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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Held for Orders, 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: Held for Orders
+       Being Stories of Railroad Life
+
+Author: Frank H. Spearman
+
+Illustrator: Jay Hambidge
+
+Release Date: November 18, 2010 [EBook #34365]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HELD FOR ORDERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Darleen Dove, Roger Frank, Mary Meehan and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            Held for Orders
+
+                     Being Stories of Railroad Life
+
+                          By Frank H. Spearman
+
+
+    _Illustrations by
+    JAY HAMBIDGE_
+
+    New York
+    McCLURE, PHILLIPS & COMPANY
+    MCMI
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY S. S. MCCLURE CO.
+    1901, BY MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
+
+    First impression, October, 1901
+
+    Second impression, November, 1901
+
+    _To_
+    John Francis Cordeal
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Shockley]
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+THE SWITCHMAN'S STORY--SHOCKLEY
+
+THE WIPER'S STORY--HOW MCGRATH GOT AN ENGINE
+
+THE ROADMASTER'S STORY--THE SPIDER WATER
+
+THE STRIKER'S STORY--MCTERZA
+
+THE DESPATCHER'S STORY--THE LAST ORDER
+
+THE NIGHTMAN'S STORY--BULLHEAD
+
+THE MASTER MECHANIC'S STORY--DELAROO
+
+THE OPERATOR'S STORY--DE MOLAY FOUR
+
+THE TRAINMASTER'S STORY--OF THE OLD GUARD
+
+THE YELLOW MAIL STORY--JIMMIE THE WIND
+
+
+
+
+Illustrations
+
+
+Shockley
+
+Chris
+
+Cooney
+
+Hailey
+
+McTerza
+
+Old Man Nicholson
+
+Dave Hawk
+
+Jimmie the Wind
+
+
+
+
+Held for Orders
+
+
+
+
+The Switchman's Story
+
+SHOCKLEY
+
+
+"He's rather a bad lot, I guess," wrote Bucks to Callahan, "but I am
+satisfied of one thing--you can't run that yard with a Sunday-school
+superintendent. He won't make you any trouble unless he gets to
+drinking. If that happens, _don't have any words with him_." Bucks
+underscored three times. "Simply crawl into a cyclone cellar and wire
+me. Sending you eighteen loads of steel to-night, and six cars of ties.
+Blair reports section 10 ready for track layers and Mear's outfit moving
+into the Palisade Cañon. Push the stuff to the front."
+
+It was getting dark, and Callahan sat in that part of the Benkleton
+depot he called the office, pulling at a muddy root that went
+unaccountably hot in sudden flashes. He took the pipe from his mouth,
+leaving his foot on the table, and looked at the bowl resentfully,
+wondering again if there could be powder in that infernal tobacco of
+Rubedo's. The mouthpiece he eyed as a desperate man might ponder a final
+shift.
+
+The pipe had originally come from God's Country, with a Beautiful Amber
+Mouthpiece, and a Beautiful Bowl; but it was a present from his sister
+and had been bought at a dry-goods store. Once when thinking--or, if you
+please, when not thinking--Callahan had held a lighted match to the
+Beautiful Amber Mouthpiece instead of to the tobacco, and in the fire
+that ensued they had hard work to save the depot.
+
+Callahan never wrote his sister about it; he thought only about buying
+pipes at dry-goods stores, and about being, when they exploded, a
+thousand miles from the man who sold them. There was plenty in that to
+think about. What he now brought his teeth reluctantly together on was
+part of the rubber tube of a dismantled atomizer; in happier
+post-Christmas days a toilet fixture. But Callahan had abandoned the use
+of bay rum after shaving. His razor had gone to the scrap and on Sunday
+mornings he merely ran a pair of scissors over the high joints--for
+Callahan was railroading--and on the front.
+
+After losing the mouthpiece he would have been completely in the air but
+for little Chris Oxen. Chris was Callahan's section gang. His name was
+once Ochsner, but that wasn't in Benkleton. Callahan was hurried when he
+made up the pay roll and put it Oxen, as being better United States. I
+say United States because Callahan said United States, in preference to
+English.
+
+Chris had been in America only three years; but he had been in Russia
+three hundred, and in that time had learned many ways of getting
+something out of nothing. When the red-haired despatcher after the
+explosion cast away with bitterness the remains of the pipe, Chris
+picked it up and by judicious action on the atomizer figured out a new
+mouthpiece no worse than the original, for while the second, like the
+first, was of rubber, it was not of the explosive variety.
+
+Chris presented the remodelled root to Callahan as a surprise; Callahan,
+in a burst of gratitude, promoted him on the spot: he made little Chris
+foreman. It didn't bring any advance in pay--but there was the honor. To
+be foreman was an honor, and as little Chris was the only man on the
+yard force, he became, by promotion, foreman of himself.
+
+So Callahan sat thinking of the ingenuity of Chris, reflecting on the
+sting of construction tobacco, and studying over Bucks's letter.
+
+The yard was his worry. Not that it was much of a yard; just a dozen
+runs off the lead to take the construction material for Callahan to
+distribute, fast as the grade was pushed westward. The trouble at the
+Benkleton yard came from without, not from within.
+
+The road was being pushed into the cattle country, and it was all easy
+till they struck Benkleton. Benkleton was just a hard knot on the Yellow
+Grass trail: a squally, sandy cattle town. There were some bad men in
+Benkleton; they didn't bother often. But there were some men in
+Benkleton who thought they were bad, and these were a source of constant
+bedevilment to the railroad men.
+
+Southwest of the yard, where the river breaks sheer into the bottoms,
+there hived and still hives a colony of railroad laborers, Russians.
+They have squatted there, burrowed into the face of the bench like sand
+swallows, and scraped caves out for themselves, and the name of the
+place is Little Russia.
+
+This was in the troublous days, when the cowboys, homesick for evil,
+would ride around Little Russia with rope and gun, and scare the
+pioneers cross-eyed. The cattle fellows spent the entire winter months,
+all sand and sunshine, putting up schemes to worry Callahan and the
+Little Russians. The headquarters for this restless gang were at Pat
+Barlie's place, across from the post office; it was there that the
+cowboys loved to congregate. To Callahan, Pat Barlie's place was a
+wasps' nest; but to Chris, it was a den of wolves--and of a dreader sort
+than Russian wolves, for Barlie's pack never slept.
+
+The east and west section men could run away from them on hand cars; it
+was the yardmen who caught it, and it grew so bad they couldn't keep a
+switchman. About ten o'clock at night, after Number Twenty-three had
+pulled in and they were distributing a trainload of bridge timber, a
+switch-man's lantern would go up in signal, when _pist!_ a bullet would
+knock the lamp clean out of his hand, and the nerve clean out of his
+head. Handling a light in the Benkleton yard was like smoking a
+celluloid pipe--you never could tell when it would go off.
+
+Cowboys shot away the lamps faster than requisitions could be drawn for
+new ones. They shot the signals off the switches, and the lights from
+the tops of moving trains. Whenever a brakeman showed a flicker, two
+cowboys stood waiting to snuff it. If they missed the lamp, they winged
+the brakeman.
+
+It compelled Bucks after a while to run trains through Benkleton
+without showing ever a light. This, though tough, could be managed, but
+to shunt flats in the yard at night with no light, or to get a switchman
+willing to play young Tell to Peg Leg Reynolds's William for any length
+of time, was impossible. At last Bucks, on whom the worry reflected at
+headquarters, swore he would fight them with fire, and he sent Shockley.
+Callahan still sat speculating on what he would be up against when
+Shockley arrived.
+
+The impression Bucks's letter gave him--knowing Bucks to be frugal of
+words--was that Shockley would rise up with cartridges in his ears and
+bowie knives dangling from his watch chain. To live in fear of the
+cowboys was one thing; but to live in fear of the cowboys on the one
+hand, and in terror of a yard master on the other, seemed, all things
+considered, confusing, particularly if the new ally got to drinking and
+his fire scattered. Just then train Fifty-nine whistled. Pat Barlie's
+corner began to sputter its salute. Callahan shifted around behind his
+bomb-proof, lit his powder horn, and looking down the line wondered
+whether Shockley might be on that train.
+
+It was not till the next night though that a tall, thinnish chap,
+without visible reasons for alighting, got off Fifty-nine and walked
+tentatively down the platform. At the ticket office he asked for the
+assistant superintendent.
+
+"Out there on the platform talking to the conductor."
+
+The thin fellow emerged and headed for Callahan. Callahan noticed only
+his light, springy amble and his hatchet face.
+
+"Mr. Callahan?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Bucks sent me up--to take the yard."
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+"Shockley."
+
+"Step upstairs. I'll be up in a minute."
+
+Shockley walked back into the depot but he left the copper-haired
+assistant superintendent uncertain as to whether it was really over;
+whether Shockley had actually arrived or not. As Callahan studied the
+claimant's inoffensive appearance, walking away, he rather thought it
+couldn't be over, or that Bucks was mistaken; but Bucks never made a
+mistake.
+
+Next morning at seven, the new yard master took hold. Callahan had
+intimated that the night air in the yard, it being low land, was
+miasmatic, and that Shockley had maybe better try for a while to do his
+switching in the daytime. Just before the appointed hour in the morning,
+the assistant had looked out on his unlucky yard; he thought to himself
+that if that yard didn't drive a man to drink nothing ever would. Piled
+shanty high with a bewildering array of material, it was enough to take
+the heart out of a Denver switching crew.
+
+While he stood at the window he saw their plug switch engine, that had
+been kicked out of every other yard on the system, wheeze out of the
+roundhouse, saw the new yard master flirt his hand at the engineer, and
+swing up on the footboard. But the swing--it made Callahan's heart warm
+to him. Not the lubberly jump of the hoboes that had worried the life
+out of him all summer, even when the cattlemen didn't bother. It was
+the swing of the sailor into the shrouds, of the Cossack into the
+saddle, of the yacht into the wind. It was like falling down or falling
+up or falling on--the grace of a mastery of gravitation--that was
+Shockley's swing on the footboard of the yard engine as it shot snorting
+past him.
+
+"He's all right," muttered Callahan. It was enough.
+
+A man who flipped a tender like that was not like to go very wrong even
+in that chaos of rails and ties and stringers and coal.
+
+"Now," continued Callahan to himself, timidly hopeful, "if the cuss only
+doesn't get to drinking!" He watched apprehensively, dreading the first
+time he should see him entering Pat Barlie's place, but Shockley didn't
+appear to know Pat had a place. The cowboys, too, watched him, waiting
+for his lamp to gleam at night down in the yard, but their patience was
+strained for a long time. Shockley got all his work done by daylight.
+
+To the surprise of Callahan, and probably on the principle of the
+watched pot, the whole winter went without a brush between Shockley and
+the cowboys. Even Peg Leg Reynolds let him alone. "He's the luckiest
+fellow on earth," remarked Callahan one day at McCloud in reply to a
+question from Bucks about Shockley. "There hasn't a shot been fired at
+him all winter."
+
+"He wasn't always lucky," commented Bucks, signing a batch of letters.
+
+"He came from Chicago," Bucks went on, after a silence. "He was
+switching there on the 'Q' at the time of the stock-yards riots.
+Shockley used to drink like a pirate. I never knew just the right of it.
+I understood it was in a brawl--anyway, he killed a man there; shot him,
+and had to get away in a hurry. I was train master. Shockley was a
+striker; but I'd always found him decent, and when his wife came to me
+about it I helped her out a little; she's dead since. His record isn't
+just right back there yet. There's something about the shooting hanging
+over him. I never set eyes on the fellow again till he struck me for a
+job at McCloud; then I sent him up to you. He claimed he'd quit
+drinking--guess he had. Long as he's behaving himself I believe in
+giving him a chance--h'm?"
+
+It really wasn't any longer a case of giving him a chance; rather of
+whether they could get on without him. When the Colorado Pacific began
+racing us into Denver that summer, it began to crowd even Shockley to
+keep the yard clean; he saw he would have to have help.
+
+"Chris, what do they give you for tinkering up the ties?" asked Shockley
+one day.
+
+"Dollar an' a half."
+
+"Why don't you take hold switching with me and get three dollars?"
+
+Chris was thunderstruck. First he said Callahan wouldn't let him, but
+Shockley "guessed yes." Then Chris figured. To save the last of the
+hundred dollars necessary to get the woman and the babies over--it could
+be done in three months instead of six, if only Callahan would listen.
+But when Shockley talked Callahan always listened, and when he asked for
+a new switchman he got him. And Chris got his three; to him a sum
+unspeakable. By the time the woman and the children arrived in the
+fall, Chris would have died for Shockley.
+
+The fall that saw the woman and the stunted subjects of the Czar stowed
+away under the bench in Little Russia brought also the cowboys down from
+Montana to bait the Russians.
+
+One stormy night, when Chris thought it was perfectly safe to venture up
+to Rubedo's after groceries, the cowboys caught him and dragged him over
+to
+
+Pat Barlie's.
+
+It was seven when they caught him, and by nine they had put him through
+every pace that civilization could suggest. Peg Leg Reynolds, as always,
+master of ceremonies, then ordered him tied to the stove. When it was
+done, the cowboys got into a big circle for a dance. The fur on Chris's
+coat had already begun to sizzle, when the front door opened. Shockley
+walked in.
+
+Straight, in his ambling, hurried way, he walked past the deserted bar
+through the ring of cowboys at the rear to Chris frying against the
+stove, and began cutting him loose. Through every knot that his knife
+slit he sent a very loud and very bad word, and no sooner had he freed
+Chris than he jerked him by the collar, as if quarreling with him,
+toward the back door, which was handy, and before the cowboys got wind
+he had shoved him through it.
+
+"Hold on there!" cried Peg Leg Reynolds, when it was just too late.
+Chris was out of it, and Shockley turned alone.
+
+"All right, partner; what is it?" he asked amiably.
+
+"You've got a ripping nerve."
+
+"I know it."
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+"Shockley."
+
+"Can you dance?"
+
+"No."
+
+It was Peg Leg's opportunity. He drew his gun. "I reckon maybe you can.
+Try it," he added, pointing the suggestion with the pistol. Shockley
+looked foolish; he didn't begin tripping soon enough, and a bullet from
+the cowboy's gun splintered the baseboard at his feet. Shockley
+attempted to shuffle. To any one who didn't know him it looked funny.
+But Peg Leg was a rough dancing master, and before he said enough an
+ordinary man would have dropped exhausted. Shockley, breathing a good
+bit quicker, only steadied himself against the bar.
+
+"Take off your hat before gentlemen," cried the cowboy. Shockley
+hesitated, but he did pull off his cap.
+
+"That's more like it. What's your name?"
+
+"Shockley."
+
+"Shockley?" echoed Reynolds with a burst of range amenities. "Well,
+Shockley, you can't help your name. Drink for once in your life with a
+man of breeding--my name's Reynolds. Pat, set out the good bottle--this
+guy pays," exclaimed Peg Leg, wheeling to the bar.
+
+"What'll it be?" asked Pat Barlie of Shockley, as he deftly slid a row
+of glasses in front of the men of breeding.
+
+"Ginger ale for me," suggested Shockley mildly. The cowboys put up a
+single yell. Ginger ale! It was too funny.
+
+Reynolds, choking with contempt, pointed to the yard master's glass.
+"Fill it with whiskey," he shouted. "Fill it, Pat!" he repeated, as
+Shockley leaned undecidedly against the bar. The yard master held out
+the glass, and the bar keeper began to pour. Shockley looked at the
+liquor a moment; then he looked at Reynolds, who fronted him gun in one
+hand and red water in the other.
+
+"Drink!"
+
+Shockley paused, looked again at the whiskey and drew the glass towards
+him with the curving hand of a drinker. "You want me to drink this?" he
+half laughed, turning on his baiter.
+
+"I didn't say so, did I? I said DRINK!" roared Peg Leg.
+
+Everybody looked at Shockley. He stood fingering the glass quietly.
+Somehow everybody, drunk or sober, looked at Shockley. He glanced around
+at the crowd; other guns were creeping from their holsters. He pushed
+the glass back, smiling.
+
+"I don't drink whiskey, partner," said Shockley gently.
+
+"You'll drink that whiskey, or I'll put a little hole into you!"
+
+Shockley reached good-naturedly for the glass, threw the liquor on the
+floor, and set it back on the bar.
+
+"Go on!" said Shockley. It confused Reynolds.
+
+"A man that'll waste good whiskey oughtn't t' live, anyhow," he
+muttered, fingering his revolver nervously. "You've spoiled my aim.
+Throw up your hat," he yelled. "I'll put a hole through that to begin
+with."
+
+Instead, Shockley put his cap back on his head.
+
+"Put a hole through it there," said he. Reynolds set down his glass, and
+Shockley waited; it was the cowboy who hesitated.
+
+"Where's your nerve?" asked the railroad man. The gun covered him with a
+flash and a roar. Reynolds, whatever his faults, was a shot. His bullet
+cut cleanly through the crown, and the powder almost burnt Shockley's
+face. The switchman recovered himself instantly, and taking off his cap
+laughed as he examined the hole.
+
+"Done with me?" he asked evenly, cap in hand.
+
+Peg Leg drained his glass before he spoke. "Get out!" he snapped. The
+switchman started on the word for the front door. When he opened it,
+everybody laughed--but Shockley.
+
+Maybe an hour later Reynolds was sitting back of the stove in a card
+game, when a voice spoke at his ear. "Get up!" Reynolds looked around
+into a pistol; behind it stood Shockley, pleasant. "Get up!" he
+repeated. Nobody had seen him come in; but there he was, and with an
+absolutely infantile gun, a mere baby gun, in the yellow light, but it
+shone like bright silver.
+
+Reynolds with visible embarrassment stood up.
+
+"Throw your cannon into the stove, Reynolds, you won't need it,"
+suggested Shockley. Reynolds looked around; there appeared to be no
+hopeful alternative: the drop looked very cold; not a cowboy interposed.
+Under convoy, Reynolds stumped over to the stove and threw in his gun,
+but the grace of the doing was bad.
+
+"Get up there on the bar and dance; hustle!" urged Shockley. They had to
+help the confused cowboy up; and when he stood shamefaced, looking down
+on the scene of his constant triumphs, and did a painful single foot,
+marking time with his peg, the cowboys, who had stood their own share of
+his bullying, roared. Shockley didn't roar; only stood with busy eyes
+where he could cover any man on demand, not forgetting even Pat Barlie.
+
+[Illustration: Chris]
+
+Peg Leg, who had danced so many in his day, danced, and his roasting gun
+sputtered an accompaniment from the stove; but as Shockley, who stood in
+front of it, paid no attention to the fusillade of bullets, good form
+prevented others from dodging. "That'll do; get down. Come here, Chris,"
+called Shockley. Chris Oxen, greatly disturbed, issued from an obscure
+corner.
+
+"Get down on your knees," exclaimed the yard master, jerking Reynolds
+with a chilly twist in front of the frightened Russian. "Get on your
+knees; right where I threw your whiskey," and Shockley, crowding
+Reynolds down to his humiliation, dropped for the first time into range
+civilities himself, and the shame and the abasement of it were very
+great.
+
+"Boys," said the yard master, with one restless eye on Reynolds and one
+on everybody else, as he pointed at Chris, "this man's coat was burnt
+up. He's a poor devil, and his money comes hard. Chip in for a new coat.
+I've nothing against any man that don't want to give, but Reynolds must
+pass the hat. Take mine, you coyote."
+
+Nearly everybody contributed as Reynolds went round. Shockley made no
+comments. "Count it," he commanded, when the fallen monarch had
+finished; and when the tale was made, Shockley told Pat Barlie to put in
+as much more as the cap held, and he did so.
+
+"There, Chris; go home. I don't like you," added Shockley, insolently,
+turning on Reynolds.
+
+"You don't know what fun is. This town won't hold you and me after
+to-night. You can take it or you can leave it, but the first time I ever
+put eyes on you again one of us will cash in."
+
+He backed directly towards the front door and out.
+
+Peg Leg Reynolds took only the night to decide; next day he hit the
+trail. The nervy yard master he might have wiped out if he had stayed,
+but the disgrace of kneeling before the dog of a Russian was something
+never to be wiped out in the annals of Benkleton. Peg Leg moved on; and
+thereafter cowboys took occasion to stop Shockley on the street and
+jolly him on the way he did the one-legged bully, and the lights were
+shot no more.
+
+The railroad men swore by the new yard master; the Russians took their
+cigarettes from their mouths and touched their caps when Shockley
+passed; Callahan blessed his name; but little Chris worshiped him.
+
+One day Alfabet Smith dropped off at Benkleton from Omaha headquarters.
+Alfabet was the only species of lizard on the pay roll--he was the West
+End spotter. "Who is that slim fellow?" he asked of Callahan as Shockley
+flew by on the pilot board of an engine.
+
+"That's Shockley."
+
+"Oh, that's Shockley, is it?"
+
+But he could say little things in a way to make a man prick hot all
+over.
+
+"Yes, that's Shockley. Why?" asked Callahan with a dash of acid.
+
+"Nothing, only he's a valuable man; he's wanted, Shockley is," smiled
+Alfabet Smith, but his smile would freeze tears.
+
+Callahan took it up short. "Look here, Alfabet. Keep off Shockley."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why? Because you and I will touch, head on, if you don't."
+
+Smith said nothing; he was used to that sort. The next time Bucks was
+up, his assistant told him of the incident.
+
+"If he bothers Shockley," Bucks said, "we'll get his scalp, that's all.
+He'd better look after his conductors and leave our men alone."
+
+"I notice Shockley isn't keeping his frogs blocked," continued Bucks,
+reverting to other matters. "That won't do. I want every frog in the
+yard blocked and kept blocked, and tell him I said so."
+
+But the frog-blocking was not what worried Shockley; his push was to
+keep the yard clean, for the month of December brought more stuff twice
+over than was ever poured into the front-end yard before. Chris, though,
+had developed into a great switchman, and the two never let the work get
+ahead.
+
+So it came that Little Russia honored Chris and his big pay check above
+most men. Shockley stood first in Little Russia; then the CZAR, then
+Chris, then Callahan. Queen Victoria and Bismarck might have admirers;
+but they were not in it under the bench.
+
+When the Russian holidays came, down below, Chris concluded that the
+celebration would be merely hollow without Shockley; for was not the
+very existence of Little Russia due to him? All the growth, all the
+prosperity--what was it due to? Protection. What was the protection?
+Shockley. There were brakemen who argued that protection came from the
+tariff; but they never made any converts in Little Russia, where the
+inhabitants could be induced to vote for president only on the assurance
+that Shockley was running.
+
+"Well, what's the racket anyhow, Chris?" demanded Shockley lazily, after
+Cross-Eyes trying to get rid of the invitation to the festivities had
+sputtered switch-English five minutes at him.
+
+"Ve got Chrismus by us," explained Chris desperately.
+
+"Christmas," repeated Shockley grimly. "Christmas. Why, man, Christmas
+don't come nowhere on earth in January. You want to wind up your
+calendar. Where'd you get them shoes?"
+
+"Dollar sefenty-vife."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Rubedo."
+
+"And don't you know a switchman oughtn't t' put his feet in flatboats?
+Don't you know some day you'll get your foot stuck in a tongue or a
+guard? Then where'll you be, Dutch, with a string of flats rolling down
+on you, eh?"
+
+However, Chris stuck for his request. He wouldn't take no for an answer.
+Next day he tired Shockley out.
+
+"Well, for God's sake let up, Chris," said the yard master at last.
+"I'll come down a while after Twenty-three comes in. Get back early
+after supper, and we'll make up Fifty-five and let the rest go."
+
+It was a pretty night; pretty enough over the yard for anybody's
+Christmas, Julian or Gregorian. No snow, but a moon, and a full one,
+rising early over the Arikaree bluffs, and a frost that bit and
+sparkled, and the north wind asleep in the sand hills.
+
+Shockley, after supper, snug in a pea-jacket and a storm cap, rode with
+the switch engine down from the roundhouse. Chris, in his astrakhan
+reefer and turban, walking over from the dugouts in Rubedo's new shoes,
+flipped the footboard at the stock-yard with almost the roll of Shockley
+himself.
+
+Happily for Christmas in Little Russia, Twenty-three pulled in on time;
+but it was long and heavy that night. It brought coal and ties, and the
+stuff for the Fort Rawlins depot, and a batch of bridge steel they had
+been waiting two weeks for--mostly Cherry Creek stuff--eleven cars of
+it.
+
+The minute the tired engine was cut off the long train, up ran the
+little switch engine and snapped at the headless monster like a coyote.
+
+Out came the coal with a clatter; out came the depot stuff with a sheet
+of flame through the goat's flues--shot here, shot there, shot
+yonder--flying down this spur and down that and the other, like stones
+from a catapult; and the tough-connected, smut-faced, blear-eyed yard
+engine coughed and snorted and spit a shower of sparks and soot and
+cinders up into the Christmas air. She darted and dodged and jerked, and
+backed up and down and across the lead, and never for a fraction of a
+second took her eye off Shockley's lamp. Shivering and clanging and
+bucking with steam and bell and air, but always with one smoky eye on
+Shockley's lamp, until Twenty-three was wrecked clean to the caboose,
+and the switch engine shot down the main line with the battered way-car
+in her claws like a hawk with a prairie dog.
+
+Then there was only the westbound freight, Fifty-five, to make up with
+the Fort Rawlins stuff and the Cherry Creek steel, which was "_rush_,"
+and a few cars of ties flung on behind on general principles. It was
+quick work now--sorting and moving the bridge steel--half an hour for an
+hour's work, with the north wind waking at the clatter and sweeping a
+bank of cloud and sand across the valley. Shockley and Chris and the
+goat crew put at it like black ants. There was releasing and setting and
+kicking and splitting, and once in a while a flying switch, dead against
+the rubrics; and at last the whole train of steel was in line, clean as
+the links of a sprocket, and ready to run in on the house-track for the
+caboose.
+
+For that run Chris set the east house-track switch, crossed the track,
+and swung a great circle with his lamp for the back. To get over to the
+switch again, he started to recross the track. In the dark, his ankle
+turned on a lump of coal; he recovered lightly, but the misstep sent his
+other foot wide, and with a bit of a jolt Rubedo's new shoe slipped into
+the frog.
+
+Up the track he heard a roll of stormy coughs from the engine gathering
+push to shove the string of flats down. They were coming towards him,
+over the spot where he stood, on his signal; and he quietly tried to
+loosen his heel.
+
+The engine's drivers let go, and she roared a steaming oath, and Chris
+could hear it; but he was glad, for his heel would not work quietly out
+of the frog; it stuck. Then the engineer, unruffled, pulled at his sand
+lever, and his engine snorted again and her driver tires bit, and slowly
+she sent the long train of steel down on Chris's switch; he heard the
+frosty flanges grinding on the face of the rails as he tried to loosen
+his foot.
+
+Coolly, first, like a confident man in a quicksand; soon, with alarm
+running into fright. But there was time enough; the head car was four or
+five lengths above the switch and coming very, very slowly, heavy-like,
+and squeaking stiffly under its load, yet coming; and he wrenched
+harder, but his foot stuck. Then he yelled for Shockley. Shockley had
+gone over to open the caboose switch; Shockley couldn't hear, and he
+knew it. And he yelled again.
+
+The sweat broke over him as he turned and twisted. The grip of the frog
+seemed to stifle him; half the time was gone; the near truck wheels
+screeched two car-lengths away: and the switchman played his last card.
+Time and time again Shockley had told him what to do if that moment came
+in the night; had told him to throw his lamp in the air like a rocket.
+But Chris had forgotten all that till the flat dropped heavily on the
+tongue in front of him; then he threw his lamp like a rocket high into
+the night.
+
+No help came. He raised his arms frantically above his head, and his
+cries cut the wind. Desperate at last, he threw himself flat to lie
+outside the rail, to save all but a foot; but the frog held him, and
+crying horribly he struggled back to his feet, only to sink again half
+crazy to the ground. As his senses left him he was hardly aware of a
+stinging pain in his foot, of a wrench at his leg, an instant arm round
+his back, and his yard master's voice in his ear.
+
+"Jump!" screamed Shockley.
+
+Chris, scrambling frantically on the deadly rails, unable to jump, felt
+himself picked from the ground, heard a choke in the throat at his ear,
+and he was flung like a drawbar through the dark. Shockley had passed a
+knife blade from vamp to sole, slit the Russian's clumsy shoe, jerked
+his foot from it, and thrown him bodily into the clear.
+
+Chris staggered panting to his feet. Already the steel was moving slowly
+over the switch; he heard the sullen pounding of the trucks on the
+contact; a lantern, burning yet, lay on its side near the stand--it was
+Shockley's lamp. Chris looked wildly around for his yard master; called
+out; called Shockley's name; listened. No scream, no groan, no cry, no
+answer; no sound, but just the steady pounding of the wheels over the
+contact. The little switchman screamed again in a frenzy, and turning,
+raced stumbling up the track to the cab. He swung into it, and by signs
+made the engineer shut off. He tried to talk, and only stammered a lingo
+of switch-pidgin and the name of Shockley. They couldn't understand it
+all, but they shut off with faces pinched and sallow, threw open the
+furnace door, and grabbing their lanterns ran back. The fireman on his
+knees held his lamp out under the flat that spanned the contact; he drew
+shrinking back, and rising, started on the run for the depot to rouse
+Callahan.
+
+It was Callahan who pulled the pin a moment later, Chris shivering like
+a rabbit at his side. It was Callahan who gave the slow pull-ahead order
+that cut the train in two at the frog, and Callahan who stepped wavering
+from the gap that opened behind the receding flat--back from something
+between the rails--back to put his hands blindly out for the target-rod,
+and unsteadily upon it. He heard Shockley breathing.
+
+Some carried the headlight back, and some tore the door off a box car,
+and they got him on. They carried him unevenly, stumbling, over to the
+depot. They laid him on Callahan's mattress in the waiting room, and the
+men stood all about him; but the only sound was his breathing, and
+inside under the lamp the receiver, clicking, clicking, clicking, of
+Bucks and the company surgeon coming on a special ahead of Fifty-nine.
+
+They twisted tourniquets into his quivering flesh, and with the light
+dying in his eyes they put whiskey to his lips. But he turned his head
+and spit it from his mouth. Then he looked from face to face about
+him--to the engineer and to the fireman, and to little Chris and to
+Callahan, and his lips moved.
+
+Chris bent over him, but try as he would he could not catch the words.
+And Callahan listened and watched and waited.
+
+"Block--block--" said Shockley's lips. And Callahan wiped
+them slowly and bent close again and put his ear over them.
+"Block--block--the--frogs."
+
+And Shockley died.
+
+They lifted the mattress into the baggage room; Callahan drew over it a
+crumpled sheet. A lantern left, burned on the checking desk, but the
+men, except Chris, went their ways. Chris hung irresolute around the
+open door.
+
+The special pulled in, and with the shoes wringing fire from her heels
+as she slowed, Bucks and a man following close sprang from the step of
+the coach. Callahan met them; shook his head.
+
+Twenty minutes later Fifty-nine whistled for the yard; but in the yard
+all was dark and still. One man got off Fifty-nine that night. Carrying
+his little valise in his hand, he walked in and out of the depot,
+hanging on the edges of the grouping men, who still talked of the
+accident. After hearing, he walked alone into the baggage room, and with
+his valise in his hand drew back the edge of the sheet and, standing,
+looked. Afterward he paused at the door, and spoke to a man that was
+fixing a lantern.
+
+"What was his name?"
+
+"Shockley."
+
+"Shockley?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yard master here?"
+
+"Yes. Know him?"
+
+"Me? No. I guess not." He walked away with his valise, and drew his coat
+collar up in the wind that swept the platform. "I guess I don't want
+him," he muttered to himself. "I guess _they_ don't want _him_; not
+now." And he went back to the man and asked when a train left again for
+Chicago. He had a warrant for Shockley; but Shockley's warrant had been
+served.
+
+After the others had gone, Bucks and Callahan and the surgeon talked
+together in the waiting room, and Chris hanging by, blear-eyed and
+helpless, looked from one to the other: showed his foot when Callahan
+pointed, and sat patient while the surgeon stitched the slit where
+Shockley's blade had touched the bone. Then he stood again and listened.
+While any one talked Chris would listen; silent and helpless, just
+listening. And when Bucks had gone up stairs, and the surgeon had gone
+up stairs, and Callahan, tired and sick, had gone up stairs, and only
+the operator sat under his lamp at the table, Chris stood back in the
+gloom in front of the stove and poked stealthily at the fire. When it
+blazed he dropped big chunks of smutty coal in on it, and wiped his
+frost-bitten nose with the back of his dirty hand, and looked toward the
+baggage room door and listened--listened for a cry, or a sound, or for
+that fearful, fearful breathing, such breathing as he had not been
+hearing before. But no cry, no sound, no stertorous breath came out of
+the darkness, and from under the lamp in front of the operator only the
+sounder clicked, always talking, talking, talking--talking queer things
+to Russian ears.
+
+So Chris drew his cap a little lower, for so he always began, pulled
+mechanically from his pocket a time-table, tore off a strip, and holding
+it carefully open, sprinkled a few clippings of tobacco upon it, and
+rolled his cigarette. He tucked it between his lips; it was company for
+the silence, and he could more easily stop the listening. But he did not
+light; only pulled his cap again a little lower, buttoned close his
+reefer, looked at his bandaged foot, picked up his lamp, and started
+home.
+
+It was dark, and the wind from the north was bitter, but he made a great
+detour into the teeth of it--around by the coal chutes, a long way
+round, a long way from the frog of the east house-track switch; and the
+cold stung his face as he limped heavily on. At last by the ice house he
+turned south, and reaching the face of the bench paused a moment,
+hesitating, on the side of the earthen stairs; it was very dark. After a
+bit he walked slowly down and pushed open the door of his dugout. It was
+dark inside, and cold; the fire was out. The children were asleep; the
+woman was asleep.
+
+He sat down in a chair and put out his lamp. There was no Christmas that
+night in Little Russia.
+
+
+
+
+The Wiper's Story
+
+HOW McGRATH GOT AN ENGINE
+
+
+This came about through there being whiskers on the rails. It may not be
+generally understood that whiskers grow on steel rails; curious as it
+seems, they do. Moreover, on steel rails they are dangerous, and, at
+times, exceedingly dangerous.
+
+Do not infer that all steel rails grow whiskers; nor is it, as one might
+suppose, only the old rails that sport them. The youngest rail on the
+curve may boast as stout a beard as the oldest rail on the tangent, and
+one just as gray. They flourish, too, in spite of orders; for while
+whiskers are permitted on engineers and tolerated on conductors, they
+are never encouraged on rails. Nature, however, provides the whiskers,
+regardless of discipline, and, what is more, shaves them herself.
+
+Their culture depends on conditions. Some months grow better whiskers
+than others: September is famous for whiskers, while July grows very
+few. Whiskers will grow on steel rails in the air of a single night; but
+not every night air will produce whiskers. It takes a high, frosty air,
+one that stays out late, to make whiskers. Take, for example, the night
+air of the Black Hills; it is known everywhere among steel rails as a
+beard tonic. The day's moisture, falling as the sun drops beyond the
+hills is drawn into feathery, jewelled crystals of frost on the chilly
+steel, as a glass of ice-water beads in summer shade; and these dewy
+stalagmites rise in a dainty profusion, until when day peeps into the
+cañons the track looks like a pair of long white streamers winding up
+and down the levels. But beware that track. It is a very dangerous
+track, and its possibilities lie where Samson's lay--in the whiskers.
+
+So it lies in early morning, as pretty a death-trap as any flower that
+ever lured a fly; only, this pitfall waits for engines and trains and
+men--and sometimes gets them.
+
+It waits there on the mountain grades, in an ambush really deadly for an
+unwary train, until the sun, which is particularly lazy in the fall,
+peeping over into the cuts, smiles, at length, on the bearded steel as
+if it were too funny, and the whiskers vanish into thin air.
+
+A smooth-faced rail presents no especial dangers; and if trainmen in the
+Hills had their way, they would never turn a wheel until the sun had
+done barbering. But despatchers not having to do with them take no
+account of whiskers. They make only the schedules, and the whiskers make
+the trouble. To lessen their dangers, engineers always start, up hill or
+down, with a tankful of sand, and they sand the whiskers. It is rough
+barbering, but it helps the driver-tires grit a bit into the face of the
+rail, and in that way hang on. In this emergency a tankful of sand is
+better than all the air Westinghouse ever stored.
+
+Aloysius McGrath was a little sweeper; but he was an aspiring one, for
+even a sweeper may aspire, and in point of fact most of them do aspire.
