley finally determined
+that the matter should be left to the surgeon himself--he could go if
+he wished. Arnold did not hesitate in his decision. "It is my duty to
+go," he decided briefly.
+
+"I don't quite see that," muttered Atkinson.
+
+The white-haired surgeon turned to the leader of the vigilantes. "It
+is not a matter of personal inclination, Atkinson. When I took my
+degree for the practice of medicine, I took an oath to respond to
+every call of suffering and I have no right to refuse this one."
+
+Leaving his own injured with his assistant, the surgeon told the
+messenger to proceed and the two walked across the square and up Front
+Street to the Three Horses. Arriving there, Arnold was asked to dress
+the wound of a man that had been shot through the breast in the fight
+along Fort Street. While he was working over his patient, who lay on a
+table surrounded by a motley crowd of onlookers, Levake walked in. He
+nodded to the surgeon and drawing a pocket knife, while Arnold was
+cleansing the wound, sat down beside him to whittle a stick.
+
+"I hear your man, Stanley, wants me," began Levake after an interval.
+
+"I guess you hear right," returned Arnold dryly.
+
+"Tell him for me to come get me, will you?" suggested Levake.
+
+"If he ever comes after you, Levake, he will get you," returned
+Arnold, looking the outlaw straight in the eye. "There isn't any doubt
+about that," he added, resuming his task.
+
+Levake whittled but made no reply. He watched the surgeon's work
+closely, and when Arnold had finished and given directions for the
+wounded man's care he walked out of the place with him.
+
+"Tell Stanley what I said, will you?" repeated Levake, as the railroad
+surgeon left the door and started down street.
+
+Arnold made no answer and Levake, taunting him to send all the men the
+railroad had after him, followed Arnold toward the square.
+
+The surgeon understood that it was Levake's purpose to engage him in a
+dispute and kill him if he could. Arnold, moreover, was hot-tempered
+and made no concealment of his feelings toward any man. For this
+reason, despite his realization of danger, he was an easy prey.
+
+To the final taunt of the outlaw the surgeon made rather a sharp
+answer and quickened his pace, to walk away from his unpleasant
+companion. But Levake would not be shaken off, and as the two were
+passing a deserted restaurant he ordered the surgeon to halt. Arnold
+turned without shrinking. Levake had already drawn his pistol and his
+victim concluded he was to be killed then and there, but he resolved
+to tell the outlaw what he thought of him.
+
+"I understand your game perfectly, Levake," he said after he had raked
+him terrifically. "Now, if you are going to shoot, do it. You haven't
+long to live yourself--make sure of that."
+
+"No man can threaten me and live," retorted Levake harshly.
+
+"I came up here, an unarmed man, on an errand of mercy."
+
+"I didn't send for you."
+
+"You would kill me just as quick if you had, Levake. What are you
+hesitating about? If you are going to shoot, shoot."
+
+Throwing back his right arm, and fingering the trigger of his revolver
+as a panther lashes his tail before springing, Levake stepped back and
+to one side. As he did so, with the fearless surgeon still facing him,
+a man stepped from behind the screen door of the deserted restaurant.
+It was Bob Scott.
+
+The old and deadly feud between the Indian and the outlaw brought them
+now, for the first time in months, face to face. In spite of his iron
+nerve Levake started. Scott, slightly stooped and wearing the familiar
+slouch hat and shabby coat in which he was always seen, regarded his
+enemy with a smile.
+
+So sudden was his appearance that Levake could not for an instant
+control himself. If there was a man in the whole mountain country that
+Levake could be said to be afraid of, it was the mild-mannered,
+mild-spoken Indian scout. Where Scott had come from, how he had got
+through the pickets posted by Levake himself--these questions, for
+which he could find no answer, disquieted the murderer.
+
+Arnold, reprieved from death as by a miracle, stood like a statue.
+Levake, with his hand on his pistol, had halted, petrified, at the
+sight of Scott.