+Aloysius worked in the roundhouse at the head of the Wind River pass on
+the West End Mountains. It is an amazingly rough country; and as for
+grades, it takes your breath merely to look down the levels. Three per
+cent, four per cent, five per cent--it is really frightful! But Aloysius
+was used to heavy falls; he had begun working for the company as a
+sweeper under Johnnie Horigan, and no engineer would have thought of
+running a grade to compare with Johnnie's headers.
+
+Horigan was the first boss Aloysius ever had. Now Aloysius, if caught
+just right, is a very pretty name, but Johnnie Horigan could make
+nothing whatever of it, so he called Aloysius, Cooney, as he said, for
+short--Cooney McGrath--and, by the way, if you will call that McGraw, we
+shall be started right. As for Horigan, he may be called anything; at
+least it is certain that on the West End he has been called everything.
+
+Johnnie was ordinarily boss sweeper. He had suffered numerous
+promotions--several times to wiper, and once to hostler; but his
+tendency to celebrate these occasions usually cost him his job, and he
+reverted to sweeping. If he had not been such an inoffensive, sawed-off
+little old nubbin he wouldn't have been tolerated on the pay rolls; but
+he had been with the company so long and discharged so often that
+foremen grew tired of trying to get rid of him, and in spite of his very
+regular habits, he was hanging on somewhere all the time.
+
+[Illustration: Cooney]
+
+When Johnnie was gone, using the word in at least two senses, Aloysius
+Cooney McGrath became, _ipso facto_, boss sweeper. It happened first one
+Sunday morning, just after pay day, when Johnnie applied to the foreman
+for permission to go to church. Permission was granted, and Johnnie
+started for church; but it is doubtful whether he ever found it. At all
+events, at the end of three weeks he turned up again at the roundhouse,
+considerably the worse for his attempt to locate the house of
+prayer--which he had tried to find only after he had been kicked out of
+every other place in town.
+
+Aloysius had improved the interval by sweeping the roundhouse as it
+never had been swept before; and when Johnnie Horigan returned, morally
+disfigured, Aloysius McGrath was already promoted to be wiper over his
+old superior. Johnnie was in no wise envious. His only move was to turn
+the misfortune to account for an ulterior purpose, and he congratulated
+the boy, affecting that he had stayed away to let them see what stuff
+the young fellow was made of. This put him in a position to negotiate a
+small loan from his _protégé_--a position of which he never neglected
+the possibilities. It was out of the question to be mad very long at
+Johnnie, though one might be very often. After a time Aloysius got to
+firing: then he wanted an engine. But he fired many months, and there
+came no promotion. The trouble was, there were no new crews added to the
+engine service. Nobody got killed; nobody quit; nobody died. One, two,
+and three years without a break, and little Aloysius had become a bigger
+Aloysius, and was still firing; he became also discouraged, for then the
+force was cut down and he was put back wiping.
+
+"Never y' mind, never y' mind, Cooney," old Johnnie would say. "It'll
+come all right. You'll get y'r ingin' yet. Lind me a couple till
+pay-a-day, Cooney, will you? I'll wahrant y' y'r ingin' yet, Cooney."
+Which little assurance always cost Aloysius two dollars till pay day,
+and no end of trouble getting it back; for when he attempted
+collection, Johnnie took a very dark view of the lad's future, alluding
+vaguely to people who were hard-hearted and ungrateful to their best
+friends. And though Aloysius paid slight attention to the old sweeper's
+vaporings, he really was in the end the means of the boy's getting his
+engine.
+
+After three years of panic and hard times on the mountain division, the
+mines began to reopen, new spurs were laid out, construction crews were
+put on, and a new activity was everywhere apparent. But to fill the cup
+of Aloysius' woe, the new crews were all sent up from McCloud. That they
+were older men in the order of promotion was cold comfort--Aloysius felt
+crowded out. He went very blue, and the next time Johnnie applied for a
+loan Aloysius rebuffed him unfeelingly; this in turn depressed John.
+
+"Never mind, never mind, Cooney. I'll not be speakin' t' Neighbor agin
+t' set y' up. If y' like wipin', stick to ut. I'll not be troublin'
+Neighbor agin." Johnnie professed a great pull with the master mechanic.
+
+That Aloysius might feel still more the sting of his coldness, Johnnie
+for some days paid much court to the new firemen and engine runners.
+Nothing about the house was too good for them, and as the crafty sweeper
+never overlooked an opportunity, he was in debt before the end of the
+week to most of the brotherhood.
+
+But the memorable morning for Aloysius came shortly thereafter. It was
+one of those keen October mornings that bite so in the Hills. The
+construction train, Extra 240 West, had started about five o'clock from
+the head of the pass with a load of steel for the track layers, and
+stopped for a bite of breakfast at Wind River. Above the roundhouse
+there is a switchback. When the train pulled in, the crew got off for
+some hot coffee. Johnnie Horigan was around playing good fellow, and he
+climbed into the cab to run the train through the switchback while the
+crews were at the eating house. It was irregular to leave the engine,
+but they did, and as for Johnnie Horigan, he was regularly irregular.
+There were sixteen cars of steel in the string, besides a cabooseful of
+laborers. The backing up the leg of the nipper was easy. After the
+switch was newly set, Johnnie pulled down the lower leg; and that,
+considering the whiskers, was too easy.
+
+When he pulled past the eating house on the down grade, he was going so
+lively with his flats that he was away before the crew could get out of
+the lunch room. In just one minute everybody in Wind River was in
+trouble: the crew, because their train was disappearing down the cañon;
+the eating house man, because nobody paid him for his coffee; and
+Johnnie Horigan, because he found it impossible to stop. He had dumped
+the sand, he had applied the air, he had reversed the engine--by all the
+rules laid down in the instruction car she ought to stop. But she didn't
+stop, and--this was the embarrassing feature--she was headed down a hill
+twenty miles long, with curves to weary a boa-constrictor. John hung his
+head wildly over the drivers, looked back at the yelling crew,
+contemplated the load that was pushing him down the grade and his head
+began to swim. There appeared but one thing more to do: that was to make
+a noise; and as he neared the roundhouse he whistled like the wind.
+Aloysius O'Cooney McGrath, at the alarm, darted out of the house like a
+fox. As he reached the door he saw the construction train coming, and
+Johnnie Horigan in the gangway looking for a soft place to light.
+
+The wiper chartered the situation in a mental second. The train was
+running away, and Horigan was leaving it to its fate. From any point of
+view it was a tough proposition, but tough propositions come rarely to
+ambitious railroad men, and Aloysius was starving for any sort of a
+proposition that would help him out of the waste. The laborers in the
+caboose, already bewildered, were craning anxiously from the windows.
+Horigan, opposite the roundhouse, jumped in a sprawl; the engine was
+shot past Aloysius; boarding was out of the question.
+
+But on the siding stood a couple of flats, empty; and with his hair
+straight on centres, the little wiper ran for them and mounted the
+nearest. The steel train was jumping. Aloysius, bunching his muscle,
+ran the length of the two flats for a head, and, from the far corner,
+threw himself across the gap, like a bat, on a load of the runaway
+steel. Scrambling to his feet, he motioned and yelled to the hoboes, who
+were pouring frantic out on the hind flat of the string, to set brakes;
+then he made ahead for the engine.
+
+It was a race with the odds all wrong, for with every yard Aloysius
+gained, the train gained a dozen. By the time he reached the tender,
+breathless, and slid down the coal into the deserted cab, the train was
+heading into Little Horn gap, and every Italian aboard, yelling for
+life. Aloysius jumped into the levers, poked his head through the
+window, and looked at the drivers. They were in the back motion, and in
+front of them the sand was streaming wide open. The first thing he did
+was to shut half it off--the fight could not be won by wasting
+ammunition. Over and over again he jerked at the air. It was refusing
+its work. Where so many a hunted runner has turned for salvation there
+was none for Aloysius. He opened and closed, threw on and threw off; it
+was all one, and all useless. The situation was as simple as it was
+frightful. Even if they didn't leave the track, they were certain to
+smash into Number Sixteen, the up-passenger, which must meet them
+somewhere on the hill.
+
+Aloysius's fingers closed slowly on the sand lever. There was nothing on
+earth for it but sand, merely sand; and even the wiper's was oozing with
+the stream that poured from the tank on the whiskered rails. He shut off
+a bit more, thinking of the terrific curves below, and mentally
+calculated--or tried to--how long his steam would last to reverse the
+drivers--how he could shovel coal and sand the curves at the same
+time--and how much slewing the Italians at the tail of the kite could
+stand without landing on the rocks.
+
+The pace was giddy and worse. When his brain was whirling fastest, a man
+put a hand on his shoulder. Aloysius started as if Davy Jones had tapped
+him, and between bounces looked, scared, around. He looked into a face
+he didn't know from Adam's, but there was sand in the eyes that met
+his.
+
+"What can I do?"
+
+Aloysius saw the man's lips move, and, without taking his hands from the
+levers, bent his head to catch the words.
+
+"What can I do?" shouted the man at his elbow.
+
+"Give me steam--steam," cried the wiper, looking straight ahead.
+
+It was the foreman of the steel gang from the caboose. Aloysius, through
+the backs of his eyes, saw him grab the shovel and make a pass at the
+tender. Doing so, he nearly took a header through the gangway, but he
+hung to the shovel and braced himself better.
+
+With the next attempt he got a shovelful into the cab, but in the
+delivery passed it well up Aloysius's neck. There were neither words nor
+grins, but just another shovelful of coal a minute after; and the
+track-layer, in spite of the dizzy lurching, shot it where it
+belonged--into the furnace. Feeling that if one shovelful could be
+landed, more could, Aloysius's own steam rose. As they headed madly
+around the Cinnamon bend the dial began to climb in spite of the
+obstacles; and the wiper, considering there were two, and the steam and
+the sand to fight the thing out, opened his valve and dusted the
+whiskers on the curve with something more than a gleam of hope.
+
+If there was confusion on the runaway train, there was terror and more
+below it. As the spectre flitted past Pringle station, five miles down
+the valley, the agent caught a glimpse of the sallow face of the wiper
+at the cab window, and saw the drivers whirling backward. He rushed to
+his key and called the Medicine Bend despatcher. With a tattoo like a
+drum-roll the despatcher in turn called Soda Springs, ten miles below
+Pringle, where Number Sixteen, the up-passenger, was then due. He
+rattled on with his heart in his fingers, and answer came on the
+instant. Then an order flashed into Soda Springs:
+
+     To No. 16.
+
+     Take Soda Springs siding quick. Extra 240 West has lost control
+     of the train. DI.
+
+There never was such a bubbling at Soda Springs as that bubbling. The
+operator tore up the platform like a hawk in a chicken yard. Men never
+scattered so quick as when Number Sixteen began screaming and wheezing
+and backing for the clear. Above the town, Aloysius, eyes white to the
+sockets, shooting the curves like a meteor, watched his lessening stream
+of sand pour into the frost on the track. As they whipped over bridges
+and fills the caboose reeled like a dying top--fear froze every soul on
+board. To leave the track now meant a scatter that would break West End
+records.
+
+When Soda Springs sighted Extra 240 West, pitching down the mountain,
+the steel dancing behind and Aloysius jumping before, there was a
+painful sensation--the sensation of good men who see a disaster they are
+powerless to avert. Nor did Soda Springs know how desperate the wiper's
+extremity had become. Not even the struggling steel foreman knew that
+with Soda Springs passing like the films of a cinematograph, and two
+more miles of down-grade ahead, the last cupful of sand was trickling
+from the wiper's tank. Aloysius, at that moment, wouldn't have given
+the odd change on a pay check for all the chances Extra 240 and he
+himself had left. He stuck to his levers merely because there was no
+particular reason for letting go. It was only a question of how a man
+wanted to take the rocks. Yet, with all his figuring, Aloysius had lost
+sight of his only salvation--maybe because it was quite out of his power
+to effect it himself. But in making the run up to Soda Springs Number
+Sixteen had already sanded the rails below.
+
+He could feel the help the minute the tires ground into the grit. They
+began to smoke, and Aloysius perceived the grade was easing somewhat.
+Even the dazed foreman, looking back, saw an improvement in the lurch of
+the caboose. There was one more hair-raiser ahead--the appalling curve
+at the forks of the Goose. But, instead of being hurled over the
+elevation, they found themselves around it and on the bridge with only a
+vicious slew. Aloysius's hair began to lie down, and his heart to rise
+up. He had her checked--even the hoboes knew it--and a mile further,
+with the dangers past, they took new ones by dropping off the hind end.
+
+At the second bend below the Goose, Aloysius made a stop, and began
+again to breathe. A box was blazing on the tender truck, and, with his
+handy fireman, he got down at once to doctor it. The whole thing shifted
+so mortally quick from danger to safety that the two never stopped to
+inventory their fears; they seemed to have vanished with the frost that
+lured them to destruction. They jumped together into the cab; and
+whistling at the laborers strung back along the right of way Extra 240
+West began backing pluckily up hill to Soda Springs. The first man who
+approached the cab as they slowed down for the platform--in fact, people
+rather stood back for him--was Bucks, Superintendent of the Division;
+his car had come in attached to Number Sixteen.
+
+"How did your train get away from you?" he asked of Aloysius; there was
+neither speculation nor sympathy in his manner and his words were bitten
+with frost.
+
+"It didn't get away from me," retorted Aloysius, who had never before in
+his life seen the man, and was not aware that he owed him any money. But
+the operator at the Springs, who knew Aloysius and the superintendent
+both, was standing behind the latter doing a pantomime that would shame
+a medicine man.
+
+"Quick talking will do more for you than smart talking," replied the
+superintendent, crisply. "You'll never get a better chance while you're
+working for this company to explain yourself."
+
+Aloysius himself began to think so, for the nods and winks of the
+operator were bewildering. He tried to speak up, but the foreman of the
+steel gang put in: "See here, sport," he snapped, irreverently, at the
+angry official. "Why don't you cool your hat before you jump a fellow
+like that?"
+
+"What business is it of yours how I jump a fellow?" returned the
+superintendent, sharply, "who are you?"
+
+"I'm only foreman of this steel gang, my friend; and I don't take any
+back talk from anybody."
+
+"In that case," responded Bucks, with velvet sarcasm, "perhaps you will
+explain things. I'm only superintendent of this division; but it's
+customary to inquire into matters of this kind."
+
+Aloysius at the words nearly sank to the platform; but the master of the
+hoboes, who had all the facts, went at the big man as if he had been one
+of the gang, and did not falter till he had covered the perspiring wiper
+with glory.
+
+"What's the reason the air wouldn't work?" asked the superintendent,
+turning, without comment, when the track-layer had finished, to
+Aloysius.
+
+"I haven't had time to find out, sir."
+
+"Find out and report to me. What's your name?"
+
+"McGrath."
+
+"McGraw, eh? Well, McGraw, look close into the air. There may be
+something in it for you. You did the firing?" he added, turning short
+again on the unabashed steel foreman.
+
+"What there was done."
+
+"I'll do a little now myself. I'll fire you right here and now for
+impertinence."
+
+"I suppose you're the boss," responded the man of ties, imperturbably.
+"When I made the crack, I'd made it harder if I had known who you were."
+
+"You know now, don't you?"
+
+"I guess so."
+
+"Very good," said Bucks, in his mildest tones. "If you will report to me
+at Medicine Bend this afternoon, I'll see whether we can't find
+something better for your manners than cursing hoboes. You can ride down
+in my car, sport. What do you say? That will save you transportation."
+
+It brought a yell from the railroad men crowding around, for that was
+Bucks's way of doing things; and the men liked Bucks and his way. The
+ex-captain of the dagoes tried to look cool, but in point of fact went
+very sheepish at his honors.
+
+Followed by a mob, eager to see the finish, Superintendent Bucks made
+his way up the track along the construction train to where Aloysius and
+the engineer of Number Sixteen were examining the air. They found it
+frozen between the first and the second car. Bucks heard it all--heard
+the whole story. Then he turned to his clerk.
+
+"Discharge both crews of Extra 240. Fire Johnnie Horigan."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"McGrath, run your train back to Wind River behind us. We'll scare up a
+conductor here somewhere; if we can't, I'll be your conductor. Make your
+report to Medicine Bend," Bucks added, speaking to the operator; and
+without further words walked back to his car.
+
+As he turned away, the engineer of Number Sixteen slapped Aloysius on
+the back:
+
+"Kid, why the blazes didn't you thank him?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Bucks."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"What for? Jiminey Christmas! What for? Didn't he just make you an
+engineer? Didn't he just say, 'Run your train back behind us to Wind
+River'?"
+
+"My train?"
+
+"Sure, your train. Do you think Bucks ever says a thing like that
+without meaning it? You bet not."
+
+Bucks's clerk, too, was a little uncertain about the promotion. "I
+suppose he's competent to run the train back, isn't he?" he asked of
+Bucks, suggestively.
+
+Bucks was scrawling a message.
+
+"A man that could hold a train from Wind River here on whiskers, with
+nothing but a tankful of sand and a hobo fireman, wouldn't be likely to
+fall off the right of way running back," he returned dryly. "He's been
+firing for years, hasn't he? We haven't got half enough men like McGraw.
+Tell Neighbor to give him an engine."
+
+
+
+
+The Roadmaster's Story
+
+THE SPIDER WATER
+
+
+
+Not officially; I don't pretend to say that. You might travel the West
+End from fresh water to salt--and we dip into both--without ever
+locating the Spider Water by map or by name.
+
+But if you should happen anywhere on the West End to sit among a gang of
+bridge carpenters; or get to confidence with a bridge foreman; or find
+the springy side of a roadmaster's heart; _then_, you might hear all you
+wanted about the Spider Water--maybe more; anyway, full plenty, as
+Hailey used to say.
+
+The Sioux named it; and whatever may be thought of their interpretation
+of Scriptural views on land-grabbing, no man with sense ever attempted
+to improve on their names for things, whether birds, or braves, or
+winds, or waters--they know.
+
+Our General Managers hadn't always sense--this may seem odd, but on the
+system it would excite no comment--and one of them countenanced a
+shameful change in the name of the Spider Water. Some polytechnical
+idiot at a safe distance dubbed it The Big Sandy; and the Big Sandy it
+is to this day on map and in folder--but not in the lingo of trackmen
+nor the heart of the Sioux. Don't say Big Sandy to trackmen and hand out
+a cigar. It will not go. Say Spider Water without any cigar and you will
+get a word and a stool, and if you ask it, fine cut.
+
+The Spider Water--although ours is the pioneer line--was there when we
+first bridged it. It is probably as old as sundown, and nothing like as
+pretty. The banks--it has none to speak of. Its stones--they are
+whiskered. Its bed--full of sand-burs. Everything about the villain
+stream has a dilapidate, broken-down air: the very mud of the Spider
+Water is rusty.
+
+So our people bridged it; and the trouble began. A number of matters
+bothered our pioneer managements--Indians, outlaws, cabinet officers,
+congressional committees, and Wall Street magnates--but at one time or
+another our folks managed all of them. The only thing they couldn't at
+any time satisfactorily manage was the Spider Water. Bridge after bridge
+they threw across it--and into it. Year after year the Spider Water
+toyed with our civil engineers and our material department. One man at
+Omaha given to asthma and statistics estimated, between spells, that the
+Spider Water had cost us more money than all the water courses together
+from the Missouri to the Sierras.
+
+Then came to the West End a masterful man, a Scotchman, pawky and hard.
+Brodie was his name, an Edinburgh man with no end of degrees and master
+of every one. Brodie came to be superintendent of bridges on the Western
+Division, and to boss every water course on the plains and in the
+mountains. But the Spider Water took a fall even out of Brodie. It swept
+out a Howe truss bridge for Brodie before he got his bag unpacked, and
+thereafter Brodie, who was reputed not to care a stringer for anybody,
+did not conceal a distinct respect for the Spider.
+
+Brodie went at it right. He tried, not to make friends with the Spider,
+for nobody could do that, but to get acquainted with it. For this he
+went to its oldest neighbors, the Sioux. Brodie spent weeks and weeks up
+the Spider Water hunting, summers; and with the Sioux he talked Spider
+Water and drank fire-water. That was Brodie's shame--the fire-water.
+
+But he was pawky, and he chinned unceasingly the braves and the medicine
+men about the uncommonly queer water that took the bridges so fast. The
+river that month in and month out couldn't squeeze up water enough to
+baptize a pollywog and then, of a sudden, and for a few days, would rage
+like the Missouri, restore to the desert its own and living image, and
+leave our bewildered rails hung up either side in the wind.
+
+Brodie talked cloudbursts up country; for the floods came, times, under
+clear skies--and the Sioux sulked in silence. He suggested an
+unsuspected inlet from some mountain stream which maybe, times, sent its
+storm water over a low divide into the Spider--and the red men shrugged
+their faces. As a last resort and in desperation he hinted at the devil;
+and the sceptics took a quick brace with as much as to say, now you
+_are_ talking; and muttered very bad Medicine.
+
+Then they gave him the Indian stuff about the Spider Water; took him
+away up where once a party of Pawnees had camped in the dust of the
+river bed to surprise the Sioux; and told Brodie how the Spider, more
+sudden than buck, fleeter than pony, had come down in the night and
+surprised the Pawnees--and so well that the next morning there wasn't
+enough material left for a scalp dance.
+
+They took Brodie out into the ratty bed himself and when he said, heap
+dry, and said, no water, they laughed, Indianwise, and pointed to the
+sand. Scooping little wells with their hands they showed him the rising
+and the filling; the instant water where before was no water. And
+dropping into the wells feathers of the grouse, they showed Brodie how
+the current carried them always across the well--every time, and always,
+Brodie noticed--southeast.
+
+Then Brodie made Hailey dig many holes, and the Spider welled into them,
+and he threw in bits of notebooks and tobacco wrappers, but always they
+travelled southeast--always the same; and a bigger fool than Brodie
+could see that the water was all there, only underground. But when did
+it rise? asked Brodie. When the Chinook spoke, said the Sioux. And why?
+persisted Brodie. Because the Spider woke, said the Sioux. And Brodie
+went out of the camp of the Sioux wondering.
+
+[Illustration: Hailey]
+
+And he planned a new bridge which should stand the Chinook and the
+Spider and the de'il himself, said Brodie, Medicine or no Medicine. And
+full seven year it lasted; then the fire-water spoke for the wicked
+Scotchman--and he himself went out into the night.
+
+And after he died, miserable wreck of a man--and of a very great
+man--the Spider woke and took his pawky bridge and tied up the main line
+for two weeks and set us crazy--for we were already losing our grip on
+the California fast freight business. But at that time Hailey was
+superintendent of bridges on the West End.
+
+
+I
+
+His father was a section foreman. When Hailey was a kid--a mere kid--he
+got into Brodie's office doing errands; but whenever he saw a
+draughtsman at work he was no good for errands. At such times he went
+all into a mental tangle that could neither be thrashed nor kicked out
+of him, though both were conscientiously tried by old man Hailey and
+Superintendent Brodie; and Brodie, since he could do nothing else with
+him, finally kicked him into learning to read--and to cipher, Brodie
+called it. Then, by and by, Hailey got an old table and part of a cake
+of India ink himself, and himself became a draughtsman, and soon, with
+some cursing from Brodie and a "Luk a' that now!" from his paralyzed
+daddy, became chief draughtsman in Brodie's office. Hailey was no
+college man--Hailey was a Brodie man. Single mind on single
+mind--concentration absolute. Mathematics, drawing, bridges,
+brains--that was Hailey. But no classics except Brodie, who himself was
+a classic. All that Brodie knew, Hailey had from him; and where Brodie
+was weak, Hailey was strong--master of himself. When Brodie shamed the
+image he was made in, Hailey hid the shame best he could,--though never
+touched or made it his own--and Brodie, who hated even himself, showed
+still a light in the wreck by molding Hailey to his work. For, one day,
+said Brodie in his heart, this boy shall be master of these bridges.
+When I am rot, he will be here what I ought to have been--this Irish
+boy--and they will say he was Brodie's man. And better than any of these
+dough-heads they send me out, better than any of their Eastern graduates
+he shall be, if he was made engineer by a drunkard. And Hailey was
+better, far, far better than the graduates, better than Brodie--and to
+Hailey came the time to wrestle the Spider.
+
+Stronger than any man before or since he was for that work. All Brodie
+knew, all the Indians knew, all that a life's experience, eating,
+living, watching, sleeping with the big river had taught him, that
+Hailey knew. And when Brodie's bridge went out, Hailey was ready with
+his new bridge for the Spider Water which should be better than
+Brodie's, just as he was better than Brodie. It was to be such a bridge
+as Brodie's bridge with the fire-water left out. And the plans for a
+Howe truss, two pier, two abutment, three span, pneumatic caisson bridge
+to span the Big Sandy River were submitted to headquarters.
+
+But the cost! The directors jumped their table when they saw the
+figures. We were being milked at that time--to put it bluntly, being
+sucked, worse than lemons--by a Wall Street clique that robbed our good
+road, shaved our salaries, impoverished our equipment, and cut our
+maintenance to the quick. They talked economy and studied piracy. In the
+matter of appropriations, for themselves they were free-booters; for us,
+they were thrifty as men of Hamelin town. When Hailey demanded a
+thousand guilders for his Spider Water bridge, they laughed and said,
+"Come, take fifty." He couldn't do anything else; and he built a fifty
+guilder bridge to bar the Spider's crawl. It lasted really better than
+the average bridge and since Hailey never could get a thousand guilders
+at once, he kept drawing fifty at a time and throwing them annually at
+the Spider.
+
+But the dream of his life--this _we_ all knew, and the Sioux would have
+said the Spider knew--was to build a final bridge over the Spider Water:
+a bridge to throttle it for all time.
+
+It was the one subject on which you could get a rise out of Hailey any
+time, day or night,--the two pier, two abutment, three span, pneumatic
+caisson Spider bridge. He would talk Spider bridge to a Chinaman. His
+bridge foreman Ed Peeto, a staving big, one-eyed French Canadian,
+actually had but two ideas in life: one was Hailey; the other the Spider
+bridge. When the management changed again--when the pirates were sent
+out on the plank so many good men had walked at their command--and a
+great and public-spirited man took control of the system, Ed Peeto
+kicked his little water spaniel in a frenzy of delight. "Now, Sport, old
+boy," he exclaimed riotously, "we'll get the bridge!"
+
+So there were many long conferences at division headquarters between
+Bucks, superintendent, and Callahan, assistant, and Hailey,
+superintendent of bridges, and after, Hailey went once more to general
+headquarters lugging all his estimates revised and all his plans
+refigured. All his expense estimates outside the Spider bridge and one
+other point were slight, because Hailey could skin along with less money
+than anybody ever in charge of the bridge work. He did it by keeping
+everything up; not a sleeper, not a spike--nothing got away from him.
+
+The new president, as befitted a very big man, was no end of a swell,
+and received Hailey with a considerate dignity unknown on our End. He
+listened carefully to the superintendent's statement of the necessities
+at the Big Sandy River. The amount looked large; but the argument,
+supported by a mass of statistics, was convincing. Three bridges in ten
+years, and the California fast freight business lost twice. Hailey's
+budget called, too, for a new bridge at the Peace River--and a good one.
+Give him these, he said in effect, and he would guarantee the worst
+stretch on the system for a lifetime against tie-up disasters. Hailey
+stayed over to await the decision; but he was always in a hurry, and he
+haunted the general offices until the president told him he could have
+the money. To Hailey this meant, particularly, the bridge of his dreams.
+The wire flashed the word to the West End; everybody at the Wickiup was
+glad; but Ed Peeto burned red fire and his little dog Sport ate
+rattlesnakes.
+
+The old shack of a depot building that served as division headquarters
+at Medicine Bend we called the Wickiup. Everybody in it was crowded for
+room, and Hailey, whose share was what was left, had hard work to keep
+out of the wastebasket. But right away now it was different. Two extra
+offices were assigned to Hailey, and he took his place with those who
+sported windows and cuspidors--in a word, had departments in the
+service. Old Denis Hailey went very near crazy. He resigned as section
+boss and took a place at smaller wages in the bridge carpenter's gang so
+he could work on the boy's bridge, and Ed Peeto, savage with
+responsibility, strutted around the Wickiup like a cyclops.
+
+For a wonder the bridge material came in fast--the Spider stuff
+first--and early in the summer Hailey, very quiet, and Peeto, very
+profane, with all and several their traps and slaves and belongings
+moved into construction headquarters at the Spider, and the first
+airlock ever sunk west of the Missouri closed over the heads of tall
+Hailey and big Ed Peeto. Like a swarm of ants the bridge-workers cast
+the refuse up out of the Spider bed. The blow-pipes never slept: night
+and day the sand streamed from below, and Hailey's caissons, like armed
+cruisers, sunk foot by foot towards the rock; by the middle of September
+the masonry was crowding high-water mark, and the following Saturday
+Hailey and Peeto ran back to Medicine Bend to rest up a bit and get
+acquainted with their families. Peeto was so deaf he couldn't hear
+himself swear, and Hailey looked ragged and thin, like the old depot,
+but immensely happy.
+
+Sunday morning counted a little even then in the mountains. It was at
+least a day to get your feet on the tables up in Bucks's office and
+smoke Callahan's Cavendish--which was enough to make a man bless
+Callahan if he did forget his Maker. Sunday mornings Bucks would get out
+the dainty, pearl-handled Wostenholm that Lillienfeld, the big San
+Francisco spirit-shipper, left annually for him at the Bend, and open
+the R. R. B. mail and read the news aloud for the benefit of Callahan
+and Hailey and such hangers-on as Peeto and an occasional stray
+despatcher.
+
+"Hello," exclaimed Bucks, chucking a nine-inch official manila under the
+table, "here's a general order--Number Fourteen----"
+
+The boys drew their briers like one. Bucks read out a lot of stuff that
+didn't touch our End, and then he reached this paragraph:
+
+"'The Mountain and the Inter-mountain divisions are hereby consolidated
+under the name of the Mountain Division with J. F. Bucks as
+Superintendent, headquarters at Medicine Bend. C. T. Callahan is
+appointed Assistant Superintendent of the new division.'"
+
+"Good boy!" roared Ed Peeto, straining his ears.
+
+"Well, well, well," said Hailey, opening his eyes, "here's promotions
+right and left."
+
+"'H. P. Agnew is appointed Superintendent of bridges of the new division
+with headquarters at Omaha, vice P. C. Hailey,'" Bucks read on, with
+some little surprise growing into a shock. Then he read fast looking for
+some further mention of Hailey. Hailey promoted, transferred,
+assigned--but there was no further mention of Hailey in G. O. Number
+Fourteen. Bucks threw down the order in a silence. Ed Peeto broke out
+first.
+
+"Who's H. P. Canoe?"
+
+"Agnew."
+
+"Who the hell is he?" roared Ed. Nobody answered: nobody knew. Bucks
+attempted to talk; Callahan lit his lighted pipe; but Ed Peeto stared at
+Hailey like a drunken man.
+
+"Did you hear that?" he snorted at his superior.
+
+Hailey nodded.
+
+"You're out!" stormed Peeto.
+
+Hailey nodded. The bridge foreman took his pipe from his mouth and
+dashed it into the stove. He got up and stamped across to the window and
+was like to have sworn the glass out before Hailey spoke.
+
+"I'm glad we're up to high water at the Spider, Bucks," said he at last.
+"When they get in the Peace River work, the division will run itself for
+a year."
+
+"Hailey," Bucks spoke slowly, "I don't need to tell you what I think of
+it, do I? It's a damned shame. But it's what I've said for a
+year--nobody ever knows what Omaha will do next."
+
+Hailey rose to his feet. "Where you going, Phil?" asked Bucks.
+
+"Going back to the Spider on Number Two."
+
+"Not going back this morning--why don't you wait for Four, to-night?"
+suggested Bucks.
+
+"Ed," Hailey raised his voice at the foreman, "will you get those
+stay-bolts and chuck them into the baggage-car for me on Number Two? I'm
+going over to the house for a minute." He forgot to answer Bucks; they
+knew what it meant. He was bracing himself to tell the folks before he
+left them. Preparing to explain why he wouldn't have the Sunday at home
+with the children. Preparing to tell the wife--and the old man--that he
+was out. Out of the railroad system he had given his life to help build
+up and make what it was. Out of the position he had climbed to by
+studying like a hermit and working like a hobo. Out--without criticism,
+or allegation, or reason--simply, like a dog, out.
+
+Nobody at the Wickiup wanted to hear the telling over at the cottage;
+nobody wanted to imagine the scene. As Number Two's mellow chime whistle
+rolled down the gorge, they saw Hailey coming out of his house, his wife
+looking after him, and two little girls tugging at his arms as he
+hurried along; old Denis behind, head down, carrying the boy's shabby
+valise, trying to understand why the blow had fallen.
+
+That was what Callahan up with Bucks at the window was trying to
+figure--what it meant.
+
+"The man that looks to Omaha for rhyme or reason will beggar his wits,
+Callahan," said Bucks slowly, as he watched Ed Peeto swing the
+stay-bolts up into the car so they would crack the baggageman across the
+shins, and then try to get him into a fight about it. "They never had a
+man--and I bar none, no, not Brodie--that could handle the
+mountain-water like Hailey; they never will have a man--and they dump
+him out like a pipe of tobacco. How does it happen we are cursed with
+such a crew of blooming idiots? Other roads aren't."
+
+Callahan made no answer. "I know why they did it," Bucks went on, "but I
+couldn't tell Hailey."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I think I know why. Last time I was down, the president brought his
+name up and asked a lot of questions about where he was educated and so
+on. Somebody had plugged him, I could see that in two minutes. I gave
+him the facts--told him that Brodie had given him his education as an
+engineer. The minute he found out he wasn't regularly graduated, he
+froze up. Very polite, but he froze up. See? Experience, actual
+acquirements," Bucks extended his hand from his vest pocket
+in an odd wavy motion till it was lost at arm's length,
+"nothing--nothing--nothing."
+
+As he concluded, Hailey was climbing behind his father into the smoker;
+Number Two pulled down the yard and out; one thing Hailey meant to make
+sure of--that they shouldn't beat him out of the finish of the Spider
+bridge as he had planned it; one monument Hailey meant to have--one he
+has.
+
+The new superintendent of bridges took hold promptly; we knew he had
+been wired for long before his appointment was announced. He was a good
+enough fellow, I guess, but we all hated him. Bucks did the civil,
+though, and took Agnew down to the Spider in a special to inspect the
+new work and introduce him to the man whose bread and opportunity he was
+taking. "I've been wanting to meet you, Mr. Hailey," said Agnew
+pleasantly after they had shaken hands. Hailey looked at Agnew silently
+as he spoke; Bucks looked steadfastly at the grasshopper derrick.
+
+"I've been expecting you'd be along pretty soon," replied Hailey
+presently. "There's considerable to look over here. After that we'll go
+back to Peace River cañon. We're just getting things started there: then
+we'll run up to the Bend and I'll turn the office over."
+
+"No hurry about that. You've got a good deal of a bridge here, Mr.
+Hailey?"
+
+"You'll need a good deal of a bridge here."
+
+"I didn't expect to find you so far along out here in the mountains.
+Where did you get that pneumatic process?"
+
+It touched Hailey, the pleasant, easy way Agnew took him. The courtesy
+of the east against the blunt of the west. There wasn't a mean drop
+anywhere in Hailey's blood, and he made no trouble whatever for his
+successor.
+
+After he let go on the West End Hailey talked as if he would look up
+something further east. He spoke about it to Bucks, but Bucks told him
+frankly he would find difficulty without a regular degree in getting a
+satisfactory connection. Hailey himself realized that; moreover, he
+seemed reluctant to quit the mountains. He acted around the cottage and
+the Wickiup like a man who has lost something and who looks for it
+abstractedly--as one might feel in his pockets for a fishpole or a
+burglar. But there were lusty little Haileys over at the cottage to be
+looked after, and Bucks, losing a roadmaster about that time, asked
+Hailey (after chewing it a long time with Callahan) to take the place
+himself and stay on the staff. He even went home with Hailey and argued
+it.
+
+"I know it doesn't seem just right," Bucks put it, "but, Hailey, you
+must remember this thing at Omaha isn't going to last. They can't run a
+road like this with Harvard graduates and Boston typewriters. There'll
+be an entire new deal down there some fine day. Stay here with me, and
+I'll say this, Hailey, if I go, ever, you go with me."
+
+And Hailey, sitting with his head between his hands, listening to his
+wife and to Bucks, said, one day, "Enough," and the first of the month
+reported for duty as roadmaster.
+
+Agnew, meantime, had stopped all construction work not too far along to
+discontinue. The bridge at the Spider fortunately was beyond his
+mandate; it was finished to a rivet as Hailey had planned it. Three
+spans, two piers, and a pair of abutments--solid as the Tetons. But the
+Peace River cañon work was caught in the air. Hailey's caissons gave way
+to piles which pulled the cost down from one hundred to seventy-five
+thousand dollars, and incidentally it was breathed that the day for
+extravagant expenditures on the West End was past--and Bucks dipped a
+bit deeper than usual into Callahan's box of cross-cut, and rammed the
+splintered leaf into his brier a bit harder and said no word.
+
+"But if we lose just one more bridge it's good-bye and gone to the
+California fast freight business," muttered Callahan. "It's taken two
+years to get it back as it is. Did you tell the president that?" he
+growled at Bucks, smoking. Bucks put out his little wave.
+
+"I told him everything. I told him we couldn't stand another tie-up. I
+showed them all the records. One bridge at Peace River, three at the
+Spider in ten years."
+
+"What did they say?"
+
+"Said they had entire confidence in Agnew's judgment; very eminent
+authority and that sort--new blood was making itself felt in every
+department; that, of course, was fired at me; but they heard all I
+intended to say, just the same. I asked the blooming board whether they
+wanted my resignation and--" Bucks paused to laugh silently, "the
+president invited me up to the Millard to dine with him. Hello, Phil
+Hailey!" he exclaimed as the new roadmaster walked in the door. "Happy
+New Year. How's your culverts, old boy? Ed Peeto said yesterday the
+piles were going in down at Peace River."
+
+"Just as good as concrete as long as they stay in," smiled Hailey, "and
+they do cost a heap less. This is great bridge weather--and for that
+matter great track weather."
+
+We had no winter that year till spring; and no spring till summer; and
+it was a spring of snow and a summer of water. Down below, the plains
+were lost in the snow after Easter even, the snow that brought the
+Blackwood disaster with three engines and a rotary to the bad, not to
+speak of old man Sankey, a host in himself. After that the snow let up;
+it was then no longer a matter of keeping the line clear; it was a
+matter of lashing the track to the right of way to keep it from swimming
+clear. Hailey had his hands full; he caught it all the while and worse
+than anybody, but he worked like two men, for in a pinch that was his
+way. Bucks, irritable from repeated blows of fortune, leaned on the wiry
+roadmaster as he did on Callahan or Neighbor. Hailey knew Bucks looked
+to him for the track and he strained every nerve making ready for the
+time the mountain snows should go out.
+
+There was nobody easy on the West End: and least of all Hailey, for that
+spring, ahead of the suns, ahead of the thaws, ahead of the waters,
+came a going out that unsettled the oldest calculator in the Wickiup.
+Brodie's old friends began coming out of the upper country, out of the
+Spider valley. Over the Eagle pass and through the Peace cañon the Sioux
+came in parties and camps and tribes--out and down and into the open
+country. And Bucks stayed them and talked with them. Talked the great
+White Father and the Ghost dance and the Bad Agent. But the Sioux
+grunted and did not talk; they traveled. Then Bucks spoke of good
+hunting, far, far south; if they were uneasy Bucks was willing they
+should travel far, for it looked like a rising. Some kind of a rising it
+must have been to take the Indians out of winter quarters at such a
+time. After Bucks, Hailey tried, and the braves listened for they knew
+Hailey and when he accused them of fixing for fight they shook their
+heads, denied, and turned their faces to the mountains. They stretched
+their arms straight out under their blankets like stringers and put out
+their palms, downward, and muttered to Hailey.
+
+"Plenty snow."
+
+"I reckon they're lying," said Bucks, listening. "There's some deviltry
+up. They're not the kind to clear out for snow."
+
+Hailey made no comment. Only looked thoughtfully at the ponies shambling
+along, the squaws trudging, the braves loitering to ask after the
+fire-water chief who slept under a cairn of stones off the right of way
+above the yard. Bucks didn't believe it. He could fancy rats deserting a
+sinking ship, because he had read of such things--but Indians clearing
+out for snow!
+
+"Not for snow, nor for water," muttered Bucks, "unless it's fire-water."
+And once more the red man was misunderstood.
+
+Now the Spider wakes regularly twice; at all other times irregularly.
+Once in April; that is the foothills water: once in June; that is the
+mountain water. And the June rise is like this [image: round mound]. But the
+April rise is like this [image: peaked mound].
+
+Now came an April without any rise; that April nothing rose--except the
+snow. "We shall get it all together," suggested Bucks one night.
+
+"Or will it get us altogether?" asked Hailey.
+
+"Either way," said Callahan, "it will be mostly at once."
+
+May opened bleaker than April; even the trackmen walked with set faces;
+the dirtiest half-breed on the line knew now what the mountains held. At
+last, while we looked and wondered, came a very late Chinook; July in
+May; then the water.
+
+
+II
+
+Section gangs were doubled and track-walkers put on. By-passes were
+opened, bridge crews strengthened, everything buckled for grief. Gullies
+began to race, culverts to choke, creeks to tumble, rivers to madden.
+From the Muddy to the Summit the water courses swelled and boiled--all
+but the Spider; the big river slept. Through May and into June the
+Spider slept; but Hailey was there at the Wickiup, always, and with one
+eye running over all the line, one eye turned always to the Spider where
+two men and two, night and day, watched the lazy surface water trickle
+over and through the vagabond bed between Hailey's monumental piers.
+Never an hour did the operating department lose to the track. East and
+west of us railroads everywhere clamored in despair. The flood reached
+from the Rockies to the Alleghenies. Our trains never missed a trip; our
+schedules were unbroken; our people laughed; we got the business, dead
+loads of it; our treasury flowed over; and Hailey watched; and the
+Spider slept.
+
+Big Ed Peeto, still foreman of the bridges, hung on Hailey's steps and
+tried with his staring, swearing eye to make it all out; to guess what
+Hailey expected to happen, for it was plain he was thinking. Whether
+smoking or speaking, whether waking or sleeping, he was thinking. And as
+May turned soft and hot into June with every ditch bellying and the
+mountains still buried, it put us all thinking.
+
+On the 30th there was trouble beyond Wild Hat and all our extra men, put
+out there under Hailey, were fighting to hold the Rat valley levels
+where they hug the river on the west slope. It wasn't really Hailey's
+track. Bucks sent him over there because he sent Hailey wherever the
+Emperor sent Ney. Sunday while Hailey was at Wild Hat it began raining.
+Sunday it rained. Monday it rained all through the mountains; Tuesday it
+was raining from Omaha to Eagle pass, with the thermometer climbing for
+breath and the barometer flat as an adder--and the Spider woke.
+
+Woke with the April water and the June water and the rain water all at
+once. Trackmen at the bridge Tuesday night flagged Number One and
+reported the river wild, and sheet ice running. A wire from Bucks
+brought Hailey out of the west and into the east; and brought him to
+reckon for the last time with his ancient enemy.
+
+He was against it Wednesday morning with dynamite. All the day, the
+night and the next day the sullen roar of the giant powder shook the
+ice-jams. Two days more he spent there watching, with only an occasional
+thunderbolt to heave and scatter the Spider water into sudden, shivery
+columns of spray; then he wired, "ice out," and set back dragged and
+silent for home and for sleep--ten hours out of two hundred, maybe, was
+all he reckoned to the good when he struck a pillow again. Saturday
+night he slept and Sunday all day and Sunday night. Monday about noon
+Bucks sent up to ask, but Hailey was asleep; they asked back by the lad
+whether they should wake him; Bucks sent word, "No."
+
+Tuesday morning the tall roadmaster came down fresh as sunshine and all
+day he worked with Bucks and the despatchers watching the line. The
+Spider raced like the Missouri, and the men at the bridge sent in panic
+messages every night and morning, but Hailey lit his pipe with their
+alarms. "That bridge will go when the mountains go," was all he said.
+
+Tuesday was his wedding date, old Denis told Peeto; it was Hailey's
+wooden wedding, and when he found everybody knew they were going to have
+a little spread over at the cottage, Hailey invited the boys up for the
+evening. Just a little celebration, Hailey said, and everybody he spoke
+wrung his hand and slapped his iron shoulders till Hailey echoed good
+cheer through and through. Callahan was going over; Bucks had promised
+to look in, and Ed Peeto and the boys had a little surprise for Hailey,
+had it in the dark of the baggage-room in the Wickiup, a big Morris
+chair. No one would ever guess how it landed at Medicine Bend, but it
+was easy. Ed Peeto had pulled it badly demoralized out of a freight
+wreck at the Sugar Buttes and done it over in company screws and varnish
+to surprise Hailey. The anniversary made it just right, very hot stuff,
+Ed Peeto said, and the company had undoubtedly paid a claim voucher, for
+it--or would.
+
+It was nine o'clock, night, and every star blinking when Hailey looked
+in again at the office for the track-walkers' reports and the Railway
+weather bulletins. Bucks, Callahan, and Peeto sat about Duffy, who in
+his shirt-sleeves threw the stuff out off the sounder as it trickled in
+dot and dash, dot and dash over the wires. The west wire was good but
+east everything below Peace River was down. We had to get the eastern
+reports around by Omaha and the south--a good thousand miles of a
+loop--but bad news travels even round a Robin Hood loop.
+
+And Wild Hat came first from the west with a stationary river and the
+Loup creek falling--clear--good night. And Ed Peeto struck the table
+heavily and swore it was well in the west. Then from the east came
+Prairie Portage, all the way round, with a northwest rain, a rising
+river, and anchor ice pounding the piers badly, track in fair shape
+and--and--
+
+The wire went wrong. As Duffy knit his eyes and tugged and cussed a
+little the wind outside took up the message and whirled a bucket of rain
+against the windows. But the wires wouldn't right and stuff that no man
+could get tumbled in like a dictionary upside down. And Bucks and
+Callahan and Hailey and Peeto smoked, silent, and listened to the
+deepening drum of the rain on the roof.
+
+Then Duffy wrestled mightily yet once more, and the long way came word
+of trouble in the Omaha yards with the river at twenty-two feet and
+cutting; rising at Bismarck one foot an hour.
+
+"Hell to pay on the Missouri, of course," growled the foreman, staring
+single-eyed at the inoffensive bulletin. "Well, she don't run our way;
+let her boil, damn her."
+
+"Keep still," exclaimed Duffy, leaning heavily on the key. "Here's
+something--from--the Spider."
+
+Only the hum of the rain and the nervous break of the sounder cut the
+smoke that curled from the pipes. Duffy snatched a pen and ran it across
+a clip, and Bucks leaning over read aloud from his shoulder:
+
+     "Omaha.
+
+     "J.F.BUCKS.--Trainmen from Number Seventy-Five stalled west of
+     Rapid City--track afloat in Simpson's cut--report Spider bridge
+     out send--"
+
+And the current broke.
+
+Callahan's hand closed rigidly over his pipe; Peeto sat speechless;
+Bucks read again at the broken message, but Hailey sprang like a man
+wounded and snatched the clip from his superintendent's hand.
+
+He stared at the running words till they burnt his eyes and then, with
+an oath, frightful as the thunder that broke down the mountains, he
+dashed the clip to the floor. His eyes snapped greenish with fury and he
+cursed Omaha, cursed its messages and everything that came out of it.
+Slow at first, but bitter, then fast and faster until all the sting that
+poisoned his heart in his unjust discharge poured from his lips. It
+flooded the room like a spilling stream and no man put a word against it
+for they knew he stood a wronged man. Out it came--all the rage--all the
+heart-burning--all the bitterness--and he dropped, bent, into a chair
+and covered his face with his hands: only the sounder clicking iron
+jargon and the thunder shaking the Wickiup like a reed filled the ears
+about him. They watched him slowly knot his fingers and loosen them, and
+saw his face rise dry and hard and old out of his hands.
+
+"Get up an engine!"
+
+"Not--you're not going down there to-night?" stammered Bucks.
+
+"Yes. Now. Right off. Peeto! Get out your crew!"
+
+The foreman jumped for the door; Bucks hesitated barely an instant, then
+turning where he sat cut a telephone plug into the roundhouse; Callahan
+saw him act and leaning forward spoke low to Duffy. The despatcher
+snatching the train sheet began instantly clearing track for a bridge
+special.
+
+In twenty minutes twenty men were running twenty ways through the storm
+and a live engine boomed under the Wickiup windows.
+
+"Phil, I want you to be careful!" It was Bucks standing by the
+roadmaster's side at the window as they looked out into the storm. "It's
+a bad night." Hailey made no answer. "A wicked night," muttered Bucks as
+the lightning shot the yards in a blaze and a crash rolled down the
+gorge. But wicked as it was he could not bring himself to countermand;
+something forbade it. Evans the conductor of the special ran in.
+
+"Here's your orders!" exclaimed Duffy. Evans pulling down his storm cap
+nodded as he took the tissue. Hailey buttoned his leather jacket and
+turned to Bucks.
+
+"Good-by."
+
+"Mind your track," said Bucks, warningly to Evans as he took Hailey's
+hand. "What's your permit?"
+
+"Forty miles an hour."
+
+"Don't stretch it. Good-bye, Phil," he added, speaking to Hailey. "I'll
+see you in the morning."
+
+"In the morning," repeated Hailey. "Good-by. Nothing more in, Duffy?"
+
+"Nothing more."
+
+"Come on!" With the words he pushed the conductor through the door and
+was gone. The switch engine puffed up with the caboose. Ahead of it Ed
+Peeto had coupled in the pile driver. At the last minute Callahan asked
+to go, and as the bridge gang tumbled into the caboose, the assistant
+superintendent, Ed Peeto, and Hailey climbed into the engine. Denis
+Mullenix sat on the right and with William Durden, fireman, they pulled
+out, five in the cab, for the Spider Water.
+
+From Medicine Bend to the Spider Water is a ninety mile run; down the
+gorge, through the foothills and into the Painted Desert that fills the
+jaw of the spur we intersect again west of Peace River. From the Peace
+to the Spider the crow flies twenty miles, but we take thirty for it;
+there is hardly a tangent between. Their orders set a speed limit, but
+from the beginning they crowded it. Hailey, moody at first, began joking
+and laughing the minute they got away. He sat behind Denis Mullenix on
+the right and poked at his ribs and taunted him with his heavy heels.
+After a bit he got down and threw coal for Durden, mile after mile, and
+crowded the boiler till the safety screamed. When Durden took the shovel
+Hailey put his hand on the shoulder of Callahan, who was trying to hang
+to big Ed Peeto on the fireman's seat.
+
+"Callahan," he yelled in his ear, "a man's better off----" And Callahan,
+though he couldn't, in the pound and the roar, catch the words, nodded
+and laughed because Hailey fiercely laughed. Then going around to the
+right the roadmaster covered Denis Mullenix's fingers on the throttle
+latch and the air with his big hands and good-naturedly coaxed them
+loose, pushed the engineer back and got the whip and the reins into his
+own keeping. It was what he wanted, for he smiled as he drew out the
+bar a notch and settled himself for the run across the flat country.
+They were leaving the foothills, and when the lightning opened the night
+they could see behind through the blasting rain the great hulking pile
+driver nod and reel out into the Painted Desert like a drunken man; for
+Hailey's schedule was the wind and his limit the wide throttle.
+
+The storm shook them with freshening fury and drove the flanges into the
+south rail with a grinding shriek, as they sped from the shelter of the
+hills. The rain fell in a sheet, and the right of way ran a river. The
+wind, whipping the water off the ballast, dashed it like hail against
+the cab glass; the segment of desert caught in the yellow of the
+headlight rippled and danced and swam in the storm water, and Hailey
+pulled again at the straining throttle and latched it wider. Callahan
+hung with a hand to a brace and a hand to Peeto, and every little while
+looked back at the caboose dancing a horn-pipe over the joints;
+Mullenix, working the injector, stared astonished at Hailey; but Durden
+grimly sprinkled new blood into the white furnace and eyed his stack.
+
+Notch after notch Hailey drew, heedless of lurch and jump; heedless of
+bed or curve; heedless of track or storm; and with every spur at her
+cylinders the engine shook like a frantic horse. Men and monster alike
+lost thought of care and drunk a frenzy in the deafening whirl that
+Hailey opened across the swimming plain.
+
+The Peace River hills loomed into the headlight like moving pictures;
+before they could think it, the desert was behind. Callahan,
+white-faced, climbed down, and passed from hand to hand by Durden and
+Mullenix got his hands on Hailey's shoulders and his lips to his ear.
+
+"For God's sake, Phil, let up!"
+
+Hailey nodded and choked the steam a little. Threw a hatful of air on
+the shoes, but more as a test than a check: the fire was in his blood
+and he slewed into the hills with a speed unslackened. From the rocks it
+is a down grade all the way to the cañon, and the wind blew them and
+the track pulled them and a frenzied man sat at the throttle. Just where
+the line crosses Peace River the track bends sharply in through the
+Needles to take the bridge.
+
+The curve is a ten degree. As they struck it, the headlight shot far out
+upon the river--and they in the cab knew they were dead men. Instead of
+lighting the box of the truss the lamp lit a black and snaky flood
+sweeping over the abutment with yellow foam. The Peace had licked up
+Agnew's thirty-foot piles and his bridge was not.
+
+Whatever could be done--and Hailey knew all--meant death to the cab.
+Denis Mullenix never moved; no man that knew Hailey would think of
+trying to supplant him even with death under the ponies. He did what a
+man could do. There was no chance anyway for the cab: but the caboose
+held twenty of his faithful men.
+
+He checked--and with a scream from the flanges the special, shaking in
+the clutches of the air-brake, swung the curve.
+
+Again, the roadmaster checked heavily. The leads of the pile driver
+swaying high above gravity center careened for an instant wildly to the
+tangent, then the monster machine, parting from the tender, took the
+elevation like a hurdle and shot into the trees, dragging the caboose
+after it. But engine and tender and five in the cab plunged head on into
+the Peace.
+
+Not a man in the caboose was killed; it was as if Hailey had tempered
+the blow to its crew. They scrambled out of the splinters and on their
+feet, men and ready to do. One voice from below came to them through the
+storm, and they answered its calling. It was Callahan; but Durden,
+Mullenix, Peeto, Hailey, never called again.
+
+At daybreak wreckers of the West End, swarming from mountain and plain,
+were heading for the Peace, and the McCloud gang--up--crossed the Spider
+on Hailey's bridge--on the bridge the coward trainmen had reported out,
+quaking as they did in the storm at the Spider foaming over its
+approaches. But Hailey's bridge stood--stands to-day.
+
+Yet three days the Spider raged, and knew then its master, while he,
+three whole days sat at the bottom of the Peace clutching the engine
+levers in the ruins of Agnew's mistake.
+
+And when the divers got them up, Callahan and Bucks tore big Peeto's
+arms from his master's body and shut his staring eye and laid him at his
+master's side. And only the Spider ravening at Hailey's caissons raged.
+But Hailey slept.
+
+
+
+
+The Striker's Story
+
+McTERZA
+
+
+I would not call her common. Not that I would be afraid to, though most
+of the boys were more or less afraid of Mrs. Mullenix, but simply that
+it wouldn't be right--not in my opinion.
+
+She kept a short order house, let that be admitted at once, but her
+husband was long a West End engineer. Denis Mullenix went into the Peace
+with Hailey and Ed Peeto and Durden the night of the big June water on
+the West End. The company didn't treat her just right. I was a strong
+company man, although I went out with the boys. But I say, and I've
+always said, the company did _not_ treat Mrs. Mullenix just right.
+
+A widow, and penniless, she bought the eating-house at McCloud with the
+few hundreds they gave her.
+
+There were five young Mullenixes, and they were, every one, star
+children, from Sinkers, who was foxy, to Kate, who was not merely fine,
+she was royal. Twenty, and straight, and true, with a complexion like
+sunrise and hair like a sunset. Kate kept the cottage going, and Mrs.
+Mullenix ruled personally in the eating-house and in the short order
+annex. Any one that has tasted a steak grilled swell in Chicago or in
+Denver, and tasted one broiled plain by Mrs. Mullenix in McCloud, half a
+block from the depot, can easily understand why the boys behaved well.
+As for her coffee, believe it or not, we owe most of our world-famous
+West End runs, not so much to the Baldwin Locomotive Works, renowned as
+they are, nor to Mr. George Westinghouse, prince of inventors though we
+rank him--but to the coffee drawn by Mrs. Mary Mullenix; honor where
+honor is due.
+
+Mrs. Mullenix's coffee for many years made the boys hot: what now makes
+them hot is that she can't be persuaded to draw it for anybody except
+McTerza, and they claim that's the way he holds the Yellow Mail with the
+808; but all the same McTerza is fast stuff, coffee or no coffee.
+
+[Illustration: McTerza]
+
+They were none of them boisterous men, those Reading engineers who took
+our jobs after the strike; but McTerza was an oyster, except that he
+couldn't be swallowed.
+
+McTerza didn't give up very much to anybody; not even to his own chums,
+Foley and Sinclair. The fact is he was diffident, owing, maybe, to a
+hesitation in his speech. It was funny, the bit of a halt, but not so
+odd as his disposition, which approached that of a grizzly. He had
+impudence and indifference and quiet--plenty of each.
+
+There was one place up street that was, in special and particular,
+headquarters for the bad men in our crowd--for we had some--Gatling's
+billiard hall. Foley himself never had the nerve to tackle Gatling's.
+But one night, all alone and come from nobody knew where, the hall
+stuffed with striking men who had tasted blood that very day--McTerza
+walked into Gatling's.
+
+It was like a yearling strolling into a cañon full of wolves. They were
+so surprised at first they couldn't bite, but pretty soon they got
+McTerza up against a mirror and began pasting pool balls at him.
+
+When Ed Banks arrived it was as bad as a rapid-fire gun, and he carried
+McTerza out the side door like a warm tapioca pudding. When the fellow
+got round again, though, he was just as careless as ever.
+
+It was pretty generally understood that in the strike the short order
+house was with us. Mrs. Mullenix had reason to feel bitter toward the
+company, and it became speedily known that Mrs. Mullenix's was not a
+healthy place for the men who took our engines; their money was not
+wanted. In fact, none of the new men ever tried to get service there
+except McTerza. McTerza one morning dropped into the short order house.
+
+"Coffee," said he; he always cut things short because he was afraid he
+would get hung up between stations in remarks. Mrs. Mullenix, sick, had
+to manage as she could. Kate was looking after things that day at the
+restaurant, and she was alone. She looked at McTerza chillingly. Kate
+had more than enough instinct to tell a Reading man from the Brotherhood
+type. She turned in silence, and she poured a cup of coffee, but from
+the night tank: it was the grossest indignity that could be perpetrated
+on a man in the short order management. She set it with little of
+civility and less of sugar before McTerza, and pushing her girdle down,
+coldly walked front, half perched on a stool, and looked listlessly out
+the window.
+
+"Cool," ventured McTerza as he stirred a lump of sugar hopefully into
+his purchase. Kate made no comment on the observation; the thing
+appeared self-evident.
+
+"Could I have a little c-c-condensed milk?" inquired McTerza presently.
+"This sc-sc-scream looks pretty rich," he added, stirring thoughtfully
+as he spoke at the pot of mustard, which was the only liquid in sight.
+
+Kate Mullenix glared contemptuously at him, but she passed out a jug of
+cream--and it was cream. From the defiance on her face as she resumed
+her attitude she appeared to expect a protest about the cold coffee.
+None came. McTerza drank the stuff very slowly, blowing it carefully the
+while as if it was burning him up. It vexed Kate.
+
+"How much?" asked McTerza humbly, as he swallowed the last drop before
+it froze to the spoon, and fished for a dime to square his account.
+
+"Twenty-five cents." He started slightly but reached again into his
+pocket and without a word produced a quarter. Kate swept it into the
+drawer with the royal indifference of a circus faker and resumed her
+stool.
+
+"C-c-could I get another c-c-cup?" asked McTerza patiently. It looked
+like a defiance; however she boldly poured a second cup of the cold
+coffee, and McTerza tackled it.
+
+After an interval of silence he spoke again. "Do you sell tickets on
+c-coffee here?" She looked at him with a questioning insolence. "I mean,
+c-could a fellow buy a chance--or get into a raffle--on the h-h-h-hot
+tank?" asked McTerza, throwing a sad glance on the live coffee urn,
+which steamed cozily beside its silent companion.
+
+"That tank is empty," snapped Kate Mullenix recklessly, for in spite of
+herself she was getting confused.
+
+"If it is," suggested McTerza, peering gravely underneath at the jet of
+gas that blazed merrily, "you ought to draw your fire: you're liable to
+b-b-burn your c-c-crown-sheet."
+
+"What's the matter?" demanded Kate angrily; "is your coffee cold?"
+
+"Oh, no," he responded, shaking his head and waiting for the surprising
+disclaimer to sink in. "Not exactly cold. It's just dead."
+
+"We don't serve Reading men here," retorted Kate defiantly.
+
+"Oh, yes, you do," responded McTerza, brightening at once. "You serve
+them like t-t-tramps." Then after a pause: "Could I get a cigar?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How much is that kind?"
+
+"Fifty cents," snapped Kate, glancing into the street for some friendly
+striker to appear.
+
+"I want a good one."
+
+"That's a good one."
+
+"Fifty cents a b-b-box?"
+
+"Fifty cents apiece."
+
+"Give me a small one, please."
+
+He put down a dollar bill as he took the cigar. She threw a half back on
+the case. At that moment in walked two of our boys, Curtis Rucker and
+Ben Nicholson. McTerza had a great chance to walk out, but he didn't
+improve it. Rucker and Ben were Reds, both of them. Ben, in fact, was an
+old terror at best. Curtis Rucker was a blackish, quick young fellow,
+fine as silk in a cab, but a devil in a strike, and what was more, a
+great admirer of Kate Mullenix, and the minx knew it. As McTerza bit off
+the end of his cigar and reached for the gas-lighter he noticed that her
+face lighted wonderfully.
+
+With a smile the newcomers called for coffee, and with a smile they got
+it. McTerza, smoking quietly at the cigar-case, watched the steaming
+liquid pour from the empty tank. It was a dispiriting revelation, but he
+only puffed leisurely on. When Kate glanced his way, as she presently
+did, disdainfully, McTerza raised his finger, and pointed to the change
+she had thrown at him.
+
+"What is it, sir?"
+
+"Mistake."
+
+The strikers pricked up their ears.
+
+"There isn't any mistake, sir. I told you the cigars were fifty cents
+each," replied Kate Mullenix. Rucker pushed back his coffee, and sliding
+off his stool walked forward.
+
+"Change isn't right," persisted McTerza, looking at Kate Mullenix.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"You forgot to take out twenty-five cents more for that last cup of
+c-c-coffee," stammered the Reading man. Kate took up the coin and handed
+a quarter back from the register.
+
+"That's right," put in Rucker promptly, "make the scabs p-p-pay for what
+they g-g-get. They're sp-p-p-pending our money." The hesitating Reading
+man appeared for the first time aware of an enemy; interested for the
+first time in the abuse that had been continually heaped on him since he
+came to town: it appeared at last to reach him. He returned Rucker's
+glare.
+
+"You call me a scab, do you?" he said at last and with the stutter all
+out. "I belong to a labor order that counts thousands to your hundreds.
+Your scabs came in and took our throttles on the Reading--why shouldn't
+we pull your latches out here? Your strike is beat, my buck, and Reading
+men beat it. You had better look for a job on a threshing machine."
+
+Rucker jumped for McTerza, and they mixed like clouds in a cyclone. For
+a minute it was a whirlwind, and nothing could be made of it; but when
+they could be seen McTerza had the best man in our camp pinned under a
+table with his throat in one hand like the latch of a throttle.
+Nicholson at the same moment raising an oak stool smashed it over
+McTerza's head. The fellow went flat as a dead man, but he must have
+pulled up quick, for when Neighbor, rushing in, whirled Nicholson into
+the street, the Reading man already had his feet, and a corner to work
+from. Reed, the trainmaster, was right behind the big master mechanic.
+Rucker was up, but saw he was outnumbered.
+
+"Hurt, Mac?" asked Reed, running toward the Reading man. The blow had
+certainly dazed him; his eyes rolled seasick for a minute, then he
+stared straight ahead.
+
+"Look out," he muttered, pointing over Reed's shoulder at Kate Mullenix,
+"she's going to faint." The trainmaster turned, but Kate was over before
+her brother Sinkers could reach her as he ran in. Rucker moved towards
+the door. As he passed McTerza he sputtered villanously, but Neighbor's
+huge bulk was between the two men.
+
+"Never mind," retorted McTerza; "next time I get you I'll ram a billiard
+c-c-c-cue down your throat."
+
+It was the first intimation our fighting men had that the Reading fellow
+could do business, and the affair caused McTerza to be inspected with
+some interest from behind screens and cracker boxes as he sauntered up
+and down the street. When the boys asked him what he was going to do
+about his treatment in the short order house he seemed indifferent; but
+the indifference, as our boys were beginning to find out, covered live
+coals; for when he was pressed he threw the gauntlet at the whole lodge
+of us, by saying that before he got through he would close the short
+order house up. That threat made him a marked man. The Reading men were
+hated; McTerza was slated for the very worst of it. Everybody on both
+sides understood that--except McTerza himself. He never understood
+anything, for that matter, till it was on him, and he dropped back into
+his indifference and recklessness almost at once. He even tried the
+short order house again. That time Mrs. Mullenix herself was in the
+saddle. There were things in life which even McTerza didn't hanker after
+tackling more than once, and one was a second interview with Mrs.
+Mullenix. But the fellow must have made an impression on even the
+redoubtable Mrs. Mary, for she privately asked Neighbor, as one might of
+an honorable adversary, for peace' sake to keep that man away from her
+restaurant; so McTerza was banned. He took his revenge by sauntering in
+and out of Gatling's, until Gatling himself went gray-headed with the
+fear that another riot would be brought on his place.
+
+Oddly enough, McTerza had one friend in the Mullenix family. On the
+strike question, like many other McCloud families, the house of Mullenix
+was divided against itself. All held for the engineers except the
+youngest member, Sinkers. Sinkers was telegraph messenger, and was
+strictly a company man in spite of everything. He naturally saw a great
+deal of the new men, but Sinkers never took the slightest interest in
+McTerza till he handled Rucker; after that Sinkers cultivated him.
+Sinkers would listen just as long as McTerza would stutter, and they
+became fast friends long before the yard riots.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The day the carload of detectives was imported the fight was on.
+Scattering collisions breaking here and there into open fights showed
+the feeling, but it wasn't till Little Russia went out that things
+looked rocky for the company property at McCloud. Little Russia had
+become a pretty big Russia at the time of the strike. The Russians,
+planted at Benkleton you might say by Shockley, had spread up and down
+the line like tumbleweeds, and their first cousins, the Polacks, worked
+the company coal mines. At McCloud they were as hard a crowd after dark
+as you would find on the steppes. The Polacks, four hundred of them,
+struck while the engineers were out, and the fat went into the fire with
+a flash.
+
+The night of the trouble took even us by surprise, and the company was
+wholly unprepared. The engineers in the worst of the heat were accused
+of the rioting, but we had no more to do with it than homesteaders. Our
+boys are Americans, and we don't fight with torches and kerosene. We
+don't have to; they're not our weapons. The company imported the
+Polacks, let them settle their own accounts with them, said our fellows,
+and I called it right. Admitting that some of our Reds got out to mix in
+it, we couldn't in sense be held for that.
+
+It was Neighbor, the craftiest old fox on the staff of the division, who
+told the depot people in the afternoon that something was coming, and
+thinking back afterward of the bunches of the low-browed fellows dotting
+the bench and the bottoms in front of their dugouts, lowering at the
+guards who patrolled the railroad yards, it was strange no one else saw
+it. They had been out three weeks, and after no end of gabbling turned
+silent. Men that talk are not so dangerous; it's when they quit talking.
+
+Neighbor was a man of a thousand to act on his apprehension. All the
+afternoon he had the switch engines shunting cars about the roundhouse;
+the minute the arc lights went on the result could be seen. The old man
+had long lines of furniture vans, box cars, gondolas, and dead Pullmans
+strung around the big house like parapets. Whatever anybody else
+thought, Neighbor was ready. Even old John Boxer, his head blacksmith,
+who operated an amateur battery for salutes and celebrations, had his
+gun overhauled: the roundhouse was looking for trouble.
+
+It was barely eight o'clock that night when a group of us on Main Street
+saw the depot lights go out, and pretty soon telephone messages began
+coming in to Gatling's from the company plant up the river for the
+sheriff; the Polacks were wrecking the dynamos. The arc lights covering
+the yards were on a different circuit, but it didn't take the whiskered
+fellows long to find that out. Half an hour later the city plant was
+attacked; no one was looking for trouble there, and the great system of
+arcs lighting the yard for miles died like fireflies. We knew then,
+everybody knew, that the Polacks meant business.
+
+Not a man was in sight when the blaze sputtered blue, red, and black
+out; but in five minutes a dozen torches were moving up on the
+in-freight house like coyotes. We could hear the crash of the big oak
+doors clear down on Main Street. There, again, the company was weak;
+they hadn't a picket out at either of the freight houses. There wasn't
+so much as a sneeze till they beat the doors in; then there was a cry;
+the women were taking a hand, and it was a loot with a big L. The
+plunder maddened them like brandy. Neighbor, who feared not the Polacks
+nor the devil, made a sortie with a dozen men from his stockade, for
+that was what the roundhouse defenses looked like, to try to save the
+building. It wasn't in men to do it. The gutting was done and the
+kerosene burning yellow before he was half-way across, and the mob,
+running then in a wavering black line from the flames that licked the
+high windows, were making for the storehouse. The fellows were certainly
+up to everything good, for in plundering the freight house first they
+gave their women the chance to lay in supplies for months. Neighbor saw
+in a minute there was nothing left for him to protect at the east end,
+and before he could cut off the constantly lengthening line of rioters,
+they were between him and the long storehouse. It must have made the old
+man weep blood, and it was there that the first shooting occurred.
+
+A squad of the detectives reënforcing Neighbor's little following, ran
+in on the flank of the rioters as the master mechanic caught up with
+their rear. They wheeled, on his command to disperse, and met it with a
+cloud of stones and coupling pins. The detectives opened with their
+Winchesters, and a yell went up that took me back to the Haymarket.
+Their answer was the torch to the storehouse and a charge on the
+imported guards that shook their front like a whirlwind. The detectives
+ran for Neighbor's breastworks, with the miners hot behind, and a hail
+of deadly missiles on their backs. One went down at the turn-table, and
+it didn't look as if his life was worth a piece of waste. But the
+fellow, raising on one arm, began picking off the Polacks closest with a
+revolver. They scattered like turkeys, and he staggered across the table
+before they could damage him any worse. Half a dozen of us stood in the
+cupola of the fire-engine house, with the thing laid below like a
+panorama.
+
+Far as the blazing freight house lit the yards, we could see the rioters
+swarming in from the bottoms. The railroad officials gathered up stairs
+in the passenger depot waited helpless for the moment when the fury of
+the mob should turn on the unprotected building. The entire records of
+the division, the despatchers' offices, the headquarters of the whole
+West End were under that roof, with nothing to stand between it and the
+torches.
+
+Awkwardly as the rioters had maneuvered, they seemed then to be getting
+into better shape for mischief. They were quicker at expedients, and two
+intensely active leaders rose out of the crowds. Following the shouts of
+the pair, which we could just hear, a great body of the strikers dashed
+up the yard.
+
+"By the Gods!" cried Andy Cameron at my elbow, "they're going for the
+oil-house!"
+
+Before the words were out we could hear the dull stroke of the picks
+sinking into the cleated doors. Buckets were passed in and out from the
+house tanks. Jacketed cans of turpentine and varnish were hustled down
+the line to men drunk with riot; in a moment twenty cars were ablaze. To
+top the frenzy they fired the oil-house itself. Destruction crazed the
+entire population of the bottoms. The burning cars threw the front of
+the big brick depot up into the sky. As the reflection struck back from
+the plate-glass windows, the mob split into two great waves, and one
+headed for the passenger depot. They crossed the coal spurs brandishing
+torches and sledges and bars. We could see them plain as block signals.
+Every implement that ever figured in a yard showed in their line, but
+their leader, a youngish fellow, swung a long, tapering stake. As the
+foremost Polack climbed up on the last string of flats that separated
+them from the depot, the storage tanks in the oil-house took fire. The
+roof jumped from the wall-plates like one vast trap-door, and the liquid
+yellow spurted flaming a hundred feet up into the black. A splitting
+yell greeted the burst, and the Polacks, with added fury, raced towards
+the long depot. I made out then the man with the club. It was Rucker.
+
+The staff of the superintendent, and the force of despatchers, a handful
+of men all told, gathered at the upper windows and opened fire with
+revolvers. It was just enough to infuriate the rioters. And it appeared
+certain that the house would be burned under the defenders' feet, for
+the broad platform was bare from end to end. Not a ghost of a
+barricade, not a truck, not a shutter stood between the depot and the
+torch, and nobody thought of a man until Cameron with the quicker eyes
+cried:
+
+"For God's sake! There's McTerza!"