+
+The latter, eying the murderer with an expression that might have been
+mistaken for friendly, had not Levake known there could be no
+friendship among decent men for him, broke the silence: "Levake, I
+have a warrant for you."
+
+The words seemed to shake the spell from the outlaw's nerves. He
+answered with his usual coolness: "You've waited a good while to serve
+it."
+
+"I've been a little busy for a few days, Levake," returned Scott, with
+the same even tone. "I kind of lost track of you." But his words again
+disconcerted Levake. The few men who now watched the scene and knew
+what was coming stood breathless.
+
+Levake, moistening his dry lips, spoke carefully: "I don't want any
+trouble with you here," he said. "When this town fight is over, bring
+your warrant around and I'll talk to you."
+
+"No," returned Scott, undisturbed, "I might lose track of you again.
+You can come right along with me, Levake."
+
+With incredible quickness the outlaw, half-turning to cover Scott,
+fired. The cat-like agility of the Indian answered the move in the
+instant it was made. Scott was, in fact, the first scout from whom
+mountain men learned to fire a revolver without aiming it and it was
+not without reason that Levake sought no encounter with him. For Scott
+to draw and fire was but one movement, and hating Levake as a monster,
+the Indian had long been ready to meet him as he met him now, when he
+should be forced to face him fairly.
+
+A fusillade of shots rang down the street. The air between the two
+men, feinting like boxers in their deadly duel, filled with whitish
+smoke. Arnold, stunned by the suddenness of the encounter, jumped out
+of range. In the next moment he saw Levake sink to the sidewalk.
+Scott, springing upon him like a cat, knelt with one hand already on
+his throat; with the other he wrung a second revolver from Levake's
+hand. The surgeon ran to the two men.
+
+Levake, panting, lay desperately wounded, as Scott slowly released his
+grip upon him. The Indian rose as the surgeon approached, but Levake,
+his eyes wide open, lay still.
+
+"You are wounded, Bob," cried Arnold, tearing the stained sleeve of
+Scott's coat from his shoulder. The scout shook his head.
+
+"We're in danger here," he replied, glancing hurriedly up the street.
+"We must get this fellow away."
+
+The two picked the wounded man from the ground and started quickly
+down street with him. The shooting, now so frequent all over the town,
+had attracted little attention outside the few that had witnessed the
+swift duel, and the two railroad men made good progress with their
+burden before the alarm was spread. But the surgeon saw that the
+strain was telling on Scott, whose shoulder was bleeding freely. He
+had even ordered his companion to drop his burden and run, when he
+heard a shout and saw Bill Dancing running across from the barricade
+to their aid.
+
+[Illustration: FOR SCOTT TO DRAW AND FIRE WAS BUT ONE MOVEMENT.]
+
+Half a dozen of the rioters, shouting threats and imprecations, were
+hastening down Front Street after Levake and his captors to rescue
+their prisoner. Scott, reloading his revolver as Dancing relieved him
+of his end of the burden, stood free to cover the retreat. He fired a
+warning shot at the nearest of their pursuers. A scattering pistol
+fire at long range followed. But the railroad men crossed the square
+in safety, and the big lineman, with Levake in his arms, carried him
+single-handed into the barricade.
+
+The surgeon and Bob Scott followed close. Bucks was first to meet the
+wounded scout, and the railroad men, jubilant at Levake's capture, ran
+to Scott and bore him down with rough welcome. Levake was laid upon a
+bench in the station and Scott followed to his side. Arnold, joining
+the scout, made ready to dress the wound in his shoulder.
+
+"See to Levake first, doctor," said Scott, "he needs it the most."
+
+As he spoke, Dancing hurried into the room. "Bob, the car shops are on
+fire."
+
+Scott ran to the east window. It was true. The rioters, supplied with
+oil and torches, had made their way in the darkness through
+Callahan's picket line near the river and set fire to the shops.
+
+Stanley was eating a hasty supper in the despatchers' office.