+
+Such as pay-day there he was, walking down the platform towards the
+depot, and humping alongside--Sinkers.
+
+I guess everybody in both camps swore. Like a man in his sleep he was
+walking right in the teeth of the Polacks. If we had tried ourselves to
+pit him it couldn't have been done cleaner. His friends, for McTerza had
+them, must have shivered--but that was just McTerza; to be where he
+shouldn't, when he shouldn't. Even had there not been more pressing
+matters, nobody could have figured out where the fellow had come from
+with his convoy, or where he was going. He was there; that was all--he
+was there.
+
+The despatchers yelled at him from above. The cry echoed back short from
+a hundred Polack throats, and they sent a splitter; it was plain they
+were mad for blood. Even that cry didn't greatly faze the fellow, but in
+the clatter of it all he caught another cry--a cry sent straight to
+McTerza's ear, and he turned at the voice and the word like a man stung.
+Rucker, leaping ahead and brandishing the truck-stake at the hated
+stutterer, yelled, "The scab!"
+
+The Reading engineer halted like a baited bear.
+
+Rucker's cry was enough--in that time and at that place it was enough.
+McTerza froze to the platform. There was more--and we knew it, all of
+us--more between those two men than scab and brotherhood, strike and
+riot, flood or fire: there was a woman. We knew it so well there was
+hardly a flutter anywhere, I take it, when men saw McTerza stooping,
+grasp Sinkers, shove him towards the depot, slip like a snake out of his
+pea-jacket, and turn to front the whole blooming mob. There wasn't any
+fluttering, I take it--and not very much breathing; only the scab, never
+a tremendous big man, swelled bigger in the eyes then straining his way
+than any man in McCloud has ever swelled before or since.
+
+Mobs are queer. A minute before it was the depot, now it was the
+scab--kill him.
+
+The scab stood. Rucker stumbled across a rail in his fury, and went
+sprawling, but the scab stood. The line wavered like tumbleweeds. They
+didn't understand a man fronting forty. Then Ben Nicholson--I recognized
+his whiskers--began blazing at him with a pistol. Yet the scab stood and
+halted the Polack line. They hesitated, they stopped to yell; but the
+scab stood.
+
+"Stone him!" shouted Ben Nicholson. McTerza backed warily across the
+platform. The Polacks wavered; the instinct of danger unsettled them.
+Mobs are queer. A single man will head them quicker than a hundred guns.
+There is nothing so dangerous as one man.
+
+[Illustration: Old Man Nicholson.]
+
+McTerza saw the inevitable, the steady circling that must get him at
+last, and as the missiles flew at him from a score of miners he
+crouched with the rage of a cornered rat, one eye always on Rucker.
+
+"Come in, you coyote!" yelled McTerza tauntingly. "Come in!" he cried,
+catching up a coupling pin that struck him and hurling it wickedly at
+his nearest assailant. Rucker, swinging his club, ran straight at his
+enemy.
+
+"Kill the scab!" he cried and a dozen bristling savages, taking his
+lead, closed on the Reading man like a fan. From the windows above, the
+railroad men popped with their pistols; they might as well have thrown
+fire-crackers. McTerza, with a cattish spring, leaped through a rain of
+brickbats for Rucker.
+
+The club in the striker's hands came around with sweep enough to drop a
+steer. Quick as a sounder key McTerza's head bobbed, and he went in and
+under on Rucker's jaw with his left hand. The man's head twisted with
+the terrific impact like a Chinese doll's. Down he went, McTerza,
+hungry, at his throat; and on top of McTerza the Polacks, with knives
+and hatchets and with Cossack barks, and they closed over him like water
+over a stone.
+
+Nobody ever looked to see him pull out, yet he wormed his way through
+them corkscrew fashion, while they hacked at one another, and sprang out
+behind his assailants with Rucker's club. In his hands it cut through
+guards and arms and knives like toothpicks. Rucker was smothering under
+toppling Polacks. But others ran in like rats. They fought McTerza from
+side to side of the platform. They charged him and flanked him--once
+they surrounded him--but his stanchion swung every way at once. Swarm as
+they would, they could not get a knife or a pick into him, and it looked
+as if he would clear the whole platform, when his dancing eye caught a
+rioter at the baggage room door mercilessly clubbing poor little
+Sinkers. The boy lay in a pitiful heap no better than a dying mouse.
+McTerza, cutting his way through the circle about him, made a swath
+straight for the kid, and before the brute over him could run he brought
+the truck-stake with a full-arm sweep flat across his back. The man's
+spine doubled like a jack-knife, and he sunk wriggling. McTerza made but
+the one pass at him; he never got up again. Catching Sinkers on his free
+arm, the Reading man ran along the depot front, pulling him at his side
+and pounding at the doors. But every door was barred, and none dared
+open. He was clean outside the breastworks, and as he trotted warily
+along, dragging the insensible boy, they cursed and chased and struck
+him like a hunted dog.
+
+At the upper end of the depot stands a huge ice-box. McTerza, dodging in
+the hail that followed him, wheeling to strike with a single arm when
+the savages closed too thick, reached the recess, and throwing Sinkers
+in behind, turned at bay on his enemies.
+
+With his clothes torn nearly off, his shirt streaming ribbons from his
+arms, daubed with dirt and blood, the scab held the recess like a giant,
+and beat down the Polacks till the platform looked a slaughter pen.
+While his club still swung, old John Boxer's cannon boomed across the
+yard. Neighbor had run it out between his parallels, and turned it on
+the depot mob. It was the noise more than the execution that dismayed
+them. McTerza's fight had shaken the leaders, and as the blacksmiths
+dragged their gun up again, shotted with nothing more than an Indian
+yell, McTerza's assailants gave way. In that instant he disappeared
+through the narrow passage at his back, and under the shadow behind the
+depot made his way along the big building and up Main Street to the
+short order house. Almost unobserved he got to the side door, when
+Rucker's crowd, with Rucker again on his feet, spied him dragging
+Sinkers inside. They made a yell and a dash, but McTerza got the boy in
+and the door barred before they could reach it. They ran to the front,
+baffled. The house was dark and the curtains drawn. Their clamor brought
+Mrs. Mullenix, half dead with fright, to the door. She recognized
+Nicholson and Rucker, and appealed to them.
+
+"Pray God, do you want to mob me, Ben Nicholson?" she sobbed, putting
+her head out fearfully.
+
+"We want the scab that sneaked into the side door, Mrs. Mary!" roared
+Ben Nicholson. "Fire him out here."
+
+"Sure there's no one here you want."
+
+"We know all about that," cried Rucker breaking in. "We want the scab."
+He pushed her back and crowded into the door after her.
+
+The room was dark, but the fright was too great for Mrs. Mullenix, and
+she cried to McTerza to leave her house for the love of God. Some one
+tore down the curtains; the glow of the burning yards lit the room, and
+out of the gloom, behind the lunch counter, almost at her elbow--a
+desperate sight, they told me--panting, blood-stained, and torn, rose
+McTerza. His fingers closed over the grip of the bread-knife on the
+shelf beside him.
+
+"Who wants me?" he cried, leaning over his breastwork.
+
+"Leave my house! For the love of God, leave it!" screamed Mrs. Mullenix,
+wringing her hands. The scab, knife in hand, leaped across the counter.
+Nicholson and Rucker bumped into each other at the suddenness of it, but
+before McTerza could spring again there was a cry behind.
+
+"He sha'n't leave this house!" And Kate Mullenix, her face ablaze,
+strode forward. "He sha'n't leave this house!" she cried again, turning
+on her mother. "Leave this house, after he's just pulled your boy from
+under their cowardly clubs! Leave it for who? He sha'n't go out. Burn it
+over our heads!" she cried passionately, wheeling on the rioters. "When
+he goes we'll go with him. It's you that want him, Curtis Rucker, is it?
+Come, get him, you coward! There he stands. Take him!"
+
+Her voice rang like a fire-bell. Rucker, burnt by her words, would have
+thrown himself on McTerza, but Nicholson held him back. There never
+would have been but one issue if they had met then.
+
+"Come away!" called the older man hoarsely. "It's not women we're after.
+She's an engineer's wife, Curt; this is her shanty. Come away, I say,"
+and saying, he pushed Rucker and their coyote following out of the door
+ahead of him. Mrs. Mullenix and Kate sprang forward to lock the door. As
+they ran back, McTerza, spent with blood, dropped between them. So far
+as I can learn that is where the courtship began, right then and
+there--and as McTerza says, all along of Sinkers, for Sinkers was always
+Kate's favorite brother, as he is now McTerza's.
+
+Sinkers had a time pulling through after the clubbing. Polacks hit hard.
+There was no end of trouble before he came out of it, but sinkers are
+tough, and he pulled through, only to think more of McTerza than of the
+whole executive staff.
+
+At least that is the beginning of the courtship as I got it. There was
+never any more trouble about serving the new men at the short order
+house that I ever heard; and after the rest of us got back to work we
+ate there side by side with them. McTerza got his coffee out of the hot
+tank, too, though he always insisted on paying twenty-five cents a cup
+for it, even after he married Kate and had a kind of an interest in the
+business.
+
+It was not until then that he made good his early threat. Sinkers being
+promoted for the toughness of his skull, thought he could hold up one
+end of the family himself, and McTerza expressed confidence in his
+ability to take care of the other; so, finally, and through his
+persuasions, the short order house was closed forever. Its coffee to-day
+is like the McCloud riots, only a stirring memory.
+
+As for McTerza, it is queer, yet he never stuttered after that night,
+not even at the marriage service; he claims the impediment was scared
+clean out of him. But that night made the reputation of McTerza a
+classic among the good men of McCloud. McCloud has, in truth, many good
+men, though the head of the push is generally conceded to be the husband
+of royal Kate Mullenix--Johnnie McTerza.
+
+
+
+
+The Despatcher's Story
+
+THE LAST ORDER
+
+
+In order to meet objection on the score of the impossible, and to
+anticipate inquiry as to whether "The Despatcher's Story" is true, it
+may be well to state frankly at the outset that this tale, in its
+inexplicable psychological features, is a transcript from the queer
+things in the railroad life. It is based on an extraordinary happening
+that fell within the experience of the president of a large Western
+railway system. Whether the story, suggestive from any point of view of
+mystery, can be regarded as a demonstration of the efficacy of prayer
+may be a disputable question. In passing, however, it is only fair to
+say that the circumstance on which the tale is based was so regarded by
+the despatcher himself, and by those familiar with the circumstance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A hundred times if once the thing had been, on appeals for betterment,
+before the board of directors. It was the one piece of track on the
+Mountain Division that trainmen shook their heads over--the Peace River
+stretch. To run any sort of a line through that cañon would take the
+breath of an engineer. Give him all the money he could ask and it would
+stagger Wetmore himself. Brodie in his day said there was nothing worse
+in the Andes, and Brodie, before he drifted into the Rockies, had seen,
+first and last, pretty much all of the Chilian work.
+
+But our men had the job to do with one half the money they needed. The
+lines to run, the grades to figure, the culverts to put in, the fills to
+make, the blasting to do, the tunnel to bore, the bridge to build--in a
+limit; that was the curse of it--the limit. And they did the best they
+could. But I will be candid: if a section and elevation of Rosamond's
+bower and a section and elevation of our Peace River work were put up to
+stand for a prize at a civil engineers' cake-walk the decision would go,
+and quick, to the Peace River track. There are only eight miles of it;
+but our men would back it against any eighty on earth for whipping
+curves, tough grades, villainous approaches, and railroad tangle
+generally.
+
+The directors always have promised to improve it; and they are promising
+yet. Thanks to what Hailey taught them, there's a good bridge there
+now--pneumatic caissons sunk to the bed. It's the more pity they haven't
+eliminated the dread main line curves that approach it, through a valley
+which I brief as a cañon and the Mauvaises Terres rolled into one single
+proposition.
+
+Yet, we do lots of business along that stretch. Our engineers thread the
+cuts and are glad to get safely through them. Our roadmasters keep up
+the elevations, hoping some night the blooming right of way will tumble
+into perdition. Our despatchers, studying under shaded lamps, think of
+it with their teeth clinched and hope there never will be any trouble on
+that stretch. Trouble is our portion and trouble we must get; but not
+there. Let it come; but let it come anywhere except on the Peace.
+
+It was in the golden days of the battered old Wickiup that the story
+opens; when Blackburn sat in the night chair. The days when the Old
+Guard were still there; before Death and Fame and Circumstance had
+stolen our first commanders and left only us little fellows, forgotten
+by every better fate, to tell their greater stories.
+
+Hailey had the bridges then, and Wetmore the locating, and Neighbor the
+roundhouses, and Bucks the superintendency, and Callahan, so _he_
+claimed, the work, and Blackburn had the night trick.
+
+
+I
+
+When Blackburn came from the plains he brought a record clean as the
+book of life. Four years on a station key; then eight years at Omaha
+despatching, with never a blunder or a break to the eight years. But it
+was at Omaha that Blackburn lost the wife whose face he carried in his
+watch. I never heard the story, only some rumor of how young she was and
+how pretty, and how he buried her and the wee baby together. It was all
+Blackburn brought to the West End mountains, his record and the little
+face in the watch. They said he had no kith or kin on earth, besides the
+wife and the baby back on the bluffs of the Missouri; and so he came on
+the night trick to us.
+
+I was just a boy around the Wickiup then, but I remember the crowd; who
+could forget them? They were jolly good fellows; sometimes there were
+very high jinks. I don't mean anybody drunk or that sort; but good
+tobacco to smoke and good songs to sing and good stories to tell--and
+Lord! how they could tell them. And when the pins slipped, as they
+would, and things went wrong, as they will, there were clear heads and
+pretty wits and stout hearts to put things right.
+
+Blackburn, as much as I can remember, always enjoyed it; but in a
+different way. He had such times a manner like nobody else's--a silent,
+beaming manner. When Bucks would roll a great white Pan-Handle yarn
+over his fresh linen shirt-front and down his cool clean white arms, one
+of them always bared to the elbow--sanding his points with the ash of a
+San Francisco cigar--and Neighbor would begin to heave from the middle
+up like a hippopotamus, and Callahan would laugh his whiskers full of
+dew, and Hailey would yell with delight, and the slaves in the next room
+would double up on the dead at the story, Blackburn would sit with his
+laugh all in a smile, but never a noise or a word. He enjoyed it all;
+not a doubt of that; only it was all tempered, I reckon, by something
+that had gone before. At least, that's the way it now strikes me, and I
+watched those big fellows pretty close--the fellows who were to turn,
+while I was growing up among them, into managers and presidents and
+magnates; and some of them from every day catch-as-catch-can men with
+the common alkali flecking their boots into dead men for whom marble
+never rose white enough or high enough.
+
+Blackburn was four years at the Wickiup on the night trick; it wouldn't
+have seemed natural to see him there in daylight. It needed the yellow
+gloom of the old kerosene lamp in the room; the specked, knotted,
+warped, smoky pine ceiling losing itself in black and cobwebbed corners;
+the smoldering murk of the soft-coal fire brooding in the shabby old
+salamander, and, outside in the darkness, the wind screwing down the
+gorge and rattling the shrunken casements, to raise Blackburn in the
+despatcher's chair. Blackburn and the lamp and the stove and the ceiling
+and the gloom--in a word, Blackburn and the night trick--they went
+together.
+
+Before the Short line was opened the Number One and Number Five trains
+caught practically all the coast passenger business. They were immensely
+heavy trains; month after month we sent out two and three sections of
+them each way, and they always ran into our division on the night trick.
+Blackburn handled all that main line business with a mileage of eight
+hundred and five, besides the mountain branches, say four hundred more;
+and the passenger connections came off them, mostly at night, for One
+and Five.
+
+Now, three men wrestle with Blackburn's mileage; but that was before
+they found out that despatchers, although something tougher than steel,
+do wear out. Moreover, we were then a good way from civilization and
+extra men. If a despatcher took sick there was no handy way of filling
+in; it was just double up and do the best you could.
+
+One lad in the office those days everybody loved: Fred Norman. He was
+off the Burlington. A kid of a fellow who looked more like a choir boy
+than a train despatcher. But he was all lightning--a laughing, restless,
+artless boy, open as a book and quick as a current. There was a better
+reason still, though, why they loved Fred: the boy had consumption;
+that's why he was out in the mountains, and his mother in Detroit used
+to write Bucks asking about him, and she used to send us all things in
+Fred's box. His flesh was as white and as pink as mountain snow, and he
+had brown eyes; he was a good boy, and I called him handsome. I reckon
+they all did. Fred brought out a tennis set with him, the first we ever
+saw in Medicine Bend, and before he had been playing an hour he had
+Neighbor, big as a grizzly, and Callahan, with a pipe in one hand and a
+tennis guide in the other, chasing all over the yard after balls; and
+Hailey trying to figure forty love, while Fred taught Bucks the Lawford
+drive. I don't say what he was to me; only that he taught me all I ever
+knew or ever will know about handling trains; and, though I was carrying
+messages then, and he was signing orders, we were really like kids
+together.
+
+Fred for a long time had the early trick. He came on at four in the
+morning and caught most of the through freights that got away from the
+River behind the passenger trains. There was no use trying to move them
+in the night trick. Between the stock trains eastbound and the both-way
+passenger trains, if a westbound freight got caught in the mountains at
+night the engine might as well be standing in the house saving
+fuel--there wasn't time to get from one siding to another. So Fred
+Norman took the freights as they came and he handled them like a
+ringmaster. When Fred's whip cracked, by Joe! a train had to dance right
+along, grade or no grade. Fred gave them the rights and they had the
+rest to do--or business to do with the superintendent or with Doubleday,
+Neighbor's assistant in the motive power.
+
+There was only one tendency in Fred Norman's despatching that anybody
+could criticise: he never seemed, after handling trains on the plains,
+to appreciate what our mountain grades really meant, and when they
+pushed him he sent his trains out pretty close together. It never
+bothered him to handle a heavy traffic; he would get the business
+through the mountains just as fast as they could put it at the Division;
+but occasionally there were some hair-curling experiences among the
+freights on Norman's trick trying to keep off each other's coat-tails.
+One night in July there was a great press moving eight or nine trains of
+Montana grassers over the main line on some kind of a time contract--we
+were giving stockmen the earth then. Everybody was prodding the Mountain
+Division, and part of the stuff came in late on Blackburn and part of it
+early on Fred, who was almost coughing his head off about that time,
+getting up at 3.30 every morning. Fred at four o'clock took the steers
+and sent them train after train through the Rat River country like
+bullets out of a Maxim gun. It was hot work, and before he had sat in an
+hour there was a stumble. The engineer of a big ten-wheeler pulling
+twenty-five cars of steers had been pushing hard and, at the entrance of
+the cañon, set his air so quick he sprung one of the driver shoes and
+the main rod hit it. The great steel bar doubled up like a man with a
+cramp. It was showing daylight; they made stop, and, quick as men could
+do it, flagged both ways. But the last section was crowding into the
+cañon right behind; they were too close together, that was all there was
+to it. The hind section split into the standing train like a butcher
+knife into a sandwich. It made a mean wreck--and, worse, it made a lot
+of hard feeling at the Wickiup.
+
+When the investigation came it was pretty near up to Fred Norman right
+from the start, and he knew it. But Blackburn, who shielded him when he
+could, just as all the despatchers did, because he was a boy--and a sick
+one among men--tried to take part of the blame himself. He could afford
+it, Blackburn; his shoulders were broad and he hadn't so much as a
+fly-speck on his book. Bucks looked pretty grave when the evidence was
+all in, and around the second floor they guessed that meant something
+for Norman. Fred himself couldn't sleep over it, and to complicate
+things the engineer of the stalled train, who hated Doubleday, hinted
+quietly that the trouble came in the first place from Doubleday's
+new-fangled idea of putting the driver shoes behind instead of in front
+of the wheels. Then the fat was in the fire. Fred got hold of it, and,
+boy-like--sore over his own share in the trouble and exasperated by
+something Doubleday was reported to have said about _him_ over at the
+house--lighted into Doubleday about the engine failure.
+
+Doubleday was right in his device, as time has proved; but it was
+unheard of then and moreover, the assistant master mechanic sensitive to
+criticism at any time, was a fearful man to run against. Sunday morning
+he and Norman met in the trainmaster's office. They went at each other
+like sparks, and when Doubleday, who had a hard mouth, began cursing
+Fred, the poor little despatcher, rankling with the trouble, anyway half
+sick, went all to pieces and flew at the big fellow like a sparrowhawk.
+He threw a wicked left into the master mechanic before Doubleday could
+lift a guard. But Walter Doubleday, angry as he was, couldn't strike
+Fred. He caught up both the boy's hands and pushed him, struggling
+madly, back against the wall to slap his face, when a froth of blood
+stained Fred's lips and he fell fainting; just at that minute Blackburn
+stepped into the room.
+
+It wasn't the kind of a time--they weren't the kind of men--to ask or
+volunteer explanations. Blackburn was on Doubleday in a wink, and before
+Walter could right himself the night despatcher had thrown him headlong
+across the room. As the operators rushed in, Blackburn and the tall
+master mechanic sprang at each other in a silent fury. No man dare say
+where it might have ended had not Fred Norman staggered between them
+with his hands up--but the blood was gushing from his mouth.
+
+It was pretty serious business. They caught him as he fell, and the boy
+lay on Blackburn's arm limp as a dead wire: nobody thought after they
+saw that hemorrhage that he would ever live to have another. I was
+scared sick, and I never saw a man so cut up as Doubleday. Blackburn was
+cool in a second, for he saw quicker than others and he knew there was
+danger of the little despatcher's dying right there in his tracks.
+Blackburn stood over him, as much at home facing death as he was in a
+fight or in a despatcher's chair. He appeared to know just how to handle
+the boy to check the gush, and to know just where the salt was and how
+to feed it, and he had Doubleday telephoning for Dr. Carhart and me
+running to a saloon after chopped ice in a jiffy. When anybody was
+knocked out, Blackburn was as regular a nurse as ever you saw; even
+switchmen, when they got pinched, kind of looked to Blackburn.
+
+That day the minute he got Fred into Carhart's hands there was Fred's
+trick to take care of, and nobody, of course, but Blackburn to do it. He
+sat in and picked up the threads and held them till noon; then Maxwell
+relieved him. Doubleday was waiting outside when Blackburn left the
+chair. I saw him put out his hand to the night despatcher. They spoke a
+minute, and went out and up Third Street toward Fred Norman's room. It
+was a gloomy day around the depot. Everybody was talking about the
+trouble, and the way it had begun and the way it had ended. They talked
+in undertones, little groups in corners and in rooms with the doors
+shut. There wasn't much of that in our day there, and it was depressing.
+I went home early to bed, for I was on nights. But the wind sung so,
+even in the afternoon, that I couldn't quiet down to sleep.
+
+
+II
+
+We were handling trains then on the old single-order system. I mention
+this because in no other way could this particular thing have happened;
+but there's no especial point in that, since other particular things do
+happen all the time, single order, double order, or no order system.
+
+The wind had dropped, and there was just a drizzle of rain falling
+through the mountains when I got down to the depot at seven o'clock that
+Sunday evening. I don't know how much sleep Blackburn had had during the
+day, but he had been at Fred Norman's bed most of the afternoon with
+Doubleday and Carhart, so he couldn't have had much. About half-past
+seven Maxwell sent me over there with a note and his storm-coat for him
+and the three men were in the room then. Boy-like, I hung around until
+it was time for Blackburn to take his trick, and then he and Doubleday
+and I walked over to the Wickiup together.
+
+At sundown everything was shipshape. There hadn't been an engine failure
+in the district for twenty-four hours and every hand-car was running
+smoothly. Moreover, there were no extra sections marked up and only one
+Special on the Division card--a theatrical train eastbound with Henry
+Irving and company from 'Frisco to Chicago. The Irving Special was
+heavy, as it always is; that night there were five baggage cars, a coach
+and two sleepers. I am particular to lay all this out just as the night
+opened when Blackburn took his train sheet, because sometimes these
+things happen under extraordinary pressure on the line and sometimes
+they don't; sometimes they happen under pressure on the despatcher
+himself. It was all fixed, too, for Blackburn to handle not only his own
+trick but the first two hours of Fred's trick, which would carry till
+six o'clock in the morning. At six Maxwell was to double into a
+four-hour dog-watch, and Callahan was to sit in till noon.
+
+There was nothing to hold the big fellows around the depot that night,
+and they began straggling home through the rain about nine o'clock.
+Before ten, Bucks and Callahan had left the office; by eleven, Neighbor
+had got away from the roundhouse; Doubleday had gone back to sit with
+Fred Norman.
+
+The lights in the yard were low and the drizzle had eased into a mist;
+it was a nasty night, and yet one never promised better for quiet.
+Before midnight the switchmen were snug in the yard shanties; in the
+Wickiup there were the night ticket agent downstairs and the night
+baggageman. Up-stairs every door was locked and every room was dark,
+except the despatcher's office. In that, Blackburn sat at his key;
+nearby, but closer to the stove, sat the night caller for the train
+crews, trying to starch his hair with a ten-cent novel.
+
+The westbound Overland passenger, Number One, was due to leave Ames at
+12.40 A. M., and ordinarily would have met a Special like the Irving at
+Rosebud, which is a good bit west of the river. But Number One's engine
+had been steaming badly all the way from McCloud, and on her schedule,
+which was crazy fast all night, she did not make Ames till some fifty
+minutes late. While there were no special orders, it was understood we
+were to help the Irving train as much as possible anyway. Bucks had made
+the acquaintance of the great man and his fellows on the westbound run,
+and as they had paid us the particular compliment of a return trip, we
+were minded to give them the best of it--even against Number One, which
+was always rather sacred on the sheet. This, I say, was pretty generally
+understood; for when it was all over there was no criticism whatever on
+Blackburn's intention of making a meeting-point for the two trains, as
+they then stood, at O'Fallon's siding.
+
+Between Ames and Rosebud, twenty miles apart, there are two
+sidings--O'Fallon's, west of the river, and Salt Rocks, east. There was
+no operator at either place. The train that leaves Ames westbound is in
+the open for twenty miles with only schedule rights or a despatcher's
+tissue between her and the worst of it. At one o'clock that morning
+Blackburn wired an order to Ames for Number One to hold at O'Fallon's
+for Special 202. A minute later he sent an order for Special 202 to run
+to O'Fallon's regardless of Number One. At least, he thought he sent
+such an order; but he didn't--he made a mistake.
+
+When he had fixed the meeting-point, Blackburn rose from his chair and
+sat down by the stove. I lazily watched him, till, falling into a doze
+as I eyed him drowsily, he began to loom up in his chair and to curl and
+twist toward the roof like a signal column; then the front legs of his
+chair struck the floor, and with a start I woke, just as he stepped
+hurriedly back to his table and picked up the order book.
+
+The first suspicion I had that anything was wrong was an exclamation
+from Blackburn as he stared at the book. Putting it down almost at once
+and holding the page open with his left hand, he plugged Callahan's
+house wire and began drumming his call. Callahan's "Aye, aye," came back
+inside of a minute, and Blackburn tapped right at him: "Come down." And
+I began to wonder what _was_ up.
+
+There was an interval; then Callahan asked, "What's the matter?"
+
+I got up and walked over to the water-tank for a drink. Blackburn again
+pressed the key, and repeated to Callahan precisely the words he had
+used before: "Come down."
+
+His face was drawn into the very shape of fear and his eyes, bent hard
+on me, were looking through me and through the shivering window--I know
+it now--and through the storming night, horror-set, into the cañon of
+the Peace River.
+
+The sounder broke and he turned back, listened a moment; but it was
+stray stuff about time freight. He pushed the chair from behind him,
+still like a man listening--listening; then with an effort, plain even
+to me, he walked across the office, pushed open the door of Callahan's
+private room, and stood with his hand on the knob, looking back at the
+lamp. It was as if he still seemed to listen, for he stood undecided a
+moment; then he stepped into the dark room and closed the door behind
+him, leaving me alone and dumb with fear.
+
+The mystery lay, I knew, in the order book. Curiosity gradually got the
+better of my fright, and I walked from the cooler over to the counter to
+get courage, and shoved the train register around noisily. I crossed to
+the despatchers' table and made a pretence of arranging the pads and
+blanks. The train order book was lying open where he had left it under
+the lamp. With my eyes bulging, I read the last two orders copied in it:
+
+     C. and E. No. One, Ames.
+       No. One, Eng. 871, will hold at O'Fallon's for Special 202.
+
+     C. and E. Special 202, Rosebud.
+       Special 202, Eng. 636, will run to Salt Rocks regardless of No.
+       One.
+
+SALT ROCKS! I glared at the words and the letters of the words.
+
+I re-read the first order and read again the second. O'Fallon's for
+Number One. That was right. O'Fallon's it should be for the Special 202,
+of course, to meet her. But it wasn't: it was the first station east of
+O'Fallon's he had ordered the Special to run to. It was a lap order. My
+scalp began to creep. A lap order for the Irving Special and the Number
+One passenger, and it doomed them to meet head on somewhere between
+O'Fallon's and the Salt Rocks, in the Peace River cañon.
+
+My mouth went sticking dry. The sleet outside had deepened into a hail
+that beat the west glass sharper and the window shook again in the wind.
+I asked myself, afraid to look around, what Blackburn could be doing in
+Callahan's room. The horror of the wreck impending through his mistake
+began to grow on me; I know what I suffered; I ask myself now what he
+suffered, inside, alone, in the dark.
+
+Oh, you who lie down upon the rail at night to sleep, in a despatcher's
+hand, think you, ever, in your darkened berths of the cruel
+responsibility on the man who in the watches of the night holds you in
+his keeping?
+
+Others may blunder; others may forget; others may fall and stand again:
+not the despatcher; a single mistake damns him. When he falls he falls
+forever.
+
+Young as I was, I realized that night the meaning of the career to which
+my little ambition urged me. The soldier, the officer, the general, the
+statesman, the president, may make mistakes, do make mistakes, that cost
+a life or cost ten thousand lives. They redeem them and live honored. It
+is the obscure despatcher under the lamp who for a single lapse pays the
+penalty of eternal disgrace. I felt something of it even then, and from
+my boy's heart, in the face of the error, in the face of the slaughter,
+I pitied Blackburn.
+
+Callahan's room door opened again and Blackburn came out of the dark. I
+had left the table and was standing in front of the stove. He looked at
+me almost eagerly; the expression of his face had completely changed. I
+never in my life saw such a change in so few minutes on any man's face,
+and, like all the rest, it alarmed me. It was not for me to speak if I
+had been able, and he did not. He walked straight over to the table,
+closed the order book, plugged Callahan's house wire again, and began
+calling him. The assistant superintendent answered, and Blackburn sent
+him just these words:
+
+"You need not come down."
+
+I heard Callahan reply with a question: "What is the matter?"
+
+Blackburn stood calmly over the key, but he made no answer. Instead, he
+repeated only the words, "You need not come down."
+
+Callahan, easily excitable always, was wrought up. "Blackburn," he asked
+over the wire, impatiently, "what in God's name is the matter?" But
+Blackburn only pulled the plug and cut him out, and sunk into the chair
+like a man wearied.
+
+"Mr. Blackburn," I said, my heart thumping like an injector, "Mr.
+Blackburn?" He glanced vacantly around; seemed for the first time to see
+me. "Is there anything," I faltered, "I can do?"
+
+Even if the words meant nothing, the offer must have touched him. "No,
+Jack," he answered quietly; "there isn't." With the words the hall door
+opened and Bucks, storm-beaten in his ulster, threw it wide and stood
+facing us both. The wind that swept in behind him blew out the lamps and
+left us in darkness.
+
+"Jack, will you light up?"
+
+It was Blackburn who spoke to me. But Bucks broke in instantly, speaking
+to him:
+
+"Callahan called me over his house wire a few minutes ago, Blackburn,
+and told me to meet him here right away. Is anything wrong?" he asked,
+with anxiety restrained in his tone.
+
+I struck a match. I was so nervous that I took hold of the hot chimney
+of the counter lamp and dropped it smash to the floor. No one said a
+word and that made me worse. I struck a second match, and a third, and
+with a fourth got the lamp on the despatchers' table lighted as
+Blackburn answered the superintendent. "Something serious has
+happened," he replied to Bucks. "I sent lap orders at one o'clock for
+Number One and the Irving Special."
+
+Bucks stared at him.
+
+"Instead of making a meeting-point at O'Fallon's I sent One an order to
+run to O'Fallon's and ordered the Special to run to Salt Rocks against
+One."
+
+"Why, my God!" exclaimed Bucks, "that will bring them together in--the
+Peace cañon--Blackburn!--Blackburn!--Blackburn!" he cried, tearing off
+his storm-coat. He walked to the table, seized the order book and
+steadied himself with one hand on the chair; I never saw him like that.
+But it looked as if the horror long averted, the trouble in the Peace
+River cañon, had come. The sleet tore at the old depot like a wolf, and
+with the sash shivering, Bucks turned like an executioner on his
+subordinate.
+
+"What have you done to meet it?" He drew his watch, and his words came
+sharp as doom. "Where's your wreckers? Where's your relief? What have
+you done? What are you doing? _Nothing?_ Why don't you speak? Will you
+kill two trainloads of people without an effort to do anything?"
+
+His voice rang absolute terror to me; I looked toward Blackburn
+perfectly helpless.
+
+"Bucks, there will be no wreck," he answered steadily.
+
+"Be no wreck!" thundered Bucks, towering in the dingy room dark as the
+sweep of the wind. "Be no wreck? Two passenger trains meet in hell and
+be no wreck? Are you crazy?"
+
+The despatcher's hands clutched at the table. "No," he persisted
+steadily, "I am not crazy, Bucks. Don't make me so. I tell you there
+will not be a wreck."
+
+Bucks, uncertain with amazement, stared at him again.
+
+"Blackburn, if you're sane I don't know what you mean. Don't stand
+there like that. Do you know what you have done?" The superintendent
+advanced toward him as he spoke; there was a trace of pity in his words
+that seemed to open Blackburn's pent heart more than all the bitterness.
+
+"Bucks," he struggled, putting out a hand toward his chief, "I am sure
+of what I say. There will be no wreck. When I saw what I had done--knew
+it was too late to undo it--I begged God that my hands might not be
+stained with their blood." Sweat oozed from the wretched man's forehead.
+Every word wrung its bead of agony. "I was answered," he exclaimed with
+a strange confidence, "there will be no wreck. I cannot see what will
+happen. I do not know what; but there will be no wreck, believe me or
+not--it is so."
+
+His steadfast manner staggered the superintendent. I could imagine what
+he was debating as he looked at Blackburn--wondering, maybe, whether the
+man's mind was gone. Bucks was staggered; he looked it, and as he
+collected himself to speak again the hall door opened like an uncanny
+thing, and we all started as Callahan burst in on us.
+
+"What's so?" he echoed. "What's up here? What did it mean, Blackburn?
+There's been trouble, hasn't there? What's the matter with you all?
+Bucks? Is everybody struck dumb?"
+
+Bucks spoke. "There's a lap order out on One and the theatrical Special,
+Callahan. We don't know what's happened," said Bucks sullenly.
+"Blackburn here has gone crazy--or he knows--somehow--there won't be any
+wreck," added the superintendent slowly and bewilderedly. "It's between
+O'Fallon's and Salt Rocks somewhere. Callahan, take the key," he cried
+of a sudden. "There's a call now. Despatcher! Don't speak; ask no
+questions. Get that message," he exclaimed sharply, pointing to the
+instrument. "It may be news."
+
+And it was news: news from Ames Station reporting the Irving Special
+_in_ at 1.52 A. M.--out at 1.54! We all heard it together, or it might
+not have been believed. The Irving Special, eastbound, safely past
+Number One, westbound, on a single track when their meeting orders had
+lapped! Past without a word of danger or of accident, or even that they
+had seen Number One and stopped in time to avoid a collision? Exactly;
+not a word; nothing. In at 52; out at 54. And the actors hard asleep in
+the berths--and on about its business the Irving Special--that's what we
+got from Ames.
+
+Callahan looked around. "Gentlemen, what does this mean? Somebody here
+is insane. I don't know whether it's me or you, Blackburn. Are you
+horsing me?" he exclaimed, raising his voice angrily. "If you are, I
+want to say I consider it a damned shabby joke."
+
+Bucks put up a hand and without a word of comment repeated Blackburn's
+story just as the despatcher had told it. "In any event there's nothing
+to do now; it's on us or we're past it. Let us wait for Number One to
+report."
+
+Callahan pored over the order book. "Maybe," he asked after a while,
+"didn't you send the orders right and copy them wrong in the book,
+Blackburn?"
+
+The despatcher shook his head. "They went as they stand. The orders
+lapped, Callahan. Wait till we hear from Number One. I feel sure she is
+safe. Wait."
+
+Bucks was pacing the floor. Callahan stuck silent to the key, taking
+what little work came, for I saw neither of the chiefs wanted to trust
+Blackburn at the key. He sat, looking, for the most part, vacantly into
+the fire. Callahan meantime had the orders repeated back from Ames and
+Rosebud. It was as Blackburn had said; they did lap; they had been sent
+just as the order book showed. There was nothing for it but to wait for
+Rosebud to hear from Number One. When the night operator there called
+the despatcher again it brought Blackburn out of his gloom like a
+thunderclap.
+
+"Give me the key!" he exclaimed. "There is Rosebud." Callahan pushed
+back and Blackburn, dropping into the chair, took the message from the
+night operator at Rosebud.
+
+"Number One, in, 2.03 A. M."
+
+Blackburn answered him, and strangely, with all the easy confidence of
+his ordinary sending. He sat and took and sent like one again master of
+the situation.
+
+"Ask Engineer Sampson to come to the wire," said he to Rosebud. Sampson,
+not Maje, but his brother Arnold, was pulling Number One that night.
+
+"Engineer Sampson here," came from Rosebud presently.
+
+"Ask Sampson where he met Special 202 to-night."
+
+We waited, wrought up, for in that reply must come the answer to all the
+mystery. There was a hitch at the other end of the wire; then Rosebud
+answered:
+
+"Sampson says he will tell you all about it in the morning."
+
+"That will not do," tapped the despatcher. "This is Blackburn.
+Superintendent Bucks and Callahan are here. They want the facts. Where
+did you meet Special 202?"
+
+There was another wearing delay. When the answer came it was slowly, at
+the engineer's dictation.
+
+"My orders were to hold at O'Fallon's for Special 202," clicked the
+sounder, repeating the engineer's halting statement. "When we cleared
+Salt Rocks siding and got down among the Quakers, I was cutting along
+pretty hard to make the cañon when I saw, or thought I saw, a headlight
+flash between the buttes across the river. It startled me, for I knew
+the 202 Special could not be very far west of us. Anyway, I made a quick
+stop, and reversed and backed tight as I could make it for Salt Rocks
+siding. Before we had got a mile I saw the headlight again, and I knew
+the 202 was against our order. We got into the clear just as the Special
+went by humming. Nobody but our train crew and my fireman knows anything
+about this."
+
+The three men in front of me made no comment as they looked at each
+other. How was it possible for one train to have seen the headlight of
+another among the buttes of the Peace River country?
+
+It was--possible. Just possible. But to figure once in how many times a
+vista would have opened for a single second so one engineer could see
+the light of another would stagger a multiplying machine. Chance? Well,
+yes, perhaps. But there were no suggestions of that nature that night
+under the despatcher's lamp at the Wickiup, with the storm driving down
+the pass as it drove that night; and yet at Peace River, where the
+clouds never rested, that night was clear. Blackburn, getting up,
+steadied himself on his feet.
+
+"Go in there and lie down," said Callahan to him. "You're used up, old
+fellow, I can see that. I'll take the key. Don't say a word."
+
+"Not a word, Blackburn," put in Bucks, resting his big hand on the
+despatcher's shoulder. "There's no harm done; nobody knows it. Bury the
+thing right here to-night. You're broke up. Go in there and lie down."
+
+He took their hands; started to speak; but they pushed him into
+Callahan's room; they didn't want to hear anything.
+
+All the night it stormed at the Wickiup. In the morning the Irving
+Special, flying toward Chicago, was far down the Platte. Number One was
+steaming west, deep in the heart of the Rockies; Blackburn lay in
+Callahan's room. It was nine o'clock, and the sun was streaming through
+the east windows when Fred Norman opened the office door. Fred could do
+those things even when he was sickest. Have a hemorrhage one day, scare
+everybody to death, and go back to his trick the next. He asked right
+away for Kit, as he called Blackburn, and when they pointed to
+Callahan's door Fred pushed it open and went in. A cry brought the
+operators to him. Blackburn was stretched on his knees half on the
+floor, half face downward on the sofa. His head had fallen between his
+arms, which were stretched above it. In his hands, clasped tight, they
+found his watch with the picture of his wife and his baby. Had he asked,
+when he first went into that room that night--when he wrestled like
+Jacob of old in his agony of prayer--that his life be taken if only
+their lives, the lives of those in his keeping, might be spared? I do
+not know. They found him dead.
+
+
+
+
+The Nightman's Story
+
+BULLHEAD
+
+
+
+His full name was James Gillespie Blaine Lyons; but his real name was
+Bullhead--just plain Bullhead.
+
+When he began passenger braking the trainmaster put him on with Pat
+Francis. The very first trip he made, a man in the smoking car asked him
+where the drinking water was. Bullhead, though sufficiently gaudy in his
+new uniform, was not prepared for any question that might be thrown at
+him. He pulled out his book of rules, which he had been told to consult
+in case of doubt, and after some study referred his inquirer to the
+fire-bucket hanging at the front end of the car. The passenger happened
+to be a foreigner and very thirsty. He climbed up on the Baker heater,
+according to directions, and did at some risk get hold of the
+bucket--but it was empty.
+
+"Iss no vater hier," cried the second-class man. Bullhead sat half way
+back in the car, still studying the rules. He looked up surprised but
+turning around pointed with confidence to the firepail at the hind end
+of the smoker.
+
+"Try the other bucket, Johnnie," he said, calmly. At that every man in
+the car began to choke; and the German, thinking the new brakeman was
+making funny of him, wanted to fight. Now Bullhead would rather fight
+than go to Sunday-school any day, and without parley he engaged the
+insulted homesteader. Pat Francis parted them after some hard words on
+his part; and Kenyon, the trainmaster, gave Bullhead three months to
+study up where the water cooler was located in Standard, A pattern,
+smoking cars. Bullhead's own mother, who did Callahan's washing, refused
+to believe her son was so stupid as not to know; but Bullhead, who now
+tells the story himself, claims he did not know.
+
+When he got back to work he tried the freight trains. They put him on
+the Number Twenty-nine, local, and one day they were drifting into the
+yard at Goose River Junction when there came from the cab a sharp call
+for brakes. Instead of climbing out and grabbing a brakewheel for dear
+life, Bullhead looked out the window to see what the excitement was. By
+the time he had decided what rule covered the emergency his train had
+driven a stray flat half way through the eating house east of the depot.
+Kenyon, after hearing Bullhead's own candid statement of fact, coughed
+apologetically and said three years; whereupon Bullhead resigned
+permanently from the train service and applied for a job in the
+roundhouse.
+
+But the roundhouse--for a boy like Bullhead. It would hardly do. He was
+put at helping Pete Beezer, the boiler washer. One night Pete was
+snatching his customary nap in the pit when the hose got away from
+Bullhead and struck his boss. In the confusion, Peter, who was nearly
+drowned, lost a set of teeth; that was sufficient in that department of
+the motive power; Bullhead moved on, suddenly. Neighbor thought he might
+do for a wiper. After the boy had learned something about wiping he
+tried one day to back an engine out on the turn-table just to see
+whether it was easy. It was; dead easy; but the turn-table happened to
+be arranged wrong for the experiment; and Neighbor, before calling in
+the wrecking gang, took occasion to kick Bullhead out of the roundhouse
+bodily.
+
+Nevertheless, Bullhead, like every Medicine Bend boy, wanted to
+railroad. Some fellows can't be shut off. He was offered the presidency
+of a Cincinnati bank by a private detective agency which had just sent
+up the active head of the institution for ten years; but as Bullhead
+could not arrange transportation east of the river he was obliged to let
+the opportunity pass.
+
+When the widow Lyons asked Callahan to put Jamie at telegraphing the
+assistant superintendent nearly fell off his chair. Mrs. Lyons, however,
+was in earnest, as the red-haired man soon found by the way his shirts
+were starched. Her son, meantime, had gotten hold of a sounder, and was
+studying telegraphy, corresponding at the same time with the Cincinnati
+detective agency for the town and county rights to all "hidden and
+undiscovered crime," on the Mountain Division--rights offered at the
+very reasonable price of ten dollars by registered mail, bank draft or
+express money order; currency at sender's risk. The only obligations
+imposed by this deal were secrecy and a German silver star; and
+Bullhead, after holding his trusting mother up for the ten, became a
+regularly installed detective with proprietary rights to local misdeeds.
+Days he plied his sounder, and nights he lay awake trying to mix up Pete
+Beezer and Neighbor with the disappearance of various bunches of horses
+from the Bar M ranch.
+
+About the same time he became interested in dentistry; not that there is
+any obvious connection between railroading and detective work and
+filling teeth--but his thoughts just turned that way and following the
+advice of a local dentist, who didn't want altogether to discourage him,
+Bullhead borrowed a pair of forceps and pulled all the teeth out of a
+circular saw to get his arm into practice. Before the dentist pronounced
+him proficient, though, his mother had Callahan reduced to terms, and
+the assistant superintendent put Bullhead among the operators.
+
+That was a great day for Bullhead. He had to take the worst of it, of
+course; sweeping the office and that; but whatever his faults, the boy
+did as he was told. Only one vicious habit clung to him--he had a
+passion for reading the rules. In spite of this, however, he steadily
+mastered the taking, and, as for sending, he could do that before he
+got out of the cuspidor department. Everybody around the Wickiup bullied
+him, and maybe that was his salvation. He got used to expecting the
+worst of it, and nerved himself to take it, which in railroading is half
+the battle.
+
+A few months after he became competent to handle a key the nightman at
+Goose River Junction went wrong. When Callahan told Bullhead he thought
+about giving him the job, the boy went wild with excitement, and in a
+burst of confidence showed Callahan his star. It was the best thing that
+ever happened, for the assistant head of the division had an impulsive
+way of swearing the nonsense out of a boy's head, and when Bullhead
+confessed to being a detective a fiery stream was poured on him. The
+foolishness couldn't quite all be driven out in one round; but Jamie
+Lyons went to Goose River fairly well informed as to how much of a fool
+he was.
+
+Goose River Junction is not a lively place. It has been claimed that
+even the buzzards at Goose River Junction play solitaire. But apart
+from the utter loneliness it was hard to hold operators there on account
+of Nellie Cassidy. A man rarely stayed at Goose River past the second
+pay-check. When he got money enough to resign he resigned; and all
+because Nellie Cassidy despised operators.
+
+The lunch counter that Matt Cassidy, Nellie's father, ran at the
+Junction was just an adjunct for feeding train crews and the few miners
+who wandered down from the Glencoe spur. Matt himself took the night
+turn, but days it was Nellie who heated the Goose River coffee and
+dispensed the pie--contract pie made at Medicine Bend, and sent by local
+freight classified as ammunition, loaded and released, O. R.
+
+It was Nellie's cruelty that made the frequent shifts at Goose River.
+Not that she was unimpressible, or had no heroes. She had plenty of them
+in the engine and the train service. It was the smart-uniformed young
+conductors and the kerchiefed juvenile engineers on the fast runs to
+whom Nellie paid deference, and for whom she served the preferred
+doughnuts.
+
+But this was nothing to Bullhead. He had his head so full of things when
+he took his new position that he failed to observe Nellie's contempt. He
+was just passing out of the private detective stage; just getting over
+dental beginnings; just rising to the responsibility of the key, and a
+month devoted to his immediate work and the study of the rules passed
+like a limited train. Previous to the coming of Bullhead, no Goose River
+man had tried study of the rules as a remedy for loneliness; it proved a
+great scheme; but it aroused the unmeasured contempt of Nellie Cassidy.
+She scorned Bullhead unspeakably, and her only uneasiness was that he
+seemed unconscious of it.
+
+However, the little Goose River girl had no idea of letting him escape
+that way. When scorn became clearly useless she tried cajolery--she
+smiled on Bullhead. Not till then did he give up; her smile was his
+undoing. It was so absolutely novel to Bullhead--Bullhead, who had never
+got anything but kicks and curses and frowns. Before Nellie's smiles,
+judiciously administered, Bullhead melted like the sugar she began to
+sprinkle in his coffee. That was what she wanted; when he was fairly
+dissolved, Nellie like the coffee went gradually cold. Bullhead became
+miserable, and to her life at Goose River was once more endurable.
+
+It was then that Bullhead began to sit up all day, after working all
+night, to get a single smile from the direction of the pie rack. He
+hung, utterly miserable, around the lunch room all day, while Nellie
+made impersonal remarks about the colorless life of a mere operator as
+compared with life in the cab of a ten-wheeler. She admired the
+engineer, Nellie--was there ever a doughnut girl who didn't? And when
+One or Two rose smoking out of the alkali east or the alkali west, and
+the mogul engine checked its gray string of sleepers at the Junction
+platform, and Bat Mullen climbed down to oil 'round--as he always
+did--there were the liveliest kind of heels behind the counter.
+
+Such were the moments when Bullhead sat in the lunch room, unnoticed,
+somewhat back where the flies were bad, and helped himself aimlessly to
+the sizzling maple syrup--Nellie rustling back and forth for Engineer
+Mullen, who ran in for a quick cup, and consulted, after each swallow, a
+dazzling open-faced gold watch, thin as a double eagle; for Bat at
+twenty-one was pulling the fast trains and carried the best. And with
+Bullhead feeding on flannel cakes and despair, and Nellie Cassidy
+looking quite her smartest, Mullen would drink his coffee in an
+impassive rush, never even glancing Bullhead's way--absolutely ignoring
+Bullhead. What was he but a nightman, anyway? Then Mullen would take as
+much as a minute of his running time to walk forward to the engine with
+Miss Cassidy, and stand in the lee of the drivers chatting with her,
+while Bullhead went completely frantic.
+
+It was being ignored in that way, after her smiles had once been his,
+that crushed the night operator. It filled his head with schemes for
+obtaining recognition at all hazards. He began by quarrelling violently
+with Nellie, and things were coming to a serious pass around the depot
+when the Klondike business struck the Mountain Division. It came with a
+rush and when they began running through freight extras by way of the
+Goose River short line, day and night, the Junction station caught the
+thick of it. It was something new altogether for the short line rails
+and the short line operators, and Bullhead's night trick, with nothing
+to do but poke the fire and pop at coyotes, became straightway a busy
+and important post. The added work kept him jumping from sundown till
+dawn, and kept him from loafing daytimes around the lunch counter and
+ruining himself on fermented syrup.
+
+On a certain night, windier than all the November nights that had gone
+before, the night operator sat alone in the office facing a resolve.
+Goose River had become intolerable. Medicine Bend was not to be thought
+of, for Bullhead now had a suspicion, due to Callahan, that he was a
+good deal of a chump, and he wanted to get away from the ridicule that
+had always and everywhere made life a burden. There appeared to
+Bullhead nothing for it but the Klondike. On the table before the moody
+operator lay his letter of resignation, addressed in due form to J. S.
+Bucks, superintendent. Near it, under the lamp, lay a well-thumbed copy
+of the book of rules, open at the chapter on Resignations, with subheads
+on--
+
+Resign, who should.
+
+Resign, how to.
+
+Resign, when to. (See also Time.)
+
+The fact was it had at last painfully forced itself on Bullhead that he
+was not fitted for the railroad business. Pat Francis had unfeelingly
+told him so. Callahan had told him so; Neighbor had told him so; Bucks
+had told him so. On that point the leading West End authorities were
+agreed. Yet in spite of these discouragements he had persisted and at
+last made a show. Who was it now that had shaken his stubborn
+conviction? Bullhead hardly dared confess. But it was undoubtedly one
+who put up to be no authority whatever on Motive Power or Train Service
+or Operating--it was Matt Cassidy's girl.
+
+While he re-read his formal letter and compared on spelling with his
+pocket Webster, a train whistled. Bullhead looked at the clock: 11.40 P.
+M. It was the local freight, Thirty, coming in from the West, working
+back to Medicine. From the East, Number One had not arrived; she was six
+hours late, and Bullhead looked out at his light, for he had orders for
+the freight. It was not often that such a thing happened, because One
+rarely went off schedule badly enough to throw her into his turn. He had
+his orders copied and O.K.'d, and waited only to deliver them.
+
+It was fearfully windy. The 266 engine, pulling Thirty that night,
+wheezed in the gale like a man with the apoplexy. She had a new fireman
+on, who was burning the life out of her, and as she puffed painfully
+down on the scrap rails of the first siding and took the Y, her
+overloaded safety gasped violently.
+
+When the conductor of the Number Thirty train opened the station door,
+the wind followed him like a catamount. The stove puffed open with a
+down draft, and shot the room full of stinging smoke. The lamp blaze
+flew up the chimney--out--and left the nightman and the conductor in
+darkness. The trainman with a swear shoved-to the door, and Bullhead,
+the patient, turned over his letter of resignation quick in the dark,
+felt for a match and relighted his lamp. Swearing again at Bullhead, the
+freight conductor swaggered over to his table, felt in all the
+operator's pockets for a cigar, tumbled all the papers around, and once
+more, on general principles, swore.
+
+Bullhead took things uncomplainingly, but he watched close, and was
+determined to fight if the brute discovered his letter of resignation.
+When the trainman could think of no further indignities he took his
+orders, to meet Number One at Sackley, the second station east of Goose
+River. After he had signed, Bullhead asked him about the depot fire at
+Bear Dance that had been going over the wires for two hours, reminded
+him of the slow order for the number nine culvert and as the rude
+visitor slammed the door behind him, held his hand over the lamp. Then
+he sat down again and turned over his letter of resignation.
+
+To make it binding it lacked only his signature--James Gillespie Blaine
+Lyons--now, himself, of the opinion of every one else on the West End:
+that he was just a natural born blooming fool. He lifted his pen to sign
+off the aspirations of a young lifetime when the sounder began to snap
+and sputter his call. It was the despatcher, and he asked hurriedly if
+Number Thirty was there.
+
+"Number Thirty is on the Y," answered Bullhead.
+
+Then came a train order. "Hold Number Thirty till Number One arrives."
+
+Bullhead repeated the order, and got back the O. K. He grabbed his hat
+and hurried out of the door to deliver the new order to the local
+freight before it should pull out.
+
+To reach the train Bullhead had to cross the short line tracks. The wind
+was scouring the flats, and as he tacked up the platform the dust swept
+dead into him. At the switch he sprang across the rails, thinking of
+nothing but reaching the engine cab of the local--forgetting about the
+track he was crossing. Before he could think or see or jump, a through
+freight on the short line, wild, from the West, storming down the grade
+behind him, struck Bullhead as a grizzly would a gnat--hurled him,
+doubling, fifty feet out on the spur--and stormed on into the East
+without a quiver out of the ordinary. One fatality followed another. The
+engineer of the short line train did not see the man he had hit, and
+with the nightman lying unconscious in the ditch, the local freight
+pulled out for Sackley.
+
+Bullhead never knew just how long he lay under the stars. When his head
+began to whirl the wind was blowing cool and strong on him, and the
+alkali dust was eddying into his open mouth. It was only a matter of
+seconds, though it seemed hours, to pull himself together and to put up
+his hand unsteadily to feel what it was soaking warm and sticky into his
+hair; then to realize that he had been struck by a short line train; to
+think of what a failure he had lately acknowledged himself to be; and of
+what it was he was clutching so tightly in his right hand--the holding
+order for Number Thirty. He raised his reeling head; there was a drift
+of starlight through the dust cloud, but no train in sight; Number
+Thirty was gone. With that consciousness came a recollection--he had
+forgotten to put out his red light.
+
+His red light wasn't out. He kept repeating that to himself to put the
+picture of what it meant before him. He had started to deliver an order
+without putting out his light, and Number Thirty was gone; against
+Number One--a head end collision staring the freight and the belated
+passenger in the face. Number Thirty, running hard on her order to make
+Sackley for the meeting, and One, running furiously, as she always
+ran--to-night worse than ever.
+
+He lifted his head, enraged with himself; enraged. He thought about the
+rules, and he grew enraged. Only himself he blamed, nobody
+else--studying the rules for a lifetime and just when it would mean the
+death of a trainload of people forgetting his red signal. He lifted his
+head; it was sick, deadly sick. But up it must come, Thirty gone, and it
+wabbled, swooning sick and groggy as he stared around and tried to
+locate himself. One thing he could see, the faint outline of the station
+and his lamp blazing smoky in the window. Bullhead figured a second;
+then he began to crawl. If he could reach the lamp before his head went
+off again, before he went completely silly, he might yet save himself
+and Number One.
+
+It wasn't in him to crawl till he thought of his own mistake; but there
+was a spur in the sweep of that through his head. His brain, he knew,
+was wabbling, but he could crawl; and he stuck fainting to that one
+idea, and crawled for the light of his lamp.
+
+It is a bare hundred feet across to the Y. Bullhead taped every foot of
+the hundred with blood. There was no one to call on for help; he just
+stuck to the crawl, grinding his teeth in bitter self-reproach. They
+traced him, next morning when he was past the telling of it, and his
+struggle looked the track of a wounded bear. Dragging along one crushed
+leg and half crazed by the crack on his forehead, Bullhead climbed to
+the platform, across, and dragged himself to the door. He can tell yet
+about rolling his broken leg under him and raising himself to grasp the
+thumb latch. Not until he tried to open it did he remember it was a
+spring lock and that he was outside. He felt in his pocket for his
+keys--but his keys were gone.
+
+There were no rules to consult then. No way on earth of getting into the
+office in time to do anything; to drag himself to the lunch room, twice
+further than the station, was out of the question. But there was a way
+to reach his key in spite of all bad things, and Bullhead knew the way.
+He struggled fast around to the window. Raising himself with a frightful
+twinge on one knee, he beat at the glass with his fist. Clutching the
+sash, he drew himself up with a hand, and with the other tore away the
+muntin, stuck his head and shoulders through the opening, got his hand
+on the key, and called the first station east, Blaisdell, with the 19.
+Life and death that call meant; the 19, the despatcher's call--hanging
+over the key, stammering the 19 over the wire, and baptizing the call in
+his own blood--that is the way Bullhead learned to be a railroad man.
+
+For Blaisdell got him and his warning, and had Number One on the siding
+just as the freight tore around the west curve, headed for Sackley.
+While it was all going on, Bullhead lay on the wind-swept platform at
+Goose River with a hole in his head that would have killed anybody on
+the West End, or, for that matter on earth except James Gillespie Blaine
+Lyons.
+
+After Number Thirty had passed so impudently, Number One felt her way
+rather cautiously to Goose River, because the despatchers couldn't get
+the blamed station. They decided, of course, that Bullhead was asleep,
+and fixed everything at the Wickiup to send a new man up there on Three
+in the morning and fire him for good.
+
+But about one o'clock Number One rolled, bad-tempered, into Goose River
+Junction, and Bat Mullen, stopping his train, strode angrily to the
+station. It was dark as a pocket inside. Bat smashed in the door with
+his heel, and the trainmen swarmed in and began looking with their
+lanterns for the nightman. The stove was red-hot, but he was not asleep
+in the arm-chair, nor napping under the counter on the supplies. They
+turned to his table and discovered the broken window, and thought of a
+hold-up. They saw where the nightman had spilled something that looked
+like ink over the table, over the order book, over the clip, and there
+was a hand print that looked inky on an open letter addressed to the
+superintendent--and a little pool of something like ink under the key.
+
+Somebody said suicide; but Bat Mullen suddenly stuck his lamp out of the
+broken window, put his head through after it, and cried out. Setting his
+lantern down on the platform, he crawled through the broken sash and
+picked up Bullhead.
+
+Next morning it was all over the West End.
+
+"And Bullhead!" cried everybody. "That's what gets me. Who'd have
+thought it of _Bullhead_!"
+
+When they all got up there and saw what Bullhead had done, everybody
+agreed that nobody but Bullhead could have done it.
+
+The pilot bar of the short line mogul, in swiping Bullhead unmercifully,
+had really made a railroad man of him. It had let a great light in on
+the situation. Whereas before every one else on the line had been to
+blame for his failures, Bullhead now saw that he himself had been to
+blame, and was man enough to stand up and say so. When the big fellows,
+Callahan and Kenyon and Pat Francis, saw his trail next morning, saw the
+blood smeared over the table, and saw Bullhead's letter of resignation
+signed in his own blood manual, and heard his straight-out story days
+afterward, they said never a word.
+
+But that morning, the morning after, Callahan picked up the letter and
+put it just as it was between the leaves of the order book and locked
+both in his grip. It was some weeks before he had a talk with Bullhead,
+and he spoke then only a few words, because the nightman fainted before
+he got through. Callahan made him understand, though, that as soon as he
+was able he could have any key on that division he wanted as long as
+_he_ was running it--and Callahan is running that division yet.
+
+It all came easy after he got well. Instead of getting the worst of it
+from everybody, Bullhead began to get the best of it, even from pretty
+Nellie Cassidy. But Nellie had missed her opening. She tried tenderness
+while the boy was being nursed at the Junction. Bullhead looked grim and
+far-off through his bulging bandages, and asked his mother to put the
+sugar in his coffee for him; Bullhead was getting sense.
+
+Besides, what need has a young man with a heavy crescent-shaped scar on
+his forehead, that people inquire about and who within a year after the
+Goose River affair was made a train despatcher under Barnes Tracy at
+Medicine Bend--what need has he of a coquette's smiles? His mother, who
+has honorably retired from hard work, says half the girls at the Bend
+are after him, and his mother ought to know, for she keeps house for
+him.
+
+Bullhead's letter of resignation with the print of his hand on it hangs
+framed over Callahan's desk, and is shown to railroad big fellows who
+are accorded the courtesies of the Wickiup. But when they ask Bullhead
+about it, he just laughs and says some railroad men have to have sense
+pounded into them.
+
+
+
+
+The Master Mechanic's Story
+
+DELAROO
+
+
+"You tell it. I can't tell it," growled Neighbor.
+
+"Oh, no. No. That's your story, Neighbor."
+
+"I ain't no story-teller--"
+
+"Just an able-jawed liar," suggested Callahan through a benevolent
+bluish haze.
+
+"Delaroo's story wasn't any lie, though," muttered Neighbor. "But a
+fellow would think it was to hear it; now he would, for a fact, wouldn't
+he?"
+
+
+I
+
+If you want him, quick and short, it would be: whiskers, secret
+societies, statistics and plug tobacco--the latter mostly worked up.
+That was Maje Sampson.
+
+Bluntly, a wind-bag; two hundred and seventy pounds of atmosphere. Up on
+benevolent fraternities, up on politics, up on the money question, up
+on everything. The Seven Financial Conspiracies engaged Maje Sampson's
+attention pretty continually, and had for him a practical application:
+there were never less than seven conspiracies afoot in Medicine Bend to
+make Maje Sampson pay up.
+
+Pay? Indeed, he did pay. He was always paying. It was not a question of
+paying. Not at all. It was a question of paying up, which is different.
+
+The children--they were brickbats. Tow-headed, putty-faced, wash-eyed
+youngsters of all sizes and conditions. About Maje Sampson's children
+there was but one distinguishing characteristic, they were all boys,
+nothing but boys, and they spread all over town. Was there a baby run
+over? It was Maje Sampson's. Was there a child lost? Maje Sampson's. Was
+there a violently large-headed, coarse-featured, hangdog, clattering
+sort of a chap anywhere around? In the street, station, roundhouse,
+yards, stock pens? It was a brickbat, sure, one of Maje Sampson's
+brickbat boys.
+
+The Sampsons were at the end of the street, and the end of the street
+was up the mountain. Maje Sampson's lot, "raired," as Neighbor put
+it--stood on its hind legs. His house had a startling tumble-over aspect
+as you approached it. The back end of his lot ran up into the sheer, but
+he marked the line sharply by a kind of horizontal fence, because the
+cliff just above belonged to the corporation that owned everything else
+on earth around Medicine Bend.
+
+Maje Sampson did not propose to let any grasping corporation encroach on
+his lines, so he built, and added to from time to time, a cluster of
+things on the hind end of his lot--an eruption of small buildings like
+pimples on a boy's nose, running down in size from the barn to the last
+dry-goods box the boys had heaved up the slope for a dog house. To add
+to the variety, some one of the structures was always getting away in
+the wind, and if anything smaller than a hotel was seen careening
+across-lots in a Medicine Bend breeze it was spotted without further
+investigation as Maje Sampson's. When the gale abated, Joe McBracken,
+who conducted the local dray line, was pretty sure to be seen with a
+henhouse or a woodshed, or something likewise, loaded on his trucks
+headed for Maje Sampson's. Once the whole lean-to of the house blew off,
+but Joe McBracken stood ready for any emergency. He met the maverick
+addition at the foot of the grade, loaded it on his house-moving truck,
+hitched on four bronchos, crawled inside the structure, and, getting the
+lines through the front window, drove up Main Street before the wind
+had gone down. Joe was photographed in the act, and afterward used the
+exhibit in getting judgment against Maje Sampson for his bill.
+
+Now a man like Maje wouldn't be likely to have very much of a run nor
+very much of an engine. He had the 264; an old pop bottle with a stack
+like a tepee turned upside down. For a run he had always trains Number
+Twenty-nine and Thirty, the local freights, with an accommodation coach
+east of Anderson. There were times of stress frequently on the West End,
+times when everybody ran first in first out, except Maje Sampson; he
+always ran Twenty-nine and Thirty west to Silver River and back. A
+pettifogging, cheap, jerk-water run with no rights to speak of, not even
+against respectable hand-cars. The only things Maje Sampson did not have
+to dodge were tramps, blanket Indians and telegraph poles; everything
+else side-tracked Twenty-nine and Thirty and Maje Sampson. Almost
+everybody on through trains must at some time have seen Maje Sampson
+puffing on a siding as Moore or Mullen shot by on Number One or Number
+Two. Maje was so big and his cab so little that when he got his head
+through the window you couldn't see very much of the cab for shoulders
+and whiskers and things. From the cab window he looked like a
+fourteen-year-old boy springing out of a ten-year-old jacket. Three
+things only, made Maje tolerable. First, the number of benevolent orders
+he belonged to; second, Delaroo; third, Martie.
+
+Maje Sampson was a joiner and a sitter up. He would join anything on the
+West End that had a ritual, a grip and a password, and he would sit up
+night after night with anybody that had a broken leg or a fever: and if
+nothing better offered, Maje, rather than go to bed, would tackle a man
+with the stomachache. This kind of took the cuss off; but he was that
+peculiar he would sit up all night with a sick man and next day make
+everybody sick talking the money question--at least everybody but
+Delaroo. If Delaroo was bored he never showed it. As long as Maje would
+talk Delaroo would listen. That single word was in fact the key to
+Delaroo: Delaroo was a listener; for that reason nobody knew much about
+him.
+
+He wasn't a railroad man by birth, but by adoption. Delaroo came from
+the mountains: he was just a plain mountain man. Some said his father
+was a trapper; if so, it explained everything--the quiet, the head bent
+inquiringly forward, the modest unobtrusiveness of a man deaf. Of a size
+and shape nothing remarkable, Delaroo--but a great listener, for though
+he looked like a deaf man he heard like a despatcher, and saw
+marvellously from out the ends of his silent eyes. Delaroo for all the
+world was a trapper.
+
+He came into the service as a roundhouse sweeper; then Neighbor, after a
+long time, put him at wiping. Delaroo said nothing but wiped for years
+and years, and was in a fair way to become liked, when, instead, he
+became one morning pitted with umbilical vesicles, and the doctors, with
+Delaroo's brevity, said smallpox. The boarding house keeper threw him
+out bodily and at once. Having no better place to go, Delaroo wandered
+into Steve Boyer's saloon, where he was generally welcome. Steve,
+however, pointed a hospitable gun at him and suggested his getting away
+immediately from the front end of it. Delaroo went from there to the
+roundhouse with his umbilicals, and asked Neighbor what a man with the
+smallpox ought to do with it. Neighbor wouldn't run, not even from the
+smallpox--but he told Delaroo what it meant to get the smallpox started
+in the roundhouse, and Delaroo wandered quietly away from the depot
+grounds, a pretty sick man then, staggered up the yards, and crawled
+stupid into a box car to die without embarrassing anybody.
+
+By some hook or crook, nobody to this day knows how, that car was
+switched on to Maje Sampson's train when it was made up that day for the
+West. Maybe it was done as a trick to scare the wind-bag engineer. If
+so, the idea was successful. When the hind-end brakeman at the second
+stop came forward and reported a tramp with the smallpox in the empty
+box car, Maje was angry. But his curiosity gradually got the upper
+hand. This man might be, by some distant chance, he reflected, a P. Q.
+W. of A., or a frater, or a fellow, or a knight or something like--and
+when they stopped again to throw off crackers and beer and catsup, Maje
+went back and entered the infected car like a lion-tamer to try lodge
+signals and things on him. Maje advanced and gave the countersign. It
+was not cordially received. He tried another and another--and another;
+his passes were lost in the air. The smallpox man appeared totally
+unable to come back at Maje with anything. He was not only delirious,
+but by this time so frightfully broken out that Maje couldn't have
+touched a sound spot with a Masonic signal of distress. Finally the
+venturesome engineer walked closer into the dark corner where the sick
+man lay--and by Heaven! it was the Indian wiper, Delaroo.
+
+When Maje Sampson got back into the cab he could not speak--at least
+not for publication. He was tearing mad and sputtered like a safety. He
+gathered up his cushion and a water bottle and a bottle that would
+explode if water touched it, and crawled with his plunder into the box
+car. He straightened Delaroo up and out and gave him a drink and by way
+of sanitary precaution took one personally, for he himself had never had
+the smallpox--but once. When he had done this little for Delaroo he
+finished his run and came back to the Bend hauling his pest-house box
+car. The fireman quit the cab immediately after Maje exposed himself;
+the conductor communicated with him only by signals. The Anderson
+operator wired ahead that Maje Sampson was bringing back a man with
+smallpox on Thirty, and when Maje, bulging out of the 264 cab, pulled
+into the division yard nobody would come within a mile of him. He set
+out the box car below the stock pens, cross-lots from his house up on
+the hill, and, not being able to get advice from anybody else, went home
+to consult Martie.
+
+Though there were a great many women in Medicine Bend, Maje Sampson
+looked to but one, Martie, the little washed-out woman up at
+Sampson's--wife, mother, nurse, cook, slave--Martie.
+
+No particular color hair; no particular color eyes; no particular color
+gown; no particular cut to it. A plain bit of a woman, mother of six
+boys, large and small, and wife of a great big wind-bag engineer, big as
+three of her by actual measurement. By the time Maje had taken counsel
+and walked down town prominent business men were fending off his
+approach with shotguns. The city marshal from behind a bomb-proof asked
+what he was going to do with his patient, and Maje retorted he was going
+to take him home. He wasn't a M. R. W. of T. nor a P. S. G. of W. E.,
+but he was a roundhouse man, and between Maje and a railroad man, a
+wiper even, there was a bond stronger than grip or password or jolly
+business of any kind. The other things Maje, without realizing it,
+merely played at; but as to the railroad lay--if a railroad man was the
+right sort he could borrow anything the big fellow had, money, plug
+tobacco, pipe, water bottle, strong bottle, it made no odds what. And,
+on the other hand, Maje wouldn't hesitate to borrow any or all of these
+things in return; the railroad man who got ahead of Maje Sampson in this
+respect had claims to be considered a past grand in the business.
+
+The doughty engineer lifted and dragged and hauled Delaroo home with
+him. If there was no hospital, Martie had said, no pest-house, no
+nothing, just bring him home. They had all had the smallpox up at
+Sampson's except the baby, and the doctor had said lately the baby
+appeared to need something. They had really everything up at Sampson's
+sooner or later: measles, diphtheria, croup, everything on earth except
+money. And Martie Sampson, with the washing and mending and scrubbing
+and cooking, nursed the outcast wiper through his smallpox. The baby
+took it, of course, and Martie nursed the baby through and went on just
+the same as before--washing, mending, cooking, scrubbing. Delaroo when
+he got well went to firing; Neighbor offered the job as a kind of
+consolation prize; and he went to firing on the 264 for Maje Sampson.
+
+It was then that Maje took Delaroo fairly in hand and showed him the
+unspeakable folly of trying to get through the world without the
+comradeship and benefits of the B. S. L.'s of U., and the fraters of the
+order of the double-barrelled star of MacDuff. Delaroo caught a good
+deal of it on the sidings, where they lay most of their time dodging
+first-class trains; and evenings when they got in from their runs
+Delaroo, having nowhere else to go, used to wander, after supper, up to
+Sampson's. At Sampson's he would sit in the shade of the lamp and smoke
+while Maje, in his shirt-sleeves, held forth on the benevolent orders,
+and one boy crawled through the bowels of the organ and another pulled
+off the tablecloth--Delaroo always saving the lamp--and a third harassed
+the dog, and a fourth stuck pins in a fifth--and Martie, sitting on the
+dim side of the shade, so the operation would not appear too glaring,
+mended at Maje's mammoth trousers.