+
+Within a few minutes the blaze could be seen from all the east windows
+of the station. Almost at the same moment, through the north windows
+fire was seen breaking out in one of the big stores in Front Street.
+As Stanley rose from his midnight meal, Atkinson ran in with word that
+a band of rioters, well armed, had attacked a train of boarding-cars
+defended by the roundhouse men.
+
+The sky, bright again with the flame of conflagration, made a huge
+dome of red, lighting the railroad yards across which men were now
+hurrying to make fresh dispositions for the emergency.
+
+The vigilante leaders saw impending, in the Front Street fire, the
+ruin of their business property. There were no longer men enough
+left to fight the flames and guard the fire-fighters. A point had
+been reached in which life and property were no longer taken into
+account, and efforts to restore law and order were facing complete
+failure. It was then that the most radical of all measures, the
+last resort of organized society in its resolve to defend itself,
+was discussed. The vigilantes, as well as the railroad men, now
+realized that but one measure remained for saving Medicine Bend and
+that was the extermination of the outlaws themselves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+The men in the barricade were lined up for orders. Ammunition was
+passed and volunteers were called to form a charging party. The
+vigilantes formed in the glare of the burning shops.
+
+From the head-quarters of the rioters in Front Street came scattering
+shots and cries as a huge volume of sparks shot up into the black sky.
+Ten men under Hawk and ten under Dancing made the supporting party for
+the vigilantes, who asked only that a line of retreat be kept
+open. This Stanley had undertaken to provide. Atkinson, making a
+wide detour back of the station, led his men down the railroad
+tracks and, reaching a point where concealment was no longer
+possible, double-quicked up Fort Street and charged with his party
+across the little park.
+
+They had already been seen. A line of men, posted behind the places
+that line Front Street at that point, opened fire. It was the worst
+possible answer to make to men in the temper of the scattered line
+that swept up the street in the glare of the burning buildings.
+Wounded men dropped out of the charge, but those that went on carried
+with them a more implacable determination. Re-forming their line under
+cover of the cedars at the corner of Fort Street, they directed an
+effective fire into the dance halls adjoining, and the rioters hiding
+within scurried from them like rats.
+
+But the vigilantes were intent first of all on capturing and burning
+the hall known as the Three Horses, and the rioters rallied to its
+defence. As the place was assailed, the doors were barred and a sharp
+fire was poured through the windows. The assailants were driven back.
+Bill Dancing, heated and stubborn, refused to retreat and, picking up
+a sledge dropped by a fleeing vigilante, attacked the barred doors
+single-handed.
+
+The street, swept by the bullets of the fray, rang with the splitting
+blows of the heavy hammer, as the lineman, his long hair flying from
+his forehead, swung at the thick panels. Within, the gamblers tried to
+shoot him from the windows, but he stood close and his friends kept
+up a constant supporting fire that drove the defenders back.
+
+From above they hurled chairs and tables down on Dancing, but his head
+seemed furniture-proof, and scorning to waste time in dodging he
+hammered away, undaunted, until he splintered the panels and the stout
+lock-stiles gave. The vigilantes, running up, tore through the door
+chains with crowbars and rushed the building.
+
+The fight in the big room lasted only a moment. The rioters crowded
+toward the rear and escaped as best they could. Vigilantes with
+torches made short work of the rest of it. Dancing stove in a cask of
+alcohol, and as the attacking party ran out of the front door a torch
+was flung back into the spreading pool.
+
+A great burst of fire lighted the street. The next moment the long
+building was in flames.
+
+Emboldened by this success and driving the outlaws from their further
+retreats, the vigilantes fired one after another of the gaudy places
+that lined the upper street. Met by close shooting at every turn, the
+rioters were driven up the hill and fighting desperately were pursued
+to cover by men now as savage as themselves. The scattered clashes
+were brief and deadly. The whole upper town was on fire. Men fleeing
+for their lives skulked in the shadows of the side streets and the
+constant scattering report of fire-arms added to the terrors of the
+night.