+
+Delaroo would sit and listen to Maje and watch the heave of the organ
+with the boy, and the current of the tablecloth with the lamp, and the
+quarter in which the dog was chewing the baby, and watch Martie's
+perpetual-motion fingers for a whole evening, and go back to the
+boarding-house without passing a word with anybody on earth, he was that
+silent.
+
+In this way the big, bluffing engineer gradually worked Delaroo into all
+the secret benevolent orders in Medicine Bend--that meant pretty much
+every one on earth. There arose always, however, in connection with the
+initiations of Delaroo one hitch: he never seemed quite to know whom he
+wanted to leave his insurance money to. He could go the most complicated
+catechism without a hitch every time, for Maje spent weeks on the
+sidings drilling him, until it came to naming the beneficiary; there he
+stuck. Nobody could get out of him to whom he wanted his money to go.
+
+Had he no relations back in the mountains? Nobody up in the Spider
+country? No wives or daughters or fathers or mothers or friends or
+anything? Delaroo always shook his head. If they persisted he shook his
+head. Maje Sampson, sitting after supper, would ask, and Martie, when
+the dishes were side-tracked, would begin to sew and listen, and
+Delaroo, of course, would listen, but never by any chance would he
+answer; not even when Maje tried to explain how it bore on 16 to 1. He
+declined to discuss any ratio or to name any beneficiary whatsoever. The
+right honorable recording secretaries fumed and denounced it as
+irregular, and Maje Sampson wore holes in his elbows gesticulating, but
+in the matter of distributing his personal share of the unearned
+increment, Delaroo expressed no preference whatsoever. He paid his dues;
+he made his passes; he sat in his place, what more could be required? If
+they put him in a post of honor he filled it with a silent dignity. If
+they set him to guard the outer portal he guarded well; it was perilous
+rather for a visiting frater or even a local brother to try getting past
+Delaroo if he was rusty in the ritual. Not Maje Sampson himself could
+work the outer guard without the countersign; if he forgot it in the
+hurry of getting to lodge he had to cool his heels in the outer air
+till it came back; Delaroo was pitiless.
+
+In the cab he was as taciturn as he was in the lodge or under the
+kerosene lamp at Sampson's; he just listened. But his firing was above
+any man's who ever stoked the 264. Delaroo made more steam on less coal
+than any man in the roundhouse. Neighbor began to hold him up as a model
+for the division, and the boys found that the way to jolly Neighbor was
+to say nice things about Delaroo. The head of the Motive Power would
+brighten out of a sulk at the mention of Delaroo's name, and he finally
+fixed up a surprise for the Indian man. One night after Delaroo came in,
+Neighbor, in the bluff way he liked to use in promoting a man, told
+Delaroo he could have an engine; a good one, one of the K. class; as
+much finer a machine than the old 264 as Duffy's chronometer was than a
+prize package watch. Delaroo never said ay, yes, or no; he merely
+listened. Neighbor never had a promotion received in just that way; it
+nearly gave him the apoplexy.
+
+But if Delaroo treated the proposal coolly, not so Maje Sampson; when
+the news of the offer reached him, Maje went into an unaccountable
+flutter. He acted at first exactly as if he wanted to hold his man back,
+which was dead against cab ethics. Finally he assented, but his cheeks
+went flabby and his eyes hollow, and he showed more worry than his
+creditors. Nobody understood it, yet there was evidently something on,
+and the Major's anxiety increased until Delaroo, the Indian fireman and
+knight companion of the Ancient Order of Druids and Fluids, completely
+took Neighbor's breath by declining the new engine. That was a West End
+wonder. He said if it made no odds he would stay on the 264. The men all
+wondered; then something new came up and the thing was forgotten. Maje
+Sampson's cheeks filled out again, he regained his usual nerve, and
+swore on the money question harder than ever.
+
+After that it was pretty generally understood that Delaroo and Maje
+Sampson and the 264 were fixtures. Neighbor never gave any one a chance
+to decline an engine more than once. The boys all knew, if Delaroo
+didn't, that he would be firing a long time after throwing that chance
+by; and he was.
+
+The combination came to be regarded as eternal. When the sloppy 264 hove
+in sight, little Delaroo and big Maje Sampson were known to be behind
+the boiler pounding up and down the mountains, up and down, year in and
+year out. Big engines came into the division and bigger. All the time
+the division was crowding on the Motive Power and putting in the mammoth
+types, until, when the 264 was stalled alongside a consolidated, or a
+mogul skyscraper, she looked like an ancient beer glass set next an
+imported stein.
+
+With the 264, when the 800 or the 1100 class were concerned, it was
+simply a case of keep out of our way or get smashed, Maje Sampson or no
+Maje Sampson, money question or no money question. Benevolent benefits
+fraternally proposed or ante-room signals confidentially put forth by
+the bald-headed 264 were of no sort of consequence with the modern
+giants that pulled a thousand tons in a string up a two-thousand-foot
+grade at better than twenty miles an hour. It was a clear yet cold, "You
+old tub, get out of our way, will you?" And the fast runners, like Moore
+and Hawksworth and Mullen and the Crowleys, Tim and Syme, had about as
+much consideration for Maje and his financial theories as their machines
+had for his machine. His jim-crow freight outfit didn't cut much of a
+figure in _their_ track schedules.
+
+So the Maje Sampson combination, but quite as brassy as though it had
+rights of the first class, dodged the big fellows up and down the line
+pretty successfully until the government began pushing troops into the
+Philippines, and there came days when a Rocky Mountain sheep could
+hardly have kept out of the way of the extras that tore, hissing and
+booming, over the mountains for 'Frisco. For a time the traffic came
+hot; so hot we were pressed to handle it. There was a good bit of
+skirmishing on the part of the passenger department to get the
+business, and then tremendous skirmishing in the operating department to
+deliver the goods. Every broken-down coach in the backyards was scrubbed
+up for the soldier trains. We aimed to kill just as few as possible of
+the boys en route to the islands, though that may have been a mistaken
+mercy. However, we handled them well; not a man in khaki got away from
+us in a wreck, and in the height of the push we put more live stock into
+South Omaha, car for car, than has ever gone in before or since.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was November, and great weather for running, and when the rails were
+not springing under the soldiers westbound, they were humming under the
+steers eastbound. Maje Sampson, with his beer kegs and his crackers and
+his 264 and his be-knighted fireman, hugged the sidings pretty close
+that week. Some of the trains had part of the rights and others had the
+remainder. The 264 and her train took what was left, which threw Maje
+Sampson most of the time on the worn-out, run-down, scrap rails that
+made corduroy roads of the passing tracks. Then came the night that
+Moulton, the Philippine commandant, went through on his special. With
+his staff and his baggage and his correspondents and that kind he took
+one whole train. Syme Crowley pulled them, with Ben Sherer, conductor,
+and whatever else may be said of that pair, they deliver their trains on
+time. Maje Sampson left Medicine Bend with Twenty-nine at noon on his
+regular run and tried to get west. But between the soldiers behind him
+and the steers against him, he soon lost every visionary right he ever
+did possess. They laid him out nearly every mile of the way to the end
+of the run. At Sugar Buttes they held him thirty minutes for the Moulton
+Special to pass, and, to crown his indignities, kept him there fifteen
+minutes more waiting for an eastbound sheep train. Sampson afterward
+claimed that Barnes Tracy, the despatcher that did it, was a Gold
+Democrat, but this never was proved.
+
+It was nearing dark when the crew of local freight Twenty-nine heard the
+dull roar of the Moulton Special speeding through the cañon of the Rat.
+A passenger train running through the cañon at night comes through with
+the far roll of a thousand drums, deepening into a rumble of thunder.
+Then out and over all comes the threatening purr of the straining engine
+breaking into a storm of exhausts, until like a rocket the headlight
+bursts streaming from the black walls, and Moore on the 811, or Mullen
+with the 818, or Hawksworth in the 1110, tear with a fury of alkali and
+a sweep of noise over the Butte switch, past caboose and flats and boxes
+and the 264 like fading light. Just a sweep of darkened glass and dead
+varnish, a whirl of smoking trucks beating madly at the fishplates, and
+the fast train is up, and out, and gone!
+
+Twenty-nine, local, was used to all this. Used to the vanishing tail
+lights, the measured sinking of the sullen dust, the silence brooding
+again over the desert with, this night, fifteen minutes more to wait for
+the eastbound stock train before they dared open the switch. Maje
+Sampson killed the time by going back to the caboose to talk equities
+with the conductor. It was no trick for him to put away fifteen minutes
+discussing the rights of man with himself; and with an angel of a
+fireman to watch the cab, why not? The 264 standing on the siding was
+chewing her cud as sweet as an old cow, with maybe a hundred and forty
+pounds of steam to the right of the dial, maybe a hundred and fifty--I
+say maybe, because no one but Delaroo ever knew--when the sheep train
+whistled.
+
+Sheep--nothing but sheep. Car after car after car, rattling down from
+the Short line behind two spanking big engines. They whistled, hoarse as
+pirates, for the Butte siding, and, rising the hill a mile west of it,
+bore down the grade throwing Dannah coal from both stacks like hydraulic
+gravel.
+
+No one knew or ever will know how it happened. They cat-hauled men on
+the carpet a week about that switch. The crew of the Moulton Special
+testified; the crews of the stock train testified; Maje Sampson
+testified; his conductor and both brakemen testified; the roadmaster and
+the section boss each testified, and their men testified--but however or
+whatever it was--whether the Moulton Special fractured the tongue, or
+whether the pony of the lead engine flew the guard, or whether the
+switch had been opened, or whether, in closing, the slip rail had
+somehow failed to follow the rod--the double-headed stocker went into
+that Butte switch, into that Butte siding, into the peaceable old 264
+and the Twenty-nine, local, like a lyddite shell, crashing, rearing,
+ripping, scattering two whole trains into blood and scrap. Destruction,
+madness, throes, death, silence; then a pyre of dirty smoke, a wail of
+sickening bleats, and a scream of hissing steam over a thousand sheep
+caught in the sudden shambles.
+
+There was frightened crawling out of the shattered cabooses, a hurrying
+up of the stunned crews, and a bewildering count of heads. Both engine
+crews of the stock train had jumped as their train split the switch. The
+train crews were badly shaken; the head brakeman of the sheep train lay
+torn in the barbed-wire fencing the right of way; but only one man was
+missing--the fireman of Twenty-nine--Delaroo.
+
+"Second 86 jumped west switch passing track and went into train 29,
+engine 264. Bad spill. Delaroo, fireman the 264, missing," wired Sugar
+Buttes to Medicine Bend a few minutes later.
+
+Neighbor got up there by ten o'clock with both roadmasters and the
+wrecking outfit. It was dark as a cañon on the desert that night.
+Benedict Morgan's men tore splintered car timber from the débris, and on
+the knolls back of the siding lighted heaping bonfires that threw a
+light all night on the dread pile smoking on the desert. They dug by the
+flame of the fires at the ghastly heap till midnight; then the moon
+rose, an extra crew arrived from the Bend, and they got the derrick at
+work. Yet with all the toil when day broke the confusion looked worse
+confounded. The main line was so hopelessly blocked that at daylight a
+special with ties and steel was run in to lay a temporary track around
+the wreck.
+
+"What do I think of it?" muttered Neighbor, when the local operator
+asked him for a report for Callahan. "I think there's two engines for
+the scrap in sight--and the 264, if we can ever find anything of
+her--and about a million sheep to pay for--" Neighbor paused to give an
+order and survey the frightful scene.
+
+"And Delaroo," repeated the operator. "He wants to know about Delaroo--"
+
+"Missing."
+
+At dawn hot coffee was passed among the wreckers, and shortly after
+sunrise the McCloud gang arrived with the second derrick. Then the men
+of the night took hold with a new grip to get into the heart of the
+pile; to find--if he was there--Delaroo.
+
+None of the McCloud gang knew the man they were hunting for, but the men
+from the Bend were soon telling them about Maje Sampson's Indian. Not a
+mute nod he ever gave; not a piece of tobacco he ever passed; not a
+brief word he ever spoke to one of the battered old hulks who rode and
+cut and slashed and stormed and drank and cursed with Benedict Morgan,
+was forgotten then. Every slewed, twisted, weather-beaten, crippled-up,
+gin-shivered old wreck of a wrecker--they were hard men--had something
+to say about Delaroo. And with their hair matted and their faces
+streaked and their shirts daubed and their elbows in blood, they said
+it--whatever it was, much or little--of Delaroo.
+
+The picks swung, the derricks creaked, and all day with the heaving and
+the calling they toiled; but the sun was sinking before they got to the
+middle of it. Then Benedict Morgan, crawling under the drivers of the
+hind mogul, partly uncovered, edged out with a set face; he swore he
+heard breathing. It was alcohol to the veins of the double gang.
+Neighbor himself went in and heard--and stayed to fasten a grapple to
+pull the engine truck off the roof of a box car that was jammed over and
+against the mogul stack.
+
+The big derrick groaned as the slack drew and the truck crashed through
+a tier of stays and swung whirling into the clear. A giant wrecker
+dodged the suspended wheels and raising his axe bit a hole into the
+jammed roof. Through that they passed a second grapple, and presently it
+gave sullenly, toppled back with a crash, and the foremost axman,
+peering into the opening, saw the heart of the wreck. Bending forward,
+he picked up something struggling in his arms. They thought it was a
+man; but it was a sheep, alive and uninjured, under all the horror: that
+was the breathing they heard. Benedict Morgan threw the man and his
+burden aside and stepped himself into the gap and through. One started
+to follow, but the chief of the wreckers waved him back. Close by where
+the sheep had been freed stood Delaroo. He stood as if with ear alert,
+so closely did the counterfeit seem the real. So sure was the impression
+of life that not until Morgan, speaking to the fireman, put his hand on
+his shoulder did he realize that the Indian stood quite dead just where
+the shock had caught him in his cab.
+
+Stumbling over the wreckage, they passed him in the silence of the
+sunset from hand to hand into the open. A big fellow, pallid and scared,
+tottered after them, and when they laid the dead man down, half fell at
+his side: it was Maje Sampson.
+
+It surprised everybody the way Maje Sampson went to pieces after Delaroo
+was killed. The Indian was carried back to the Bend and up to Sampson's
+and laid out in the God-forsaken parlor; but Maje wasn't any good fixing
+things up that time. He usually shone on like occasions. He was the
+comforter of the afflicted to an extraordinary degree; he gave the usual
+mourner no chance to let up. But now his day was as one that is
+darkened. When Neighbor went up next night to see about some minor
+matters connected with the funeral and the precedence of the various
+dozen orders that were to march, he found Maje Sampson and Martie alone
+in the darkness of the parlor with the silent Delaroo.
+
+Maje turned to the master mechanic from where Delaroo lay. "Neighbor,
+you might as well know it now as any time. Don't you say so, Martie?
+Martie, what do you say?" Martie burst into tears; but through them
+Neighbor caught the engineer's broken confession. "Neighbor--I'm color
+blind." The master mechanic sat stunned.
+
+"True as God's word. You might as well know it now. There's the man that
+stood between me and the loss of my job. It's been coming on me for two
+year. He knew it, that's why he stayed in my cab. He stayed because I
+was color blind. He knowed I'd git ketched the minute a new fireman come
+in, Neighbor. He watched the signals--Delaroo. I'm color blind, God help
+me." Maje Sampson sat down by the coffin. Martie hushed her crying; the
+three sat in the darkness.
+
+"It wouldn't worry me so much if it wasn't f'r the family, Neighbor. The
+woman--and the boys. I ain't much a-savin'; you know that. If you can
+gi' me a job I can get bread an' butter out of, give it to me. I can't
+pull a train; my eyes went out with this man here. I wish to God it was
+me, and him standing over. A man that's color blind, and don't know a
+thing on God's earth but runnin' an engine, is worse 'n' a dead man."
+
+Neighbor went home thinking.
+
+They buried Delaroo. But even then they were not through with him.
+Delaroo had insurance in every order in the Bend, which meant almost
+every one on earth. There was no end to his benefit certificates, and no
+known beneficiaries. But when they overhauled his trunk they found every
+last certificate filed away up to the last paid assessment and the last
+quarter's dues. Then came a shock. People found out there was a
+beneficiary. While the fraters were busy making their passes Delaroo had
+quietly been directing the right honorable recording secretaries to make
+the benefits run to Neighbor, and so every dollar of his insurance ran.
+Nobody was more thunderstruck at the discovery than the master mechanic
+himself.
+
+Yet Delaroo meant something by it. After Neighbor had studied over it
+nights the best of a month; after Maje Sampson had tried to take the
+color test and failed, as he persistently said he would; after he had
+gone to tinkering in the roundhouse, and from tinkering respectably,
+and by degrees down the hill to wiping at a dollar and forty cents a day
+with time and a half for overtime--Neighbor bethought himself all of a
+sudden one day of a paper Delaroo had once given him and asked him to
+keep.
+
+He had put it away in the storekeeper's safe with his own papers and the
+drawings of his extension front end patent--and safely forgotten all
+about it. It was the day they had to go into the county court about the
+will that was not, when he recollected Delaroo's paper and pulled it out
+of its envelope. There was only a half sheet of paper, inside, with this
+writing from Delaroo to Neighbor:
+
+     R. B. A.--What is coming to me on ensurance give to Marty
+     Sampson, wife of Maje. Give my trunk to P. McGraw.
+
+     Rispk.,
+
+     P. DE LA ROUX.
+
+When the master mechanic read that before the probate judge, Maje
+Sampson took a-trembling: Martie hid her face in her shawl, crying
+again. Maybe a glimmer of what it meant came for the first time in her
+life over her. Maybe she remembered Delaroo as he used to sit with them
+under the kerosene lamp while Maje untiringly pounded the money question
+into him--smoking as he listened, and Martie mended on never-ending
+trousers. Looking from Maje Sampson, heated with monologue, to his wife,
+patiently stitching. No comments; just looking as Pierre Delaroux could
+look.
+
+Strange, Neighbor thought it, and yet, maybe, not so strange. It was all
+there in the paper--the torn, worn little book of Delaroo's life. She
+was the only woman on earth that had ever done him a kindness.
+
+Nobody at Medicine Bend quite understood it; but nobody at Medicine Bend
+quite suspected that under all the barrenness up at Maje Sampson's an
+ambition could have survived; yet one had. Martie had an ambition. Way
+down under her faded eyes and her faded dress there was an ambition, and
+that for the least promising subjects in the Rocky Mountains--the
+brickbats. Under the unending mending and the poverty and the toil,
+Martie, who never put her nose out of doors, who never attended a church
+social, never ventured even to a free public school show--had an
+ambition for the boys. She wanted the two biggest to go to the State
+University; wanted them to go and get an education. And they went; and
+Maje Sampson says them boys, ary one, has forgotten more about the money
+question than he ever knew. It looks as if after all the brickbats might
+come out; a bit of money in Martie's hands goes so far.
+
+There are a few soldiers buried at the Bend. Decoration Day there is an
+attempt at a turn-out; a little speeching and a little marching. A thin,
+straggle column of the same warped, bent old fellows in the same faded
+old blue. Up the hill they go and around to the cemetery to decorate.
+
+When they turn at Maje Sampson's place--there's a gate there now--Martie
+and more or less of the boys, and Maje, kind of join in along and go
+over with them carrying a basket or so of flowers and a bucket of water.
+
+The boys soon stray over to where the crowd is, around the graves of the
+Heroes. But Martie gets down by a grave somewhat apart and prods the
+drifting gravel all up loose with an old case-knife. You would think she
+might be kneading bread there, the way she sways under her sun-bonnet
+and gloves--for her little boiled hands are in gloves now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I don't know how much good it does Delaroo spiking up his grave once a
+year," Neighbor always winds up. "It may not do him a blamed bit of
+good, I don't say it does. But I can see them. I see them from the
+roundhouse; it does me good. Hm?
+
+"Maje?" he will add. "Why, I've got him over there at the house, wiping.
+I'm going to put him running the stationary if old John Boxer ever dies.
+When will he die? Blamed if I know. John is a pretty good man yet. I
+can't kill him, can I? Well, then, what's a matter with you?
+
+"No, Maje don't talk as much as he used to; forgetting his passes more
+or less, too. Getting old like some more of us. He's kind of quit the
+money question; claims he don't understand it now as well as the boys
+do. But he can talk about Delaroo; he understands Delaroo pretty
+well--now."
+
+
+
+
+The Operator's Story
+
+DE MOLAY FOUR
+
+
+Very able men have given their lives to the study of Monsoon's
+headlight; yet science, after no end of investigation, stands in its
+presence baffled.
+
+The source of its illumination is believed to be understood. I say
+believed, because in a day when yesterday's beliefs are to-morrow's
+delusions I commit myself personally to no theory. Whether it is a thing
+living or dead; whether malign to mackerel or potent in its influence on
+imperfectly understood atmospheric phenomena, I do not know. I doubt
+whether anybody knows, except maybe Monsoon himself. I know only that on
+the West End, Monsoon's headlight, from every point of view, stands
+high, and that on one occasion it stood between Abe Monsoon and a
+frightful catastrophe.
+
+There have been of late studied efforts to introduce electric headlights
+on the Mountain Division. But there are grizzled men in the cab who look
+with distrust--silent, it is true, yet distrust--on the claims put forth
+for them. While Monsoon's headlight does its work--as it has done even
+long before Monsoon followed it to the West End, and will do long after
+he leaves the West End--why, they say, and reasonably enough, take on
+new and theoretical substitutes?
+
+While the discussion deepens and even rages in the Wickiup, Monsoon
+himself is silent. Brave men are modest men. Among ourselves we don't
+use adjectives; where Monsoon is known it is not necessary to put
+anything ahead of his name--except, may be, once a month on the payroll
+when the cross-eyed accountant adds A. or Abe or Abraham, just as he
+happens to be fixed for time. Monsoon's name in itself stands for a
+great deal. When his brother engineers, men who have grown seamy and
+weather-beaten in the service, put up their voices for Monsoon's
+headlight; or when talkative storekeepers, who servilely jump at
+headquarters' experiments in order to court the favor of the high, speak
+for electricity, Abe Monsoon himself is silent. His light is there; let
+them take it or leave it as they will. If the Superintendent of Motive
+Power should attempt to throw it out for the new-fangled arrangement,
+Monsoon would doubtless feel that it was not the first time Omaha had
+gone wrong--and, for that matter, that neither he nor anybody else had
+assurance it would be the last. However--
+
+The story opens on Bob Duffy. Bob, right from the start, was what I call
+a good-looker, and, being the oldest boy, he had more of the swing
+anyway. When Martin came along, his mother hadn't got over thinking
+about Bob. Doubtless she thought, too, of Martin; but he was kind of
+overshadowed. Bob began by clerking in the post-office and delivering
+mail to all the pretty girls. His sympathy for the girls was so great
+that after a while he began passing out letters to them whether they
+were addressed to the girls or to somebody else. This gradually weakened
+his influence with the government.
+
+Martin began work in the telegraph office; he really learned the whole
+thing right there at the Bend under Callahan. Began, carrying Western
+Unions stuck at his waist under a heavy leather belt. He wore in those
+days, when he had real responsibility, a formidable brown Stetson that
+appeared bent on swallowing his ears: it was about the time he was
+rising trousers and eleven. Nobody but Sinkers ever beat Martin Duffy
+delivering messages, and nobody, bar none--Bullhead, McTerza,
+anybody--ever beat him eating pie. It was by eating pie that he was able
+to wear the belt so long--and you may take that either way. But I speak
+gladly of the pie, because in the usual course of events there isn't
+much pie in a despatcher's life. There is, by very large odds, more
+anxiety than pie, and I introduce the pie, not to give weight to the
+incidents that follow but rather to lighten them; though as Duffy has
+more recently admitted this was not always the effect of the pie itself.
+
+I do not believe that Martin Duffy ever had an enemy. A right tight
+little chap he was, with always a good word, even under no end of
+pressure on the single track. There's many a struggling trainman that
+will look quick and grateful when any fellow far or near speaks a word
+about Martin Duffy. Fast as he climbed, his head never swelled. His hats
+rested, even after he got a key, same as the original Stetson, right on
+the wings of his ears. But his heart grew right along after his head
+stopped, and that's where he laid over some other railroad men I could
+mention if I had to, which I don't--not here.
+
+About the time it looked as if Martin would make a go of it on the road,
+the post-office inspectors were thinking Bob would make a go of it over
+the road. But he was such a kid of a fellow that the postmaster
+convinced the detectives Bob's way of doing things was simple
+foolishness, which it probably was, and they merely swore him out of the
+service.
+
+It was then that Martin reached out a hand to his elder brother. There
+were really just the two brothers; and back of them--as there is,
+somewhere, back of every railroad man--a mother. No father--not
+generally; just a mother. A quiet, sombre little woman in a shawl and a
+bonnet of no special shape or size--just a shawl and a bonnet, that's
+all. Anyhow, the Duffy boys' mother was that way, and there's a lot more
+like her. I don't know what gets the fathers; maybe, very often, the
+scrap. But there's almost always, somewhere, a mother. So after Martin
+began to make a record, to help his mother and his brother both, he
+spoke for Bob. Callahan didn't hesitate or jolly him as he used to do
+with a good many. He thought the company couldn't have too many of the
+Duffy kind; so he said, "Yes, sure." And Bob Duffy was put at work--same
+thing exactly: carrying messages, reading hair-destroyers and blowing
+his salary on pie.
+
+But pie acts queer. Sometimes it makes a man's head solid and his heart
+big; then again it makes a man's head big and his heart solid. I'm not
+saying anything more now except that pie certainly acts different.
+
+Bob Duffy was taller than Martin and I would repeat, handsomer; but I
+can't, because Martin had absolutely no basis of beauty to start with.
+He was parchment-like and palish from sitting night after night and
+night after night over a sounder. Never sick a day in his life; but
+always over the sounder until, sleeping or waking, resting or working,
+the current purred and purred through his great little head like a
+familiarity taking old tomcat. He could guess more off a wire than most
+men could catch after the whole thing had tumbled in.
+
+So up and up ladder he went. Messenger, operator--up to assistant
+despatcher, up to a regular trick despatcher. Up to the orders and
+signing the J. M. C., the letters that stood for our superintendent's
+name and honor. Up to the trains and their movements, up to the lives,
+then CHIEF!--with the honor of the division all clutched in Martin
+Duffy's three quick right fingers on the key and his three quick left
+fingers on the pen at the same instant scratching orders across the
+clip. Talk about ambidexterity--Martin didn't know what it would be like
+to use one hand at a time. If Martin Duffy said right, trains went
+right. If he said wrong, trains went wrong. But Martin never said the
+wrong; he said only the right. Giddings knows; he copied for him long
+enough. Giddings and plenty more of them can tell all about Martin
+Duffy.
+
+Bob didn't rise in the service quite so fast as Martin. He was rather
+for having a good time. He did more of the social act, and that pleased
+his mother, who, on account of her bonnet-and-shawl complexion, didn't
+achieve much that way. Martin, too, was proud of his brother, and as
+soon as Bob could handle a wire, which was very soon (for he learned
+things in no time) Martin got Callahan to put him up at Grant as operator.
+Bob got the place because he was Martin's brother, nothing else. He held
+it about two months, then he resigned and went to San 'Frisco. He was a
+restless fellow; it was Bob up and Bob down. For a year he wandered
+around out there, telegraphing, then he bobbed up again in Medicine Bend
+out of a job. He wanted to go to work, and--well, Callahan--Martin's
+brother, you know--sent him up to Montair as night operator. Three
+months he worked steady as a clock. Then one night the despatchers at
+the Bend couldn't get Montair for two hours. It laid out Number Six and
+a Special with the General Manager and made no end of a row.
+
+Martin said right off he ought to go. But there was the little mother
+up home, silent, I expect, but pleading-like. It was left largely to
+Martin, for the young fellow was already chief; and that was the
+trouble--he hated to bear down too hard; so he compromised by asking his
+superintendent not to fire Bob but to set him back. They sent him up as
+night man to Rat River, the meanest place on the whole system. That was
+the summer of the Templars' Conclave at San 'Frisco.
+
+We worked the whole spring getting things up along the line, from Omaha
+to the Sierras, for that Conclave. Engines were overhauled, rolling
+stock touched up, roadbed put in shape, everything shaken from end to
+end. Not only were the passenger records to be smashed, but beyond that
+a lot of our big general officers were way-up Masons and meant that our
+line should get not merely the cream of the business but the cream of
+the advertising out of the thing. The general tenor of the instructions
+was to nickel-plate everything, from the catalpas to the target rods.
+For three months before the Conclave date we were busy getting ready for
+it, and when the big day drew near on which we were to undertake the
+moving and the feeding of six thousand people one way on one track
+through the mountains, the car-tinks smoked cross-cut and the Russian
+sectionmen began to oil their hair.
+
+Callahan was superintendent under Bucks, then General Manager, and
+Martin Duffy, Chief Despatcher, Neighbor, Superintendent of Motive
+Power, and Doubleday, Division Master Mechanic, and with everything
+buttoned up on the West End we went that Sunday morning on the firing
+line to take the first of the Templar Specials.
+
+Medicine Bend had the alkali pretty well washed out of its eyes, and
+never before in its history had it appeared really gay. The old Wickiup
+was decorated till it looked like a buck rigged for a ghost dance. Right
+after daybreak the trains began rolling in on Harold Davis's trick.
+Duffy had annulled all local freights and all through odds and evens,
+all stock tramps east and all westbound empties--everything that could
+be, had been suspended for that Sunday; and with it all there were still
+by five times more trains than ever before rolled through Medicine Bend
+in twenty-four hours.
+
+It was like a festival day in the mountains. Even the Indians and the
+squaw men turned out to see the fun. There was a crowd at the depot by
+five o'clock, when the first train rolled up the lower gorge with St.
+John's Commandery, Number Three from Buffalo; and the Pullmans were gay
+with bunting. The Medicine Bend crowd gave them an Indian yell and in
+two minutes the Knights, with their scalps in their hands as a token of
+surrender, were tumbling out of their sleepers into the crisp dawn. They
+were just like schoolboys, and when Shorty Lovelace--the local curiosity
+who had both feet and both hands frozen off the night he got drunk with
+Matt Cassidy at Goose River Junction--struck up on his mouth-organ "Put
+Me Off at Buffalo," they dropped seven dollars, odd, and three baggage
+checks into his hat while the crews were changing engines. It appeared
+to affect them uncommon, to see a fellow without any hands or feet play
+the mouth-organ and before sundown Shorty made the killing of his life.
+With what he raked in that day he kept the city marshal guessing for
+three months--which was also pretty good for a man without any hands or
+feet.
+
+All day it was that way: train after train and ovation after ovation.
+The day was cool as a watermelon--August--and bright as a baby's face
+all through the mountains; and the Templars went up into the high passes
+with all the swing and noise we could raise. Harold Davis took it all
+morning steady from 4 A. M. at the despatcher's key. He was used up long
+before noon; but he stayed, and just at twelve o'clock, while a big
+Templar train from Baltimore was loading its commandery in front of the
+Wickiup after an early dinner, and a big Templar band played a tingling
+two-step, Martin Duffy stuck his dry, parchment face into the platform
+crowd, elbowed his way unnoticed through it, climbed the Wickiup stairs,
+walked into the despatcher's room, and, throwing off his hat and coat,
+leaned over Harold Davis's shoulder and took a transfer.
+
+Young Giddings had been sitting there in a perspiration half an hour
+then; he copied for Martin Duffy that day. At noon they figured to get
+the last Templar over the Eagle Pass with the set of the sun. When Duffy
+took the key he never looked his force cleaner, only he was tired;
+Giddings could see that. The regular man had been sick a week and Martin
+had been filling in. Besides that, all Saturday, the day before, he had
+been spiking the line--figuring what could be annulled and what
+couldn't; what could be run extra and what could be put into regulars.
+Callahan had just got married and was going out to the Coast on his
+wedding tour in Bucks's car. He had refused to look at an order after
+Saturday night. Sunday morning, and from Sunday morning on, it was all
+against Duffy. When the Chief took the middle trick there were fourteen
+Templar Specials still to come with the last one just pulling out of
+McCloud on the plains. They were ordered to run with right of track over
+all eastbound trains thirty minutes apart all the way through.
+
+A minute after Martin Duffy sat in, the conductor of the train below
+registered out. There was a yell pretty soon, and away went the
+Baltimore crowd--and they were corkers, too, those Baltimore fellows,
+and travelled like lords.
+
+At five o'clock in the evening the trains in the West Division were
+moving just like clocks on the hour and the half--thirty minutes, thirty
+minutes, thirty minutes--and, as far as young Giddings could see, Duffy,
+after five booming hours, was fresher than when he took the chair. The
+little despatcher's capacity for work was something enormous; it wasn't
+till after supper-time, with the worst of the figuring behind him, and
+in the letting down of the anxiety, that Martin began to look older and
+his dry Indian hair began to crawl over his forehead. By that time his
+eyes had lost their snap, and when he motioned Giddings to the key, and
+got up to walk up and down the hall in the breeze, he looked like a
+wilted potato vine. His last batch of orders was only a little one
+compared with those that had gone before. But with the changes to the
+different crews they read about like this--
+
+     Telegraphic Train Order Number 68. Mountain Division.
+
+     Superintendent's Office, August 8, 1892.
+
+     For Medicine Bend to C. and E. of Engines 664, 738, 810, 326,
+     and 826.
+
+     Engines 664, 738, 810, and 326 will run as four Specials,
+     Medicine Bend to Bear Dance. Engine 826 will double-head
+     Special 326 to summit of Eagle Pass.
+
+     First No. 80, Engine 179, will run two hours thirty minutes
+     late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend.
+
+     Second No. 80, Engine 264, will run three hours and fifteen
+     minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend.
+
+     Third No. 80, Engine 210, will run four hours and thirty
+     minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend.
+
+     J. M. C.
+
+     D.
+
+When young Giddings sat in, the sun was dropping between the Tetons. In
+the yard the car-cleaners were polishing the plates on Bucks's private
+car and the darky cook was pulling chickens out of the refrigerator.
+Duffy had thirteen Conclaves moving smoothly on the middle trick. The
+final one was due, and the hostlers were steaming down with the
+double-header to pull it over the Pass. This, the last of the Commandery
+trains, was to bring DE MOLAY COMMANDERY NUMBER FOUR of Pittsburg, and
+the orders were to couple Bucks's car on to it for the run west. De
+Molay--and everybody had notice--was Bucks's old commandery back in
+Pennsylvania, and he was going to the end of the division that night
+with the cronies of his youth. Little fellows they were in railroading
+when he rode the goat with them, but now mostly, like him, big fellows.
+Half a dozen old salts had been pounding ahead at him all day over the
+wire. They were to join him and Mr. and Mrs. Callahan for supper in the
+private car, and the yellow cider lay on the thin-shaven ice and the
+mountain grouse curled on the grill irons when De Molay Four, Pittsburg,
+pulled into Medicine Bend.
+
+We had seen a good many swell trains that day, the swellest that ever
+pounded _our_ fishplates, Pullmans solid, and the finest kind of people.
+Boston, Washington, New York, Philadelphia sent some pretty gorgeous
+trains. But with at least half the town on the platform, when De Molay
+Four rolled in it took their breath so they couldn't yell till the Sir
+Knights began pouring from the vestibules and gave Medicine Bend their
+own lordly cheer.
+
+Mahogany vestibules they were and extension platforms; salon lamps and
+nickeled handrails; buffet smoker and private diner: a royal train and a
+royal company; olive green from tender to tail lights--De Molay Four,
+Pittsburg.
+
+Bucks's old gang spied him. Modestly back under the portico, he stood
+near the ticket window, and they broke through at him solid. They pulled
+him and hauled him and mauled him and passed him from hand to hand. They
+stood him on his head and on his hands and on his feet again, and told
+him of something they wanted and wanted right off.
+
+Bucks looked the least bit uncertain as he considered the opening
+request. It wasn't much in some ways, what they asked; in other ways it
+was a good deal. He laughed and bantered and joked them as long as they
+would stand it; then he called up to Martin Duffy, who was leaning out
+the despatchers' window, "We'll see how he talks," laughed Bucks in his
+great big way. "But, boys, it's up to the Chief. I'm not in it on the
+orders, you know. Martin," he called, as Duffy bent his head, "they want
+fifteen minutes here to stretch their legs. Say they've been roasted in
+the alkali all day. Can you do anything for the boys?"
+
+The boys! Big fellows in fezes, Shriner style, and slim fellows in duck,
+sailor style, and bow-legged fellows in cheviot, any old style. Chaps in
+white flannel, and chaps in gray, and chaps in blue. Turkish whiskers
+and Key West cigars and Crusaders' togs--and, between them, Bucks, his
+head most of the time in chancery. It was the first time they had seen
+him since he had made our Jim Crow line into a system known from the
+Boston and Maine to the Mexican Central, and, bar none, run cleaner or
+better. The first time they had seen him since he had made a name for
+himself and for his road from Newport News to 'Frisco, and they meant
+now to kill him, dead.
+
+You know about what it meant and about how it went, how it had to go.
+What could Martin say to the man who had made him all he was and who
+stood, now a boy again among the boys of his boyhood, and asked for
+fifteen minutes--a quarter of an hour for De Molay Number Four? It threw
+the little Chief completely off his schedules; just fifteen minutes was
+more than enough to do that. All the work was done, the anxiety nearly
+past--Martin had risen to rest his thumping head. But fifteen minutes;
+once in a lifetime--Bucks asking it.
+
+Duffy turned to big Jack Moore standing at his side ready to pull De
+Molay over the Pass, and spoke him low. Jack nodded; everything went
+with Jack, even the turn-tables that stuck with other engineers. Martin
+in his shirt-sleeves leaned out the window and, looking down on the
+turbaned and turbulent mob, spoke so Bucks could hear.
+
+"What is it?" demanded the most puissant commander of De Molay
+excitedly. "What does he say, Bucks?"
+
+"What says the slave?" growled a second formidable crusader; "out with
+it!"
+
+"All we want is fifteen minutes."
+
+"You wouldn't turn us down on fifteen minutes this far from an oasis,
+would you, Bucks?" protested a glass-eyed Shriner.
+
+Bucks looked around royally. "Fifteen minutes?" he drawled. "What's a
+quarter of an hour in a lifetime, Jackman, on the last oasis? Take off
+your clothes, you fellows, and take half an hour. Now will you be good?"
+
+De Molay put up a Templar yell. They always get the good things of life,
+those Pittsburg men; things other fellows couldn't begin to get. They
+passed the word through the sleepers, and the women began pouring from
+the vestibules. In two quick minutes out came the Duquesne band in red
+pompoms, duck trousers and military jackets, white corded with black.
+The crowd broke, the band marched down the platform and, striking up the
+"Washington Post," opened ranks on the grass plot above the Wickiup to
+receive the De Molay guard. One hundred Knights Templar in fatigue
+debouched into a bit of a park, and in the purple of the sunset gave a
+commandery drill to the honor of Bucks--Bucks and the West End.
+
+It was Sunday night, and still as August could make it. The battalion
+moving silent and mobile as a streamer over the grass, marched, deployed
+and rested. They broke, to the clear-cut music, into crosses and squares
+and crescents and stars until small boys went cross-eyed, and wheeling
+at last on the line, they saluted Bucks--himself a past grand
+commander--and the railroad men yelled.
+
+Meantime the General Manager's private car had been pasted on the
+tail-end of De Molay Four, and a pusher edging up, stuck its nose into
+the rear vestibule. On the head end Jack Moore and Oyster were backing
+down on the olive-green string with the two smoothest moguls on the
+division. Bucks and Neighbor had held back everything good all day for
+De Molay Four, down to engines and runners and conductor. Pat Francis
+carried the punch, and the little Chief sat again in the despatcher's
+chair for De Molay Four.
+
+And while the lovely women strolled in the cool of the evening and the
+odor of mountain sweetness, and the guard drilled, and the band played,
+the Chief knit his brows over his train sheet. It looked now,
+re-arranged, re-ordered, re-adjusted and re-organized, as if a Gila
+Monster had crawled over it without wiping his feet. And when De Molay
+Four got ready to pull out, with Moore and Oyster on the throttles and
+old John Parker in the baggage, where he had absolutely nothing to do
+but drink cigars and smoke champagne and Pat Francis in the aisles, and
+Bucks, with Mr. and Mrs. Callahan and their crowd, in private Number
+Twelve--there was that much shouting and tooting and waving that Martin
+Duffy simply couldn't think for a few seconds; yet he held them all, for
+life or for death, every last one, in the curve of his fingers.
+
+So they stood ready in the gorge while Duffy studied wearily how to
+handle First, Second, and Third Eighty against them.
+
+First, Second, and Third Eighty! If they could only have been wiped off
+the face of the rails as easy as they might have been wiped off a train
+sheet! But there they were, three sections, and big ones, of the
+California fast freight. High-class stuff for Chicago and New York that
+couldn't be held or laid out that Sunday, not for a dozen Conclaves. All
+day First, Second, and Third Eighty had been feeling their way east
+through the mountains, trying to dodge the swell commanderies rolling by
+impudent as pay cars. But all the final plans to keep them out of
+everybody's way, out of the way of fez and turban and chapeau and Greek
+cross and crimson-splashed sleepers, were now dashed by thirty minutes
+at Medicine for De Molay Four.
+
+Order after order went from under his hand. New meeting-points for
+First, Second, and Third Eighty and De Molay Four, otherwise Special
+326.
+
+Pat Francis snatched the tissues from Duffy's hand and, after the
+battalion had dispersed among their wives and sisters, and among the
+sisters of the other fellow; after the pomponed chaps had chucked the
+trombones and cymbals and drums at old John Parker's shins; after the
+last air-cock had been tested and the last laggard crusader thrown
+forcibly aboard by the provost guard, the double-header tooted, "Out!"
+and, with the flutter of an ocean liner, De Molay Four pulled up the
+gorge.
+
+The orders buttoned in the reefers gave De Molay a free sweep to Elcho,
+and Jack Moore and Oyster were the men to take it, good and hard.
+Moreover, there was glory aboard. Pennsylvania nobs, way-up railroad
+men, waiting to see what for motive power we had in the Woolly West; how
+we climbed mountains and skirted cañon walls, and crawled down two and
+three per cent grades. Then with Bucks himself in the private car--what
+wonder they let her out and swung De Molay through the gorge as maybe
+you've seen a particularly buoyant kite snake its tail out of the grass
+and drag it careening skyward. When they slowed for Elcho at nightfall,
+past First and Second Eighty, and Bucks named the mileage, the Pennsys
+refused to believe it for the hour's run. But fast as they had sped
+along the iron trail, Martin Duffy's work had sped ahead of them, and
+this order was waiting:
+
+     Telegraphic Train Order Number 79.
+
+     C. and E. Third No. 80, Rat River.
+
+     C. and E. Special 326, Elcho.
+
+     Third No. 80, Engine 210, and Special 326 will meet at Rock Point.
+
+     J. M. C.
+
+     D.
+
+With this meeting-point made, it would be pretty much over in the
+despatchers' office. Martin Duffy pushed his sallow hair back for the
+last time, and, leaving young Giddings to get the last O. K.'s and the
+last Complete on his trick, got out of the chair.
+
+It had been a tremendous day for Giddings, a tremendous day. Thirty-two
+Specials on the despatchers, and Giddings copying for the Chief. He sat
+down after Duffy, filled with a riotous importance because it was now,
+in effect, all up to Giddings, personally; at least until Barnes Tracy
+should presently kick him out of the seat of honor for the night trick.
+Mr. Giddings sat down and waited for the signature of the orders.
+
+Very soon Pat Francis dropped off De Molay Four, slowing at Elcho, ran
+straight to the operator for his order, signed it and at once Order 79
+was throbbing back to young Giddings at Medicine Bend. It was precisely
+7.54 P. M. when Giddings gave back the Complete and at 7.55 Elcho
+reported Special 326, "out," all just like clockwork. What a head Martin
+Duffy has, thought young Giddings--and behold! all the complicated
+everlasting headwork of the trick and the day, and of the West End and
+its honor, was now up to the signature of Third Eighty at Rat River.
+Just Third Eighty's signature for the Rock Point meeting, and the
+biggest job ever tackled by a single-track road in America (Giddings
+thought) was done and well done.
+
+So the ambitious Giddings by means of a pocket-mirror inspected a
+threatening pimple on the end of his chubby nose palming the glass
+skilfully so Barnes Tracy couldn't see it even if he did interrupt his
+eruption, and waited for Bob Duffy, the Rat River nightman, to come back
+at him with Third Eighty's signature. Under Giddings' eye, as he sat,
+ticked Martin Duffy's chronometer--the watch that split the seconds and
+chimed the quarters and stopped and started so impossibly and ran to a
+second a month--the watch that Bucks (who never did things by halves)
+had given little Martin Duffy with the order that made him Chief. It lay
+at Giddings's fingers, and the minute hand wiped from the enamelled dial
+seven o'clock fifty-five, fifty-six, seven, eight--nine. Young Giddings
+turned to his order book and inspected his entries like a methodical
+bookkeeper, and Martin Duffy's chronometer chimed the fourth quarter,
+eight o'clock. One entry he had still to make. Book in hand he called
+Rat River.
+
+"Get Third Eighty's signature to Order 79 and hurry them out," he tapped
+impatiently at Bob Duffy.
+
+There was a wait. Giddings lighted his pipe the way Callahan always
+lighted _his_ pipe--putting out his lips to catch all the perfume and
+blowing the first cloud away wearily, as Callahan always did wearily.
+Then he twirled the match meditatively, and listened, and got suddenly
+this from Bob Duffy at Rat River:
+
+"I forgot Order 79," came Bob Duffy's message. "I let Third Eighty go
+without it. They left here at seven--fifty"--fifty something, Giddings
+never heard fifty what. The match went into the ink, the pipe into the
+water-pail, and Giddings, before Bob Duffy finished, like a drowning
+man was calling Elcho with the life and death, the Nineteen call.
+
+"Hold Special 326!" he cried over the wire the instant Elcho replied.
+
+But Elcho, steadily, answered this:
+
+"Special--Three-twenty-six--left--here--seven-fifty-five."
+
+Giddings, with both hands on the table, raised up like a drunken man.
+The West End was against it. Third Eighty in the open and going against
+the De Molay Four. Bucks, Callahan, wife--everybody--and Rock Point a
+blind siding that no word from anybody on earth could reach ahead of
+Third Eighty.
+
+Giddings sprang to the open window and shouted to anybody and everybody
+to call Martin Duffy. But Martin Duffy spoke behind him.
+
+"What do you want?" he asked; it came terribly quick on Giddings as he
+turned.
+
+"What's the matter?" exclaimed Martin, looking into the boy's face.
+"Speak, can't you? What's the matter, Giddings?"
+
+"Bob forgot Order 79 and let Third Eighty go without it--and Special 326
+is out of Elcho," choked Giddings.
+
+"_What?_"
+
+"Bob at--Rat River--gave Third Eighty a clearance without the Order 79."
+
+Martin Duffy sprang straight up in the air. Once he shut his lifted
+hands; once he looked at Giddings, staggering again through the
+frightful news, then he dropped into the chair, looked wildly around,
+seized his key like a hunted man, stared at his train sheet, grabbed the
+order book, and listened to Giddings cutting off one hope after another
+of stopping Special 326. His fingers set mechanically and he made the
+Rat River call; but Rat River was silent. With Barnes Tracy tiptoeing in
+behind on the instinct of trouble, and young Giddings shaking like a
+leaf, the Chief called Rat River. Then he called Elcho, asked for
+Special 326, and Elcho again repeated steadily:
+
+"Special--326--left--here--on--Order--79--at--seven-fifty-five P. M."
+
+Martin Duffy bent before the message; young Giddings, who had been
+whispering to Tracy, dropped on a stool and covered his face.
+
+"Don't cry, Giddings." It was Duffy who spoke; dry and parched his
+voice. "It's nothing you--could help." He looked around and saw Tracy at
+his elbow. "Barnes," he said, but he tried twice before his voice would
+carry. "Barnes--they will meet in the Cinnamon cut. Giddings told you?
+Bob forgot, forgot my order. Run, Giddings, for Benedict Morgan and
+Doubleday and Carhart--_quick!_"
+
+Giddings ran, the Rat River call echoing again down the hall behind him.
+Rat River was closest to Rock Point--would get the first news of the
+wreck, and Martin Duffy was calling his recreant brother at the River;
+but the River was silent.
+
+Doubleday and the company surgeon, Dr. Carhart, rushed into the room
+almost together. Then came with a storm the wrecking boss, Benedict
+Morgan; it was only an evil hour that brought Benedict Morgan into the
+despatchers' office. Stooped and silent, Martin Duffy, holding the
+chair, was calling Rat River. Carhart watched him just a moment, then he
+took Barnes Tracy aside and whispered--and, going back, bent over Duffy.
+The Chief pulled himself up.
+
+"Let Tracy take the key," repeated the doctor. "Get away from the table
+a minute, Martin. It may not be as bad as you think."
+
+Duffy, looking into the surgeon's face, put his hand on his arm. "It's
+the De Molay train, the Special 326, with Bucks's car, double-headed.
+Oh, my God--I can't stop them. Doctor, they will meet!"
+
+Carhart unfastened the fingers on his arm. "Come away a minute. Let
+Tracy have the key," he urged.
+
+"A head-ender, eh?" croaked Benedict Morgan from the counter, and with a
+frightful oath. "A head-ender!"
+
+"Shut up, you brute!" hissed Carhart. Duffy's hands were creeping
+queerly up the sides of his head.
+
+"Sure," growled Benedict Morgan, loweringly, "sure. Shut up. Of course.
+Shut up."
+
+Carhart was a quick man. He started for the wrecker, but Duffy,
+springing, stopped him. "For God's sake, keep cool, everybody," he
+exclaimed, piteously. There was no one else to talk, to give the orders.
+Bucks and Callahan both on the Special--maybe past order-giving now.
+Only Martin Duffy to take the double load and the double shame. He
+stared, dazed again, into the faces around as he held to the fiery
+surgeon. "Morgan," he added steadily, looking at the surly wrecker, "get
+up your crew, quick. Doubleday, make up all the coaches in the yard for
+an ambulance train. Get every doctor in town to go with you. Tracy,
+clear the line."
+
+The Master Mechanic and Benedict Morgan clattered down stairs. Carhart,
+running to the telephone, told Central to summon every medical man in
+the Bend, and hurried out. Before he had covered a block, roundhouse
+callers, like flaws of wind before a storm, were scurrying the streets,
+and from the tower of the fire-house sounded the harsh clang of the
+emergency gong for the wreckers.
+
+Caught where they could be caught, out of saloons, beds, poker joints,
+Salvation barracks, churches,--the men of the wrecking crew ran down the
+silent streets, waking now fast into life. Congregations were dispersed,
+hymns cut, prayers forgotten, bars deserted, hells emptied, barracks
+raided at that call, the emergency gong call, fell as a fire-bell, for
+the Mountain Division wrecking gang.
+
+While the yard crews shot up and down the spurs switching coaches into
+the relief train, Benedict Morgan with solid volleys of oaths was
+organizing his men and filling them at the lunch counters with huge
+schooners of coffee. Carhart pushed again through the jam of men and up
+to the despatchers' office. Before and behind him crowded the local
+physicians with instrument bags and bandages. The ominous baggage
+deposited on the office floor, they sat down about the room or hovered
+around Carhart asking for details. Doubleday, tall and grim, came over
+from the roundhouse. Benedict Morgan stamped up from the yard--the
+Mountain Division was ready.
+
+All three despatchers were in the room. John Mallers, the day man, stood
+near Tracy, who had relieved Giddings. The line was clear for the relief
+run. Elcho had been notified of the impending disaster, and at Tracy's
+elbow sat the Chief looking fixedly at the key--taking the bob of the
+sounder with his eye. A dozen men in the room were talking; but they
+spoke as men who speaking wait on the life of a fuse. Duffy, with
+suspense deepening into frenzy, pushed Tracy's hand from the key and,
+sliding into the chair, began once more to call his brother at Rat
+River.
+
+"R, T--R, T--R, T--R, T--" clicked the River call. "R, T--R, T--R,
+T--Bob--Bob--Bob," spelled the sender. "Answer me, answer, answer. R,
+T--R, T--R, T--R, T--"
+
+And Barnes Tracy edged away and leaned back to where the shadow hid his
+face. And John Mallers, turning from the pleading of the current, stared
+gloomily out of the window across the yard shimmering under the double
+relay of arc lights; and young Giddings, who couldn't stand it--just
+_couldn't_ stand it--bending on his stool, shook with gulping sobs.
+
+The others knew nothing of the heartbreaking in the little clicks. But
+they all knew the track--knew where the trains would meet; knew they
+could not by any possibility see each other till they whirled together
+on the curve of the Cinnamon cut or on the trestle west of it and they
+waited only for the breaking of the suspense that settled heavily over
+them.
+
+Ten, twenty, thirty, forty minutes went, with Martin Duffy at intervals
+vainly calling. Then--as the crack opens in the field of ice, as the
+snow breaks in the mountain slide, as the sea gives up at last its dead,
+the sounder spoke--Rat River made the despatcher's call. And Martin
+Duffy, staring at the copper coil, pushed himself up in his chair like a
+man that chokes, caught smothering at his neck, and slipped wriggling to
+the floor.
+
+Carhart caught him up, but Duffy's eyes stared meaningless past him. Rat
+River was calling him, but Martin Duffy was past the taking. Like the
+man next at the gun, Barnes Tracy sprang into the chair with the I, I,
+D. The surgeon, Giddings helping, dragged Duffy to the lounge in
+Callahan's room--his Chief was more to Giddings then than the fate of
+Special 326. But soon confused voices began to ring from where men were
+crowding around the despatchers' table. They echoed in to where the
+doctors worked over the raving Chief. And young Giddings, helping,
+began, too, to hear strange things from the other room.
+
+"The moon--"
+
+"The _moon_?"
+
+"The MOON!"
+
+"_What?_"
+
+Barnes Tracy was trying to make himself heard:
+
+"The moon, damn it! MOON! That's English, ain't it? _Moon._"
+
+"Who's talking at Rat River?" demanded Benedict Morgan, hoarsely.
+
+"Chick Neale, conductor of Third Eighty; their train is back at Rat
+River. God bless that man," stammered Barnes Tracy, wiping his forehead
+feverishly; "he's an old operator. He says Bob Duffy is missing--tell
+Martin, quick, there isn't any wreck--quick!"
+
+"What does Neale say?" cried Doubleday with an explosion.
+
+Tracy thought he had told them, but he hadn't. "He says his engineer,
+Abe Monsoon, was scared by the moon rising just as they cleared Kennel
+Butte," explained Tracy unsteadily. "He took it for the headlight of
+Special 326 and jumped from his engine. The fireman backed the train to
+Rat River--see?"
+
+While Tracy talked, Mallers at the key was getting it all. "Look here,"
+he exclaimed, "did you ever hear of such a mix-up in your life? The head
+brakeman of the freight was in the cab, Neale says. He and the engineer
+were talking about the last Conclave train, wondering where they were
+going to meet it, when the brakeman spied the moon coming up around
+Kennel Butte curve. 'There's the 326 Special!' he yelled, and lighted
+out the gangway. Monsoon reversed and jumped off after him so quick he
+knocked the fireman over in the coal. When the fireman got up--he hadn't
+heard a word of it all--he couldn't see anything ahead but the moon. So
+he stops the train and backs up for the two guys. When Neale and he
+picked them up they ran right back to Rat River for orders. They never
+got to Rock Point at all--why, they never got two miles east of Rat
+River."
+
+"And where's Special 326?" cried Doubleday.
+
+"At Rock Point, you loco. She must be there and waiting yet for Third
+Eighty. The stopping of the freight gave her plenty of time to make the
+meeting-point, don't you see, and there she is--sweating--yet. Neale is
+an old operator. By Heaven! Give me a man of the key against the the
+world. Praise God from whom all blessings flow!"
+
+"Then there isn't to be any wreck?" ventured a shy little lady
+homeopathic physician, who had been crimped into the fray to help do up
+the mangled Knights and was modestly waiting her opportunity.
+
+"Not to-night," announced Tracy with the dignity of a man temporarily in
+charge of the entire division.
+
+A yell went out of the room like a tidal wave. Doubleday and Benedict
+Morgan had not spoken to each other since the night of the roundhouse
+fire--that was two years. They turned wonder-struck to each other.
+Doubleday impulsively put out his hand and, before he could pull it in
+again, the wrecking boss grabbed it like a pay check. Carhart, who was
+catching the news from the rattle of young Giddings, went wild trying to
+repeat it to Duffy without losing it in his throat. The Chief was
+opening his eyes, trying to understand.
+
+Medical men of violently differing schools, allopaths, homeopaths,
+osteopaths, eclectics--made their peace with a whoop. A red-headed
+druggist, who had rung himself in for a free ride to the horror, threw
+his emergency packets into the middle of the floor. The doctors caught
+the impulse: instrument cases were laid with solemn tenderness on the
+heap, and a dozen crazy men, joining hands around the pyred saws and
+gauze, struck up "Old Hundred."
+
+Engineer Monsoon was a new man, who had been over the division only
+twice before in his life, both times in daylight. For that emergency Abe
+Monsoon was the man of all others, because it takes more than an
+ordinary moon to scare a thoroughbred West End engineer. But Monsoon and
+his moon headlight had between them saved De Molay Four from the scrap.
+
+The relief arrangements and Monsoon's headlight were the fun of it, but
+there was more. Martin Duffy lay eleven weeks with brain fever before
+they could say moon again to him. Bob had skipped into the mountains in
+the very hour that he had disgraced himself. He has never shown up at
+Medicine since; but Martin is still Chief, and they think more of him on
+the Mountain district than ever.
+
+Bucks got the whole thing when De Molay Four reached Rat River that
+night. Bucks and Callahan and Moore and Oyster and Pat Francis got it
+and smiled grimly. Nobody else on Special 326 even dreamed of leaving a
+bone that Sunday night in the Cinnamon cut. All the rest of the evening
+Bucks smiled just the same at the Knights and the Knightesses, and they
+thought him for a bachelor wonderfully entertaining.
+
+A month later, when the old boys more or less ragged came straggling
+back from 'Frisco, Bucks's crowd stayed over a train, and he told his
+Pennsylvania cronies what they had slipped through in that delay at Rock
+Point.
+
+"Just luck," laughed one of the Eastern superintendents, who wore on his
+watch chain an enormous Greek cross with "Our Trust is in God" engraved
+on it. "Just luck," he laughed, "wasn't it?"
+
+"Maybe," murmured Bucks, looking through the Wickiup window at the Teton
+peaks. "That is--you might call it that--back on the Penn. Out here I
+guess they'd call it, Just God."
+
+
+
+
+The Trainmaster's Story
+
+OF THE OLD GUARD
+
+
+I never found it very hard to get into trouble: as far back as I can
+remember that has come dead easy for me.
+
+When this happened I hadn't been railroading a month and I was up with
+my conductor on the carpet, sweating from sheer grogginess and
+excitement. The job of front-end brakeman on a mountain division is no
+great stake for a man ordinarily, but it was one for me, just then. We
+knew when we went into the superintendent's office that somebody was to
+get fired; the only question was, who?--the train crew or the operator?
+Our engine crew were out of it; it was up to the conductor and to me.
+Had the operator displayed red signals? The conductor said, no; I said,
+no; the operator said, yes: but he lied. We couldn't prove it; we could
+only put our word against his: and what made it the worse for me, my
+conductor was something of a liar himself.
+
+I stood beading in a cold sweat for I could see with half an eye it was
+going against us; the superintendent, an up-and-up railroad man every
+inch and all business, but suspicious, was leaning the operator's way
+the strongest kind.
+
+There wasn't another soul in the little room as the three of us stood
+before the superintendent's desk except a passenger conductor, who sat
+behind me with his feet on the window ledge, looking out into the yard.
+
+"Morrison's record in this office is clean," the superintendent was
+saying of the operator, who was doing us smooth as smokeless powder,
+"he has never to my knowledge lied in an investigation. But, Allbers,"
+continued the superintendent speaking bluntly to my conductor, "you've
+never told a straight story about that Rat River switch matter yet. This
+man is a new man," he added, throwing a hard look at me. "Ordinarily I'd
+be inclined to take the word of two men against one, but I don't know
+one at all and the other has done me once. I can't see anything for it
+but to take Morrison's word and let you fellows both out. There wasn't
+any wreck, but that's not your fault; not for a minute."
+
+"Mr. Rocksby," I protested, speaking up to the division boss in a clean
+funk--the prospect of losing my job that way, through a lying operator,
+took the heart clean out of me--"you don't know me, it is true, but I
+pledge you my word of honor--"
+
+"What's your word of honor?" asked the superintendent, cutting into me
+like a hatchet, "I don't know any more about your word of honor than I
+do about you."
+
+What could I say? There were men who did know me, but they were a long
+cry from the Rocky Mountains and the headquarters of the Mountain
+Division. I glanced about me from his face, gray as alkali, to Allbers,
+shuffling on the carpet, and to Morrison, as steady as a successful
+liar, taking my job and my reputation at one swallow; and to the
+passenger conductor with the glossy black whiskers; but he was looking
+out the window. "What do I know about your word of honor?" repeated
+Rocksby sharply. "Allbers, take your man and get your time."
+
+A wave of helpless rage swept over me. The only thing I could think of,
+was strangling the lying operator in the hall. Then somebody spoke.
+
+"Show your papers, you damn fool."
+
+It came calm as sunshine and cold as a north-wester from the passenger
+conductor behind me, from Dave Hawk, and it pulled me into line like a
+bugle call. I felt my English all back at once. Everybody heard him and
+looked my way; again it was up to me. This time I was ready for the
+superintendent, or for that matter for the blooming Mountain Division. I
+had forgot all about my papers till Dave Hawk spoke. I put my hand,
+shaking, into my inside vest pocket for a piece of oilskin--it was all
+I had left; I was a good way from my base that year. I laid the oilskin
+on the superintendent's table, unfolded it jealously and took out a
+medal and a letter, that in spite of the carefullest wrapping was
+creased and sweated. But the letter was from my captain and the bit of
+bronze was the Cross. Rocksby picked up the letter and read it.
+
+[Illustration: Dave Hawk.]
+
+"Have you been in the British Army?" he asked curtly.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+He scowled a minute over Picton's scrawl, laid it down and gratified his
+curiosity by picking up the medal. He studied the face of the token,
+looked curiously at the dingy red ribbon, twirled it and saw the words
+on the reverse, "For Valour," and looked again at me.
+
+"Where'd you get this?" he asked indicating the Victoria.
+
+"In the Soudan, sir."
+
+Dave Hawk kept right on looking out the window. Neither my conductor nor
+the operator seemed to know just what the row was. Nobody spoke.
+
+"What' you doing here?" Rocksby went on.
+
+"I came out to learn the cattle business." His brows went up easy-like.
+"They cleaned me out." Brows dropped gentle-like. "Then I went bad with
+mountain-fever," and he looked decent at me.
+
+"You say you had your head out the cupola and saw the white signal?" he
+asked, sort of puzzled.
+
+"I saw the white signal." Rocksby looked at the operator Morrison.
+
+"We'll adjourn this thing," said he at last, "till I look into it a
+little further. For the present, go back to your runs."
+
+We never heard any more of it. Allbers got out quick. I waited to pick
+up my stuff and turned to thank Dave Hawk; he was gone.
+
+It wasn't the first time Dave had pulled me out of the water. About two
+weeks before that I had crawled one night up on the front platform of
+the baggage at Peace River to steal a ride to Medicine Bend on Number
+One. It was Dave's train. I had been kicked out of the McCloud hospital
+two days before without a cent, or a friend on earth outside the old
+country, and I hadn't a mind to bother the folks at home any more, come
+Conan or the devil.
+
+The night was bitter bad, black as a Fuzzy and sleeting out of the
+foothills like manslaughter. When the train stopped at Rosebud for
+water, what with gripping the icy hand-rail and trying to keep my teeth
+steady on my knees I must have been a hard sight. Just as the train was
+ready to pull out, Dave came by and poked his lantern full in my face.
+
+He was an older man than I, a good bit older, for I was hardly more than
+a kid then, only spindling tall, and so thin I couldn't tell a stomach
+ache from a back ache. As I sat huddled down on the lee step with my cap
+pulled over my head and ears, he poked his light full into my face and
+snapped, "Get out!"
+
+If it had been a headlight I couldn't have been worse scared, and I
+found afterward he carried the brightest lamp on the division. I looked
+up into his face and he looked into mine. I wonder if in this life it
+isn't mostly in the face after all? I couldn't say anything, I was
+shaking in a chill as I pulled myself together and climbed down into the
+storm.
+
+Yet I never saw a face harder in some ways than Dave Hawk's. His visor
+hid his forehead and a blackbeard covered his face till it left only his
+straight cold nose and a dash of olive white under the eyes. His
+whiskers loomed high as a Cossack's and his eyes were onyx black with
+just such a glitter. He knew it was no better than murder to put me off
+in that storm at a mountain siding: I knew it; but I didn't much care
+for I knew before very long I should fall off, anyway. After I crawled
+down he stood looking at me, and with nothing better on I stood looking
+at him.
+
+"If you get up there again I'll break your neck," he promised, holding
+up his lantern. I was quiet; the nerve was out of me.
+
+"Where you going?" he asked shortly.
+
+"Medicine Ben----"
+
+"Get into the smoker, you damn fool."
+
+How it galvanized me. For twenty-four hours I hadn't eaten. I was just
+out of a hospital bed and six weeks of mountain fever, but I braced at
+his words like a Sioux buck. I hurried back ahead of him to the smoking
+car, drenched wet, and tough, I know. I looked so tough that the
+brakeman grabbed me the minute I opened the front door and tried to kick
+me out. I turned snarling then, crazy as a wolf all in a second, and
+somehow backed the brakeman against the water cooler with his windpipe
+twisted in my bony fingers like a corkscrew. The train was moving out. I
+had been cuffed and kicked till I would rather kill somebody than not;
+this seemed a fair chance for a homicide. When the poor fellow's wind
+went off--he wasn't much of a scrapper, I fancy--he whipped around in
+the aisle like a dying rooster. As he struggled in my grip there behind
+him in the doorway stood Dave, lantern in hand, looking on with a new
+face. This time he was smiling--Dave's smile meant just the parting of
+his lips over a row of glistening teeth; perfectly even teeth and under
+his black mustache whiter than ivory. It appeared to amuse him to see me
+killing the brakeman. The instant I saw Dave I let go and he watched the
+crestfallen trainman pull himself together.
+
+"Guess you'll let him alone now, won't you?" said Dave pleasantly to my
+rattled assailant. "Sit down," he growled harshly at me, stringing his
+lantern on his arm. He walked unconcernedly down the aisle, and I
+dropped exhausted into the front seat facing the Baker heater. It was
+heavenly hot; red hot. I have loved a car heater ever since, and Baker
+to me, is hardly lower than the angels. My togs began to steam, my blood
+began to flow, the train boy gave me a wormy apple, an Irishman with a
+bottle of rank whiskey gave me a stinger and I wanted to live again. I
+curled up in the seat and in five minutes I was roasting, oh, such a
+heavenly roast; and dozing, Lord! what a heavenly doze, before that
+Baker heater. All night the forward truck beat and pounded under me: all
+night I woke and slept in the steaming, stinking air of the hot car. And
+whenever I opened my eyes I saw always the same thing, a topping tall
+conductor looming in the aisle, his green-hooded lamp, like a semaphore
+under his arm. And above, in the gloom, a bush of black beard and a pair
+of deep-set, shining eyes back under a peaked cap. Dave often comes back
+as I saw him, waking and dreaming, that night in the smoker of Number
+One.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was breaking day when he bent over me.
+
+"We're getting into the Bend," he said gruffly. "Got any money for
+breakfast?"
+
+"I haven't a cent on God's earth." He put his hand in his pocket and
+pulling out a handful of loose bills shoved one into my fingers.
+
+"I'll take it from you and gladly," I said sitting up. "But I'm not a
+beggar nor a tramp."
+
+"Off track?"
+
+"Yes. I'm going to enlist--" His teeth flashed. "That's worse than
+railroading, ain't it?" Something came into my head like a rocket.
+
+"If I could get started railroading----"
+
+"Get started easy enough."
+
+That's how I happened to show him my Victoria. He gave me a card to the
+trainmaster, and next day I went to braking for Allbers, who, by the
+way, was the biggest liar I ever knew.
+
+But the morning I got into Medicine Bend that first time on Number One I
+had another scare. I went into the lunch room for coffee and sandwiches
+and threw my bill at the boy. He opened it, looked at it and looked at
+me.
+
+"Well," I growled, for I was impudent with luck and a hot stomach.
+"Good, ain't it?"
+
+"Smallest you got?"
+
+I nodded as if I had a pocket full. He hustled around and came back with
+a handful of money. I said nothing but when he spread it out before me I
+sat paralysed. I had just assumed that Dave had given me a dollar.
+Sinkers, deducting the price of two coffees and six sandwiches from the
+bill counted out nineteen dollars and thirty cents for me.
+
+That change kept me running for a month, and after my first pay day I
+hunted up Dave to pay him back. I found him in the evening. He was
+sitting alone on the eating-house porch, his feet up against the rail,
+looking at the mountains in the sunset.
+
+"Never mind," he said, as I held out a twenty dollar bill and tried to
+speak my little piece. He did not move except to wave back my hand.
+
+"Oh, but I can't let you do that----" I protested.
+
+"Put up your money, Tommie." He called me Tommie.
+
+"No," he repeated putting by my hand; his face set hard, and when Dave's
+face did set it set stony. "Put up your money; you don't owe me
+anything. I stole it."
+
+It was a queer deal out on the West End in those days. It was a case of
+wide open from the river to the Rockies. Everybody on the line from the
+directors to the car-tinks were giving the company the worst of it. The
+section hands hooked the ties for the maintenance, the painters drank
+the alcohol for the shellac, the purchasing agent had more fast horses
+than we had locomotives, and what made it discouraging for the
+conductors, the auditors stole what little money the boys did turn in.
+
+A hard place to begin railroading the old line was then: but that's
+where I had to tackle the game, and in all the hard crowd I mixed with
+Dave Hawk was the only big man on the division. There were others there
+who fixed the thing up by comparing notes on their collections and
+turning in percentages to make their reports look right. But Dave was
+not a conspirator; never made a confidant of any man in his stealing or
+his spending, and despised their figuring. He did as he pleased and
+cared for no one; no superior had any terror for Dave. He had a wife
+somewhere back east of the river, they said, that had sold him
+out--that's why he was in the mountains--and he lived among free and
+easy men a lonely life. If anybody ever got close to him, I think maybe
+I did, though I was still only a freight conductor when the lightning
+struck the division.
+
+It came with a clean sweep through the general offices at the River.
+Everybody in the auditing department, the executive heads down to
+general manager and a whole raft of East End conductors. It was a
+shake-out from top to bottom, and the bloods on our division went white
+and sickly very fast.
+
+Of course it was somebody's gain. When the heads of our passenger
+conductors began to drop, they began setting up freight men. Rocksby had
+resigned a year earlier, and Haverly, his successor, an ex-despatcher
+and as big a knave as there was on the pay roll, let the men out right
+and left with the sole idea of saving his own scalp. By the time I was
+put up to a passenger train the old force was pretty much cleared out
+except Dave.
+
+Every day almost, we looked to see him go. Everybody loved him because
+he was a master railroad man, and everybody except Dave himself was
+apprehensive about his future. He moved on just the same, calm and cold
+as ice-water, taking the same old chances, reckless of everything and
+everybody. I never knew till afterward, but the truth was Haverly with
+all his bluff talk was just enough afraid of Dave Hawk to want to let
+him alone. The matter, though, focused one day up in the old office in
+an unexpected way.
+
+Haverly's own seat got so hot that bedeviled by his fears of losing it
+and afraid to discharge Dave, who now sailed up and down the line
+reckless as any pirate of the Spanish Main, he cowered, called Dave into
+the little room at the Wickiup and asked him to resign. In all the storm
+that raged on the division the old conductor alone had remained calm.
+Every day it was somebody's head off; every night a new alarm; Dave
+alone ignored it all. He was, through it all, the shining mark, the
+daredevil target; yet he bore a charmed life and survived every last
+associate. Then Haverly asked him to resign. Dave, bitter angry, faced
+him with black words in his throat.
+
+"It's come to a showdown," muttered the superintendent uneasily after a
+minute's talking. "Do you want to resign?"
+
+Dave eyed the mountains coldly. "No."
+
+"You'll have to--"
+
+"Have to?" Hawk whirled dark as a storm. "Have to? Who says so?"