+
+Hour after hour the conflagration raged and day broke at last on the
+smoking ruins of the town of Medicine Bend. The work of the
+vigilantes had been mercilessly thorough. Along the railroad track
+stiffened bodies hanging from the cross-bars of telegraph poles in
+the gloom of the breaking day told a ghastly story of justice
+summarily administered to the worst of the offenders. In the gloom
+of the smoking streets stragglers roamed unmolested among the
+ruins; for of the outlaws, killed or hunted out of the town, none
+were now left to oppose the free passage of any one from end to end of
+Medicine Bend.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The victory was dear, but none murmured at its cost. Medicine Bend for
+once had been purged of its parasites.
+
+At the railroad head-quarters Stanley, before daylight, was directing
+the resumption of operations so interrupted by the three days of
+anarchism on the mountain division. New men were added every hour to
+the pay-roll, and the smaller tradesmen of the town, ruined by the
+riots, were given positions to keep them until the town could be
+rebuilt.
+
+The pressure on the operating department increased twofold with the
+resumption of traffic. Winter was now upon the mountains, but
+construction could not be stopped for winter. The enormous prizes for
+extending the line through the Rockies to meet the rival railroad
+heading east from California, spurred the builders to every effort to
+lengthen their mileage, and something unheard of was attempted,
+namely, mountain railroad-building in midwinter.
+
+Levake, the leader among the mountain outlaws, was nursed back to life
+by the surgeon he had so nearly murdered. But his respite was a brief
+one. When new officers of the law were elected in Medicine Bend, the
+murderer was tried for one of his many crimes and paid on the scaffold
+the penalty of his cold-blooded cruelty. Rebstock, the fox, and his
+companion Seagrue escaped the exterminating raid of the vigilantes but
+fought shy of Medicine Bend for long afterward.
+
+A few days after the riots Stanley sent for Bucks, who was holding a
+key among the operators downstairs, to come to his office.
+
+"How long have you been a telegraph operator, Bucks?" he asked.
+
+Bucks laughed in some embarrassment. "Since I was about twelve years
+old, sir."
+
+"Twelve years old!" echoed Stanley in amazement. "Where did you learn
+to telegraph at twelve?"
+
+Bucks hesitated again. "I never learned, sir!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I used to sit in the telegraph office of the road when my uncle
+was superintendent, and I got used to hearing the sound of the
+instruments. I just woke up one morning and found I could telegraph.
+I couldn't the night before. That's the only way I ever learned,
+sir."
+
+Stanley regarded the boy with interest. "How old are you now?"
+
+"Seventeen."
+
+"Very well. When you went to bed last night you were not a train
+despatcher: this morning you are." Bucks started. "If any one ever
+asks you," continued Stanley dryly, "how you learned to be a train
+despatcher, tell them just that."
+
+"I don't want you to think you are old enough to be a despatcher,"
+continued Stanley, as Bucks stammered his thanks, "for you are not.
+And I don't want you to think I like to make you one. I don't. Neither
+for your sake nor mine. I don't like to impose the responsibilities of
+a man on a boy. But I can't help it. We haven't the men, and we can't
+get them--and we must all, men and boys, pull together and just do
+the best we can--do you understand?"
+
+"I understand everything, Colonel Stanley."
+
+"I need not say much about what is before you. You have been sending
+despatchers' orders for years yourself. You know how many lives are
+held every minute in the despatchers' hand. Don't overrate your
+responsibility and grow nervous over it; and don't ever underestimate
+it. As long as you keep yourself fit for your work, and do the best
+you can, you may sleep with a clear conscience. Report to Mr. Baxter.
+Remember you are working with green trainmen and don't expect too much
+of them."
+
+When Bucks signed a transfer and took his train-sheet that night at
+twelve o'clock, his chief anxiety was to keep the material trains
+going to Casement and everything eastbound was laid out in an effort
+to send the ties and rails west. Bucks set himself to keep pace with
+the good work done by the despatcher in the evening trick and for two
+hours kept his sheet pretty clean.
+
+A heavy train of rails which he had been helping all the way west
+after midnight was then at Castle Springs, and Bucks gave its crew an
+order to meet the eastbound passenger train at Point of Rocks. It was
+three o'clock when a message came from the operator at Point of Rocks,
+saying the rail train had passed westbound. Bucks seized a key and
+silencing the wires asked for the passenger train. Nothing had been
+seen of it. He called up Bitter Creek, the first telegraph point west
+of Point of Rocks with an order to hold the passenger train. But the
+train had already gone.
+
+The new dispatcher sprang up from the table frantic. Then, racing
+again to the key, he made the operator at Castle Springs repeat the
+order and assure him it had been delivered. Of this there could be no
+question. The freight crew had ignored or forgotten it, and were now
+past Point of Rocks running head-on against the passenger train. If
+the heavens had fallen the situation would have seemed better to
+Bucks. A head-on collision on the first night of his promotion meant,
+he felt, his ruin. As he sat overwhelmed with despair, trying to
+collect his wits and to determine what to do, the door opened and Bob
+Scott appeared.
+
+The scout, with his unfailing and kindly smile, advanced and held out
+his hand. "Just dropped in to extend my congratulations."
+
+Bucks looked at him in horror, his face rigid and his eyes set. Scott
+paused and regarded his aspect with surprise. "Something has
+happened," he said, waiting for the despatcher to speak.
+
+"Bob!" exclaimed the boy in desperation, "No. 9 has run past her
+meeting order at Point of Rocks with No. 2. They will meet head-on and
+kill everybody. My God! what can I do?"
+
+In the dim light of the shaded oil lamp, Bucks, looking at the scout,
+stood the picture of despair. Scott picked up the poker and began to
+stir the fire and asked only a few questions and said little. However,
+when Bucks told him he was going to wake Stanley, whose sleeping-room
+adjoined his office at the end of the hall, Scott counselled no.
+
+"He could do nothing," said Scott reflecting. "Let us wait a while
+before we do anything like that," he added, coupling himself with the
+despatcher in the latter's overwhelming anxiety. "The first news of
+the collision will come from Bitter Creek. It will be time enough then
+to call Stanley. Give your orders for a wrecking crew, get a train
+ready, and get word to Doctor Arnold to go with it."
+
+Bucks, steadying himself under the kindly common-sense of his older
+friend, followed each suggestion promptly. Scott, who ordinarily would
+himself have been running around on the job, made no move to leave the
+room, thinking he could be of more service in remaining with the
+unfortunate despatcher. The yard became a scene of instant activity.
+And although no organization to meet emergencies of this kind had been
+as yet effected on the new division, the men responded intelligently
+and promptly with the necessary arrangements.
+
+Everyone summoned tried to get into the dispatchers' room to hear the
+story repeated. Scott took it upon himself to prevent this, and
+standing in the anteroom made all explanations himself. He rejoined
+Bucks after getting rid of the crowd, and the moment the relief train
+reported ready the despatcher sent it out, that help might reach the
+scene of disaster at the earliest possible moment. Bucks, calmed
+somewhat but suffering intensely, paced the floor or threw himself
+into his chair, while Scott picked up the despatcher's old copy of
+"The Last of the Mohicans," and smoking silently sat immovable,
+waiting with his customary stoicism for the call that should announce
+the dreaded wreck.
+
+The moments loaded with anxiety went with leaden feet while the two
+men sat. It seemed as if the first hour never would pass. Then the
+long silence of the little receiver was broken by a call for the
+dispatcher. Bucks sprang to answer it.
+
+Scott watched his face as he sent his "Ay, ay." Without understanding
+what the instruments clicked, he read the expressions that followed
+one after the other across Bucks's countenance, as he would have read
+a desert trail. He noted the perplexity on the despatcher's face when
+the latter tried to get the sender of the call.
+
+"Some one is cutting in on the line," exclaimed Bucks, mystified, as
+the sounder clicked. "Bob, it is Bill Dancing."
+
+A pause followed. "What can it mean, his sending a message to me? He
+is between Bitter Creek and Castle Springs. Wait a moment!"
+
+The receiver clicked sharp and fast. Scarcely able to control his
+voice in his anxiety, Bucks turned to the now excited scout: "The
+trains met between Bitter Creek and Castle Springs. There was no
+collision!"
+
+Almost collapsing with the passing of the strain, Bucks faltered in
+his taking. Asking Dancing again for the story, Bucks took it more
+coolly and repeated it to his eager listener, as it came.
+
+"Dancing was out with two men on the line to-day, repairing between
+Bitter Creek and Castle Springs. He didn't get done and camped beside
+the track for the night, to finish in the morning."
+
+"Go on," exclaimed Scott.
+
+"They shot a jack-rabbit----"
+
+"Hang the jack-rabbit," cried Scott. "What about the trains?"
+
+"You can't hurry Bill Dancing, Bob," pleaded Bucks. "You know that.
+Faster, Bill, faster," he telegraphed urgently.
+
+"You will get it faster," returned the distant lineman far out in the
+mountains under the stars, as he talked calmly with the despatcher,
+"if you will go slower."
+
+Bucks strangled his impatience. Dancing resumed, and the despatcher
+again translated for Scott.
+
+"They cooked the jack-rabbit for supper----"
+
+Scott flung his book violently across the room. "It tasted good,"
+continued Dancing exasperatingly. "But the night was awfully cold, so
+they built a big camp-fire near the curve. The freight engineer saw
+the fire and thought it was a locomotive head-light. Then he
+remembered he had run past his meeting point. He stopped his train to
+find out what the fire was. When he told Bill what had happened they
+grabbed up the burning logs, carried them down the track, and built a
+signal fire for No. 2. And it came along inside five minutes----"
+
+"And there they are!" concluded Bucks, wiping the dampness from his
+forehead.
+
+The receiver continued to click. "Bill thought I would be worried and
+he cut in on the line right away to tell me what had happened."
+
+"Now give your orders to No. 2 to back up to Castle Springs and let
+the rail train get by. Recall your relief train," added Scott. "And
+bring that freight engineer in here in the morning and let Stanley
+talk to him for just about five minutes." The key rattled for a
+moment. Scott, going to the farthest corner of the room, picked up
+"The Last of the Mohicans." "Bucks," he murmured insinuatingly, as he
+sat down to look into the book again, "I want to ask you now, once for
+all, whether this is a true story?"
+
+"Bob, put that book where it belongs and stop talking about it."
+
+Scott hitched one shoulder a bit and returned to the fire, but he was
+not silenced.
+
+"That reminds me, Bucks," he resumed after a pause, "there is another
+friend of yours here at the door, waiting to congratulate you. Shall
+I let him in?"
+
+"I don't want any congratulations, Bob."
+
+"I'll promise he doesn't say a single word, Bucks." As he spoke, Scott
+opened the hall door and whistled into the darkness. For an instant
+there was no response. Then a small and vague object outlined itself
+in the gloom, but halted questioningly on the threshold. Wagging his
+abbreviated tail very gently and carrying his drooping ears very low,
+Scuffy at length walked slowly into the room. Bucks hailed him with
+delight, and Scuffy bounding forward crouched at his feet.
+
+"I can't do a thing with him over at the ranch," complained Scott,
+eying the dog with a secret admiration. "He is eating the hounds up;
+doesn't give them a chance to pick a bone even after he's done with
+it."
+
+"I'm afraid there is nothing to do with Scuffy, but to make a
+despatcher of him," returned Bucks, picking him up by the forepaws. "I
+can see very plainly it's going to be a dog's life most of the time."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Mountain Divide, by Frank H. Spearman
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