+
+The superintendent shifted the paperweight on the desk uncomfortably.
+
+"Why should I resign?" demanded the old conductor angrily. "Resign?" He
+rose from his chair. "You know I'm a thief. You're a thief yourself.
+You helped make me one. I've carried more men for you than for anybody
+else on the whole division. I don't resign for anybody. Discharge me,
+damn you. I don't ask any odds of you."
+
+Haverly met it sullenly, yet he didn't dare do anything. He knew Dave
+could ruin him any day he chose to open his mouth. What he did not know
+was that Dave Hawk was molded in a class of men different from his own.
+Even dishonor was safe in the hands of Dave Hawk.
+
+There was no change after, except that darker, moodier, lonelier than
+ever, Dave moved along on his runs, the last of the Old Guard. Better
+railroad man than he never took a train out of division. Stress of wind
+or stress of weather, storm, flood or blockade, Dave Hawk's trains came
+and went on time or very close. So he rode, grim old privateer, with his
+letters of marque on the company's strongbox, and Haverly trembled night
+and day till that day came that fear had foretold to him. A clap of
+thunder struck the Wickiup and Haverly's head fell low; and Dave Hawk
+sailed boldly on.
+
+I was extra passenger man when John Stanley Bucks took the West End. He
+came from south of our country, and we heard great things about the new
+superintendent and about what would happen as soon as he got into the
+saddle. What few of the old men in the Wickiup were left looked at Bucks
+just once and began to arrange their temporal affairs. His appearance
+bore out his reputation. Only, everybody while pretty clear in his own
+mind as to what he would do--that is, as to what he would have to
+do--wondered what Dave would do.
+
+He and Bucks met. I couldn't for the life of me help thinking when they
+struck hands, this grizzled mountaineer and this contained, strong,
+soldierly executive who had come to command us, of another meeting, I
+once saw when I carried Crook out on a special and watched him at Bear
+Dance strike hands with the last of the big fighting chiefs of the
+mountain Sioux.
+
+For three months Bucks sat his new saddle without a word or an act to
+show what he was thinking: then there came from the little room a
+general order that swept right and left from trainmaster to wrecking
+boss. The last one of the old timers in the operating department went
+except Dave Hawk.
+
+The day the order was bulletined Bucks sent for Dave; sent word by me he
+wanted to see him.
+
+"Come on," said Dave to me when I gave him the message.
+
+"What do you want me for?"
+
+"Come on," he repeated, and, greatly against my inclination, I went up
+with him. I looked for a scene.
+
+"Dave, you've been running here a good while, haven't you?" Bucks began.
+
+"Long as anybody, I guess," said Dave curtly.
+
+"How many years?"
+
+"Nineteen."
+
+"There's been some pretty lively shake-outs on the system lately,"
+continued Bucks; the veteran conductor looked at him coldly. "I am
+trying to shape things here for an entire new deal."
+
+"Don't let me stand in your way," returned Dave grimly.
+
+"That's what I want to see you about."
+
+"It needn't take long," blurted Dave.
+
+"Then I'll tell you what I want----"
+
+"I don't resign. You can discharge me any minute."
+
+"I wouldn't ask any man to resign, Dave, if I wanted to discharge him.
+Don't make a mistake like that. I suppose you will admit there's room
+for improvement in the running of this division?"
+
+Dave never twitched. "A whole lot of improvement," Bucks, with
+perceptible emphasis, added. It came from the new superintendent as a
+sort of gauntlet and Dave picked it up.
+
+"I guess that's right enough," he replied candidly, "there is room for a
+whole lot of improvement. If I sat where you do I'd fire every man that
+stood in the way of it, too."
+
+"That's why I've sent for you," Bucks resumed.
+
+"Then drop the chinook talk and give me my time."
+
+"You don't understand me yet, Dave. I want you to give up your run. I
+want your friend, Burnes here, to take your run----"
+
+A queer shadow went over Dave's face. When Bucks began he was getting a
+thunderstorm on. Somehow the way it ended, the way it was coming
+about--putting me into his place--I, the only boy on the division he
+cared "a damn" about--it struck him, as it struck me, all in a heap. He
+couldn't say a word; his eyes went out the window into the mountains:
+something in it looked like fate. For my part I felt murder guilty.
+
+"What I want you to do, Dave," added Bucks evenly, "is to come into the
+office here with me and look after the train crews. Just at present I've
+got to lean considerably on a trainmaster, do you want the job?"
+
+The silent conductor turned to stone.
+
+"The men who own the road are new men, Dave; they didn't steal it. They
+bought it and paid for it. They want a new deal and they propose to
+give a new deal to the men. They will pay salaries a man can live on
+honestly; they will give no excuse for knocking down; they want what's
+coming to them, and they propose the men shall have their right share of
+it in the pay checks.
+
+"But there's more than that in it. They want to build up the operating
+force, as fast as it can be built, from the men in the ranks. I aim to
+make a start now on this division. If you're with me, hang up your coat
+here the first of the month, and take the train crews."
+
+Dave left the office groggy. The best Bucks could do he couldn't get a
+positive answer out of him. He was overcome and couldn't focus on the
+proposition. Bucks saw how he had gone to pieces and managed
+diplomatically to leave the matter open, Callahan, whom Bucks had
+brought with him as assistant, filling in meanwhile as trainmaster.
+
+The matter was noised. It was known that Dave, admittedly the brainiest
+and most capable of the Old Guard had been singled out, regardless of
+his past record for promotion. "I'm not here sitting in judgment on
+what was done last year," Bucks had said plainly. "It's what is done
+this year and next that will count in this office." And the conductors,
+thinking there was a chance, believing that at last if they did their
+work right they would get their share of the promotions, began to carry
+their lanterns as if they had more important business than holding up
+stray fares.
+
+Meantime Dave hung to his run. Somehow the old run had grown a part of
+him and he couldn't give it up. When he told Bucks at the end of the
+week that he would like another week to make his decision the
+superintendent waved it to him. Everybody began to make great things of
+Dave: some of the boys called him trainmaster and told him to drop his
+punch and give Tommie a show.
+
+He didn't take the humor the way one would expect. Always silent he grew
+more than that; sombre and dejected. We never saw a smile on his face.
+"Dave is off," muttered Henry Cavanaugh, his old baggageman, "I don't
+understand it. He's off. You ought to talk to him, Tommie. You're the
+only man on the division can do it."
+
+I was ordered west that night to bring a military special from Washakie.
+I rode up on Dave's train. The hind Los Angeles sleeper was loaded
+light, and when Dave had worked the train and walked into the stateroom
+to sort his collections, I followed him. We sat half an hour alone and
+undisturbed, but he wouldn't talk. It was a heavy train and the wind was
+high.
+
+We made Rat River after midnight, and I was still sitting alone in the
+open stateroom when I saw Dave's green light coming down the darkened
+aisle. He walked in, put his lamp on the floor, sat down, and threw his
+feet on the cushions.
+
+"How's Tommie to-night?" he asked, leaning back as if he hadn't seen me
+before, in his old teasing way. He played light heart sometimes; but it
+was no more than played: that was easy seeing.
+
+"How's Dave?" He turned, pulled the window shade and looked out. There
+was a moon and the night was bright, only windy.
+
+"What are you going to do with Bucks, Dave?"
+
+"Do you want my punch, Tommie?"
+
+"You know better than that, don't you?"
+
+"I guess so."
+
+"You're blue to-night. What's the matter?" He shifted and it wasn't like
+him to shift.
+
+"I'm going to quit the West End."
+
+"Quit? What do you mean? You're not going to throw over this trainmaster
+offer?"
+
+"I'm going to quit."
+
+"What's the use," he went on slowly. "How can I take charge of
+conductors, talk to conductors? How can I discharge a conductor for
+stealing when he knows I'm a thief myself? They know it; Bucks knows it.
+There's no place among men for a thief."
+
+"Dave, you take it too hard; everything ran wide open here. You're the
+best railroad man on this division; everybody, old and new, admits
+that."
+
+"I ought to be a railroad man. I held down a division on the Pan Handle
+when I was thirty years old."
+
+"Were you a railroad superintendent at thirty?"
+
+"I was a trainmaster at twenty-seven. I'm forty-nine now, and a thief.
+The woman that ditched me is dead: the man she ran away with is dead: my
+baby is dead, long ago." He was looking out, as he spoke, on the flying
+desert ashen in the moonlight. In the car the passengers were hard
+asleep and we heard only the slew of the straining flanges and the
+muffled beat of the heavy truck under us.
+
+"There's no law on earth that will keep a man from leaving the track
+once in a while," I argued; "there's none to keep him from righting his
+trucks when the chance is offered. I say, a man's bound to do it. If you
+won't do it here, choose your place and I'll go with you. This is a big
+country, Dave. Hang it, I'll go anywhere. You are my partner, aren't
+you?"
+
+He bent to pick up his lantern, "Tommie, you're a great boy."
+
+"Well, I mean it." He looked at his watch, I pulled mine: it was one
+o'clock.
+
+"Better go to sleep, Tommie." I looked up into his face as he rose. He
+looked for an instant steadily into mine. "Go to bed, Tommie," he
+smiled, pulling down his visor, and turning, he walked slowly forward. I
+threw myself on the couch and drew my cap over my eyes. The first thing
+I felt was a hand on my shoulder. Then I realized I had been asleep and
+that the train was standing still. A man was bending over me, lantern in
+hand. It was the porter.
+
+"What's wrong?" I exclaimed.
+
+"There's trouble up ahead, Mr. Burnes," he exclaimed huskily. I sprang
+to my feet. "Have you got your pistol?" he stuttered.
+
+Somebody came running down the aisle and the porter dodged like a hare
+behind me. It was the hind-end brakeman, but he was so scared he could
+not speak. I hurried forward.
+
+Through the head Los Angeles sleeper, the San Francisco cars and the
+Portland I ran without meeting a living soul; but the silence was
+ominous. When I caught a glimpse of the inside of the chair car, I saw
+the ferment. Women were screaming and praying, and men were burrowing
+under the foot-rests. "They've killed everybody in the smoker," shouted
+a travelling man, grabbing me.
+
+"Damnation, make way, won't you!" I exclaimed, pushing away from him
+through the mob. At the forward door, taking me for one of the train
+robbers, there was another panic. Passengers from the smoker were jammed
+together there like sardines. I had to pile them bodily across the seats
+to get through and into the forward car.
+
+It was over. The front lamps were out and the car smoking bluish. A
+cowboy hung pitched head and arms down over the heater seat. In the
+middle of the car Henry Cavanaugh, crouching in the aisle, held in his
+arms Dave Hawk. At the dark front end of the coach I saw the outline of
+a man sprawled on his face in the aisle. The news agent crawled out from
+under a seat. It must have been short and horribly sharp.
+
+They had flagged the train east of Bear Dance. Two men boarded the front
+platform of the smoker and one the rear. But the two in front opened the
+smoker door just as Dave was hurrying forward to investigate the stop.
+He was no man to ask questions. He saw the masks and covered them
+instantly. Dave Hawk any time and anywhere was a deadly shot. Without a
+word he opened on the forward robbers. A game cowboy back of him pulled
+a gun and cut into it; and was the first to go down, wounded. But the
+train boy said, Hawk himself had dropped the two head men almost
+immediately after the firing began and stood free handed when the man
+from the rear platform put a Winchester against his back. Even then,
+with a hole blown clean through him, he had whirled and fired again; we
+found the man's blood on the platform in the morning, but, whoever he
+was, he got to the horses and got away.
+
+When I reached Dave, he lay in his baggage-man's arms. We threw the
+carrion into the baggage car and carried the cowboy and the conductor
+back into the forward sleeper. I gave the go-ahead orders and hurried
+again to the side of the last of the Old Guard. Once his eyes opened,
+wandering stonily; but he never heard me, never knew me, never spoke. As
+his train went that morning into division he went with it. When we
+stopped, his face was cold. It was up to the Grand Master.
+
+A game man always, he was never a cruel one. He called himself a thief.
+He never hesitated with the other men high and low to loot the company.
+The big looters were financiers: Dave was only a thief, yet gave his
+life for the very law he trampled under foot.
+
+Thief, if you please; I don't know: we needn't quarrel about the word he
+branded himself with. Yet a trust of money, of friendship, of duty were
+safer far in Dave Hawk's hands than in the hands of abler financiers.
+
+I hold him not up for a model, neither glory in his wickedness. When I
+was friendless, he was my friend: his story is told.
+
+
+
+
+The Yellow Mail Story
+
+JIMMIE THE WIND
+
+
+There wasn't another engineer on the division that dared talk to
+Doubleday the way Jimmie Bradshaw talked.
+
+[Illustration: Jimmy the Wind.]
+
+But Jimmie had a grievance, and every time he thought about it, it made
+him nervous.
+
+Ninety-six years. It seemed a good while to wait; yet in the regular
+course of events on the Mountain Division there appeared no earlier
+prospect of Jimmie's getting a passenger run.
+
+"Got your rights, ain't you?" said Doubleday, when Jimmie complained.
+
+"I have and I haven't," grumbled Jimmie, winking hard; "there's younger
+men than I am on the fast runs."
+
+"They got in on the strike; you've been told that a hundred times. We
+can't get up another strike just to fix you out on a fast run. Hang on
+to your freight. There's better men than you in Ireland up to their belt
+in the bog, Jimmie."
+
+"It's a pity they didn't leave you there, Doubleday."
+
+"You'd have been a good while hunting for a freight run if they had."
+
+Then Jimmie would get mad and shake his finger and talk fast: "Just the
+same, I'll have a fast run here when you're dead."
+
+"Maybe; but I'll be alive a good while yet, my son," the master mechanic
+would laugh. Then Jimmie would walk off very warm, and when he got into
+the clear with himself, he would wink furiously and say friction things
+about Doubleday that needn't now be printed, because it is different.
+However, the talk always ended that way, and Jimmie Bradshaw knew it
+always would end that way.
+
+The trouble was, no one on the division would take Jimmie seriously, and
+he felt that the ambition of his life would never be fulfilled; that he
+would go plugging to gray hairs and the grave on an old freight train;
+and that even when he got to the right side of the Jordan there would
+still be something like half a century between him and a fast run. It
+was funny to hear him complaining about it, for everything, even his
+troubles, came funny to him, and in talking he had an odd way of
+stuttering with his eyes, which were red. In fact, Jimmie was nearly all
+red; hair, face, hands--they said his teeth were sandy.
+
+When the first rumors about the proposed Yellow Mail reached the
+mountains Jimmie was running a new ten-wheeler; breaking her in on a
+freight "for some fellow without a lick o' sense to use on a limited
+passenger run," as Jimmie observed bitterly. The rumors about the mail
+came at first like stray mallards, opening signs of winter, and as the
+season advanced flew thicker and faster. Washington never was very
+progressive in the matter of improving the transcontinental service, but
+once by mistake they put in a postmaster-general down there, who
+wouldn't take the old song. When the bureau fellows that put their
+brains up in curl papers told him it couldn't be done he smiled softly,
+and sent for the managers of the crack lines across the continent,
+without suspecting how it bore incidentally on Jimmie Bradshaw's
+grievance against his master mechanic.
+
+The postmaster-general called the managers of the big lines, and they
+had a dinner at Chamberlain's, and _they_ told him the same thing. "It
+has been tried," they said in the old, tired way; "really it can't be
+done."
+
+"California has been getting the worst of it for years on the mail
+service," persisted the postmaster-general moderately. "But Californians
+ought to have the best of it. We don't think anything about putting New
+York mail in Chicago in twenty hours. It ought to be simple to cut half
+a day across the continent and give San Francisco her mail a day
+earlier. Where's the fall down?" he asked, like one refusing no for an
+answer.
+
+The general managers looked at our representative sympathetically, and
+coughed cigar smoke his way to hide him.
+
+"West of the Missouri," murmured a Pennsylvania swell, who pulled
+indifferently at a fifty-cent cigar. Everybody at the table took a drink
+on the _exposé_, except the general manager who sat at that time for the
+Rocky Mountains.
+
+The West End representative was unhappily accustomed to facing the
+finger of scorn on such occasions. It had become with our managers a
+tradition. There was never a conference of transcontinental lines in
+which we were not scoffed at as the weak link in the chain of
+everything--mail, passenger, specials, what not--the trouble was
+invariably laid at our door.
+
+This time a new man was sitting for the line at the Chamberlain dinner;
+a youngish man with a face that set like cement when the West End was
+trod on.
+
+The postmaster-general was inclined, from the reputation we had, to look
+on our man as one looks at a dog without a pedigree, or at a dray horse
+in a bunch of standard-breds. But something in the mouth of the West End
+man gave him pause; since the Rough Riders, it has been a bit different
+with verdicts on things Western. The postmaster-general suppressed a
+rising sarcasm with a sip of Chartreuse, for the dinner was ripening,
+and waited; nor did he mistake, the West Ender _was_ about to speak.
+
+"Why west of the Missouri?" he asked, with a lift of the face not
+altogether candid. The Pennsylvania man shrugged his brows; to explain
+might have seemed indelicate.
+
+"If it is put through, how much of it do you propose to take yourself?"
+inquired our man, looking evenly at the Allegheny official.
+
+"Sixty-five miles, including stops from the New York post-office to
+Canal Street," replied the Pennsylvania man, and his words flowed with
+irritating ease.
+
+"What do you take?" continued the man with the jaw, turning to the
+Burlington representative, who was struggling, belated, with an
+artichoke.
+
+"_About_ seventy from Canal to Tenth and Mason. Say, seventy," repeated
+the "Q" manager, with the lordliness of a man who has miles to throw at
+almost anybody, and knows it.
+
+"Then suppose we say sixty-five from Tenth and Mason to Ogden,"
+suggested the West Ender. There was a well-bred stare the table round, a
+lifting of glasses to mask expressions that might give pain. Sixty-five
+miles an _hour_? Through the _Rockies_?
+
+The postmaster-general struck the table quick and heavily; he didn't
+want to let it get away. "Why, hang it, Mr. Bucks," he exclaimed with
+emphasis, "if you will say sixty, the business is done. We don't ask you
+to do the Rockies in the time these fellows take to cut the Alleghenies.
+Do sixty, and I will put mail in 'Frisco a day earlier every week in the
+year."
+
+"Nothing on the West End to keep you from doing it," said General
+Manager Bucks. He had been put up then only about six months. "But----"
+
+Every one looked at the young manager. The Pennsylvania man looked with
+confidence, for he instantly suspected there must be a string to such a
+proposition, or that the new representative was "talking through his
+hat."
+
+"But what?" asked the Cabinet member, uncomfortably apprehensive.
+
+"We are not putting on a sixty-five mile schedule just because we love
+our country, you understand, nor to heighten an already glorious
+reputation. Oh, no," smiled Bucks faintly, "we are doing it for 'the
+stuff.' You put up the money; we put up the speed. Not sixty miles;
+sixty-five--from the Missouri to the Sierras. No; no more wine. Yes, I
+will take a cigar."
+
+The trade was on from that minute. Bucks said no more then; he was a
+good listener. But next day, when it came to talking money, he talked
+more money into the West End treasury for one year's running than was
+ever talked before on a mail contract for the best three years' work we
+ever did.
+
+When they asked him how much time he wanted to get ready, and told him
+to take plenty, three months was stipulated. The contracts were drawn,
+and they were signed by our people without hesitation because they knew
+Bucks. But while the preparations for the fast schedule were being made,
+the government weakened on signing. Nothing ever got through a
+Washington department without hitch, and they said our road had so often
+failed on like propositions that they wanted a test. There was a deal of
+wrangling, then a test run was agreed on by all the roads concerned. If
+it proved successful, if the mail was put to the Golden Gate on the
+second of the schedule, public opinion and the interests in the
+Philippines, it was concluded, would justify the heavy premium asked for
+the service.
+
+In this way the dickering and the figuring became, in a measure, public,
+and keyed up everybody interested to a high pitch. We said nothing for
+publication, but under Bucks's energy sawed wood for three whole months.
+Indeed, three months goes as a day getting a system into shape for an
+extraordinary schedule. Success meant with us prestige; but failure
+meant obloquy for the road and for our division chief who had been so
+lately called to handle it.
+
+The real strain, it was clear, would come on his old, the Mountain,
+division; and to carry out the point, rested on the Motive Power of the
+Mountain Division; hence, concretely, on Doubleday, master mechanic of
+the hill country.
+
+In thirty days, Neighbor, superintendent of the Motive Power, called for
+reports from the division master mechanics on the preparations for the
+Yellow Mail run, and they reported progress. In sixty days he called
+again. The subordinates reported well except Doubleday. Doubleday said
+merely, "Not ready"; he was busy tinkering with his engines. There was a
+third call in eighty days, and on the eighty-fifth a peremptory call.
+Everybody said ready except Doubleday. When Neighbor remonstrated
+sharply he would say only that he would be ready in time. That was the
+most he would promise, though it was generally understood that if he
+failed to deliver the goods he would have to make way for somebody that
+could.
+
+The Plains Division of the system was marked up for seventy miles an
+hour, and, if the truth were told, a little better; but, with all the
+help they could give us, it still left sixty for the mountains to take
+care of, and the Yellow Mail proposition was conceded to be the toughest
+affair the Motive Power at Medicine Bend had ever faced. However,
+forty-eight hours before the mail left the New York post-office
+Doubleday wired to Neighbor, "Ready"; Neighbor to Bucks, "Ready"; and
+Bucks to Washington, "Ready"--and we were ready from end to end.
+
+Then the orders began to shoot through the mountains. The test run was
+of especial importance, because the signing of the contract was believed
+to depend on the success of it. Once signed, accidents and delays might
+be explained; for the test run there must be no delays. Despatchers
+were given the eleven, which meant Bucks; no lay-outs, no slows for the
+Yellow Mail. Roadmasters were notified; no track work in front of the
+Yellow Mail. Bridge gangs were warned, yard masters instructed, section
+bosses cautioned, track walkers spurred--the system was polished like a
+barkeeper's diamond, and swept like a parlor car for the test flight of
+the Yellow Mail.
+
+Doubleday, working like a boiler washer, spent all day Thursday and all
+Thursday night in the roundhouse. He had personally gone over the
+engines that were to take the racket in the mountains. Ten-wheelers they
+were, the 1012 and the 1014, with fifty-six-inch drivers and cylinders
+big enough to sit up and eat breakfast in. Spick and span both of them,
+just long enough out of the shops to run smoothly to the work; and on
+Friday Oliver Sollers, who, when he opened a throttle, blew miles over
+the tender like feathers, took the 1012, groomed like a Wilkes mare,
+down to Piedmont for the run up to the Bend.
+
+Now Oliver Sollers was a runner in a thousand, and steady as a clock;
+but he had a fireman who couldn't stand prosperity, Steve Horigan, a
+cousin of Johnnie's. The glory was too great for Steve, and he spent
+Friday night in Gallagher's place celebrating, telling the boys what the
+1012 would do to the Yellow Mail. Not a thing, Steve claimed after five
+drinks, but pull the stamps clean off the letters the minute they struck
+the foothills. But when Steve showed up at five A.M. to superintend the
+movement, he was seasick. The minute Sollers set eyes on him he objected
+to taking him out. Mr. Sollers was not looking for any unnecessary
+chances on one of Bucks's personal matters, and for the general manager
+the Yellow Mail test had become exceedingly personal. Practically
+everybody East and West had said it would fail; Bucks said no.
+
+Neighbor himself was on the Piedmont platform that morning, watching
+things. The McCloud despatchers had promised the train to our division
+on time, and her smoke was due with the rise of the sun. The big
+superintendent of Motive Power, watching anxiously for her arrival, and
+planning anxiously for her outgoing, glared at the bunged fireman in
+front of him, and, when Sellers protested, Neighbor turned on the
+swollen Steve with sorely bitter words. Steve swore mightily he was fit
+and could do the trick--but what's the word of a railroad man that
+drinks? Neighbor spoke wicked words, and while they poured on the guilty
+Steve's crop there was a shout down the platform. In the east the sun
+was breaking over the sandhills, and below it a haze of black thickened
+the horizon. It was McTerza with the 808 and the Yellow Mail. Neighbor
+looked at his watch; she was, if anything, a minute to the good, and
+before the car tinks could hustle across the yard, a streak of gold cut
+the sea of purple alfalfa in the lower valley, and the narrows began to
+smoke with the dust of the race for the platform.
+
+When McTerza blocked the big drivers at the west end of the depot, every
+eye was on the new equipment. Three standard railway mail cars, done in
+varnished buttercup, strung out behind the sizzling engine, and they
+looked pretty as cowslips. While Neighbor vaguely meditated on their
+beauty and on his boozing fireman, Jimmie Bradshaw, just in from a night
+run down from the Bend, walked across the yard. He had seen Steve
+Horigan making a "sneak" for the bath-house, and from the yard gossip
+Jimmie had guessed the rest.
+
+"What are you looking for, Neighbor?" asked Jimmie Bradshaw.
+
+"A man to fire for Sollers--up. Do you want it?"
+
+Neighbor threw it at him cross and carelessly, not having any idea
+Jimmie was looking for trouble. But Jimmie surprised him; Jimmie did
+want it.
+
+"Sure, I want it. Put me on. Tired? No. I'm fresh as rainwater. Put me
+on, Neighbor; I'll never get fast any other way. Doubleday wouldn't give
+me a fast run in a hundred years.
+
+"Neighbor," cried Jimmie, greatly wrought, "put me on, and I'll plant
+sunflowers on your grave."
+
+There wasn't much time to look around; the 1012 was being coupled on to
+the mail for the hardest run on the line.
+
+"Get in there, you blamed idiot," roared Neighbor presently at Jimmie.
+"Get in and fire her; and if you don't give Sollers two hundred and ten
+pounds every inch of the way I'll set you back wiping."
+
+Jimmie winked furiously at the proposition while it was being hurled at
+him, but he lost no time climbing in. The 1012 was drumming then at her
+gauge with better than two hundred pounds. Adam Shafer, conductor for
+the run, ran backward and forward a minute examining the air. At the
+final word from his brakeman he lifted two fingers at Sollers; Oliver
+opened a notch, and Jimmie Bradshaw stuck his head out of the gangway.
+Slowly, but with swiftly rising speed, the yellow string began to move
+out through the long lines of freight cars that blocked the spurs; and
+those who watched that morning from the Piedmont platform, thought a
+smoother equipment than Bucks's mail train never drew out of the
+mountain yards.
+
+Jimmie Bradshaw jumped at the work in front of him. He had never lifted
+a pick in as swell a cab. The hind end of the 1012 was big as a private
+car; Jimmie had never seen so much play for a shovel in his life, and he
+knew the trick of his business better than most men even in West End
+cabs, the trick of holding the high pressure every minute, of feeling
+the drafts before they left the throttle; and as Oliver let the engine
+out very, very fast, Jimmie Bradshaw sprinkled the grate bars craftily
+and blinked at the shivering pointer, as much as to say, "It's you and
+me now for the Yellow Mail, and nobody else on earth."
+
+There was a long reach of smooth track in front of the foothills. It was
+there the big start had to be made, and in two minutes the bark of the
+big machine had deepened to a chest tone full as thunder. It was all fun
+for an hour, for two hours. It was that long before the ambitious
+fireman realized what the new speed meant: the sickening slew, the lurch
+on lurch so fast the engine never righted, the shortened breath along
+the tangent, the giddy roll to the elevation and the sudden shock of the
+curve, the roar of the flight on the ear, and, above and over it all,
+the booming purr of the maddened steel. The canoe in the heart of the
+rapid, the bridge of a liner at sea, the gun in the heat of the fight,
+take something of this--the cab of the mail takes it all.
+
+When they struck the foothills Sollers and Jimmie Bradshaw looked at
+their watches and looked at each other like men who had turned their
+backs on every mountain record. There was a stop for water, speed drinks
+so hard, an oil round, an anxious touch on the journals; then the Yellow
+Mail drew reeling into the hills. Oliver eased her just a bit for the
+heavier curves, but for all that the train writhed frantically as it cut
+the segments, and the men thought, in spite of themselves, of the
+mountain curves ahead. The worst of the run lay ahead of the pilot,
+because the art in mountain running is not alone or so much in getting
+up hill; it is in getting down hill. But by the way the Yellow Mail got
+that day up hill and down, it seemed as if Steve Horigan's dream would
+be realized, and that the 1012 actually would pull the stamps off the
+letters. Before they knew it they were through the gateway, out into
+the desert country, up along the crested buttes, and then, sudden as
+eternity, the wheel-base of the 1012 struck a tight curve, a pent-down
+rail sprang out like a knitting-needle, and the Yellow Mail shot
+staggering off track into a gray borrow-pit.
+
+There was a crunching of truck and frame, a crashing splinter of
+varnished cars, a scream from the wounded engine, a cloud of gray ash in
+the burning sun, and a ruin of human effort in the ditch. In the twinkle
+of an eye the mail train lay spilled on the alkali; for a minute it
+looked desperate bad for the general manager's test.
+
+It was hardly more than a minute; then like ants out of a trampled hill
+men began crawling from the yellow wreck. There was more--there was
+groaning and worse, yet little for so frightful a shock. And first on
+his feet, with no more than scratches, and quickest back under the cab
+after his engineer, was Jimmie Bradshaw, the fireman.
+
+Sollers, barely conscious, lay wedged between the tank and the
+footboard. Jimmie, all by himself, eased him away from the boiler. The
+conductor stood with a broken arm directing his brakeman how to chop a
+crew out of the head mail car, and the hind crews were getting out
+unaided. There was a quick calling back and forth, and the cry, "Nobody
+killed!" But the engineer and the conductor were put out of action.
+There was, in fact, only one West End man unhurt--Jimmie Bradshaw.
+
+The first wreck of the fast mail, there have been worse since, took
+place just east of Crockett's siding. A westbound freight lay at that
+moment on the passing track waiting for the mail. Jimmie Bradshaw, the
+minute he righted himself, cast up the possibilities of the situation.
+Before the freight crew had reached the wreck Jimmie was hustling ahead
+to tell them what he wanted. The freight conductor demurred; and when
+they discussed it with the freight engineer, Kingsley, he objected. "My
+engine won't never stand it; it'll pound her to scrap," he argued. "I
+reckon the safest thing to do is to get orders."
+
+"Get orders!" stormed Jimmie Bradshaw, pointing at the wreck. "Get
+orders! Are you running an engine on this line and don't know the orders
+for those mail bags? The orders is to move 'em! That's orders enough.
+Move 'em! Uncouple three of those empty box-cars and hustle 'em back. By
+the Great United States! any man that interferes with moving this mail
+will get his time, that's what he'll get. That's Doubleday, and don't
+you forget it. The thing is to move the mail, not to stand here chewing
+about it!"
+
+"Bucks wants the stuff hustled," put in the freight conductor, weakening
+before Jimmie's eloquence, "everybody knows that."
+
+"Uncouple there!" cried Jimmie, climbing into the mogul cab. "I'll pull
+the bags, Kingsley; you needn't take any chances. Come back there, every
+mother's son of you, and help on the transfer."
+
+He carried his points with a gale. He was conductor and engineer and
+general manager all in one. He backed the boxes to the curve below the
+spill, and set every man at work piling the mail from the wrecked train
+to the freight cars. The wounded cared for the wounded, and the dead
+might have buried the dead; Jimmie moved the mail. Only one thing turned
+his hair gray; the transfer was so slow, it threatened to defeat his
+plan. As he stood fermenting, a stray party of Sioux bucks on a vagrant
+hunt rose out of the desert passes, and halted to survey the confusion.
+It was Jimmie Bradshaw's opportunity. He had the blanket men in council
+in a trice. They talked for one minute; in two, he had them regularly
+sworn in and carrying second-class. The registered stuff was jealously
+guarded by those of the mail clerks who could still hobble--and who,
+head for head, leg for leg, and arm for arm, can stand the wrecking that
+a mail clerk can stand? The mail crews took the registered matter; the
+freight crews and Jimmie, dripping sweat and anxiety, handled the
+letter-bags; but second and third-class were temporarily hustled for the
+Great White Father by his irreverent children of the Rockies.
+
+Before the disabled men could credit their senses the business was done,
+they made as comfortable as possible, and, with the promise of speedy
+aid back to the injured, the Yellow Mail, somewhat disfigured, was
+heading again westward in the box-cars. This time Jimmie Bradshaw, like
+a dog with a bone, had the throttle. Jimmie Bradshaw for once in his
+life had the coveted fast run, and till he sighted Fort Rucker he never
+for a minute let up.
+
+Meantime, at Medicine Bend, there was a desperate crowd around the
+despatcher. It was an hour and twenty minutes after Ponca Station
+reported the Yellow Mail out, before Fort Rucker, eighteen miles west,
+reported the box-cars and Jimmie Bradshaw in, and followed with a wreck
+report from the Crockett siding. When that end of it began to tumble
+into the Wickiup office Doubleday's face turned hard; fate was against
+him, the contract gone glimmering, and he didn't feel at all sure his
+own head and the roadmaster's wouldn't follow it. Then the Rucker
+operator began again to talk about Jimmie Bradshaw, and "Who's
+Bradshaw?" asked somebody; and Rucker went on excitedly with the story
+of the mogul and of three box-cars, and of a war party of Sioux
+squatting on the brake-wheels; it came so mixed that Medicine Bend
+thought everybody at Rucker Station had gone mad.
+
+While they fumed, Jimmie Bradshaw was speeding the mail through the
+mountains. He had Kingsley's fireman, big as an ox and full of his own
+enthusiasm. In no time they were flying across the flats of the Spider
+Water, threading the curves of the Peace River, and hitting the rails of
+the Painted Desert, with the mogul sprinting like a Texas steer, and the
+box-cars leaping like yearlings at the joints. It was no case of
+scientific running, no case of favoring the roadbed, of easing the
+strain on the equipment; it was simply a case of galloping to a Broadway
+fire with a Silsby rotary on a 4-11 call. Up hill and down, curve and
+tangent, it was all one. There was speed made on the plains with that
+mail, and there was speed made in the foothills with the fancy
+equipment, but never the speed that Jimmie Bradshaw made when he ran the
+mail through the gorges in three box-cars; and frightened operators and
+paralyzed station agents all the way up the line watched the fearful and
+wonderful train, with Bradshaw's red head sticking out of the cab
+window, shiver the switches.
+
+Medicine Bend couldn't get the straight of it over the wires. There was
+an electric storm in the mountains, and the wires went bad in the midst
+of the confusion. They knew there was a wreck, and understood there was
+mail in the ditch, and, with Doubleday frantic, the despatchers were
+trying to get the track to run a train down to Crockett's. But Jimmie
+Bradshaw had asked at Rucker for rights to the Bend, and in an unguarded
+moment they had been given; after that it was all off. Nobody could get
+action on Jimmie Bradshaw. He took the rights, and stayed not for stake
+nor stopped not for stone. In thirty minutes the operating department
+were wild to kill him, but he was making such time it was concluded
+better to humor the lunatic than to hold him up anywhere for a parley.
+When this was decided Jimmie and his war party were already reported
+past Bad Axe, fifteen miles below the Bend with every truck on the
+box-cars smoking.
+
+The Bad Axe run to the Bend was never done in less than fourteen minutes
+until Bradshaw that day brought up the mail. Between those two points
+the line is modeled on the curves of a ram's horn, but Jimmie with the
+mogul found every twist on the right of way in eleven minutes; that
+particular record is good yet. Indeed, before Doubleday, then in a
+frenzied condition, got his cohorts fairly on the platform to look for
+Jimmie, the hollow scream of the big freight engine echoed through the
+mountains. Shouts from below brought the operators to the upper windows;
+down the Bend they saw a monster locomotive flying from a trailing horn
+of smoke. As the stubby string of freight cars slewed quartering into
+the lower yard, the startled officials saw them from the Wickiup
+windows wrapped in a stream of flame. Every journal was afire, and the
+blaze from the boxes, rolling into the steam from the stack, curled
+hotly around a bevy of Sioux Indians, who clung sternly to the
+footboards and brake-wheels on top of the box-cars. It was a ride for
+the red men that is told around the council fires yet. But they do not
+always add in their traditions that they were hanging on, not only for
+life, but likewise for a butt of plug tobacco promised for their timely
+aid at Crockett siding.
+
+By the time Jimmie slowed up his astounding equipment the fire brigade
+was on the run from the roundhouse. The Sioux warriors climbed hastily
+down the fire escapes, a force of bruised and bare-headed mail clerks
+shoved back the box-car doors, the car tinks tackled the conflagration,
+and Jimmie Bradshaw, dropping from the cab with the swing of a man who
+has done a trick, waited at the gangway for the questions to come at
+him. For a minute they came hot.
+
+"What the blazes do you mean by bringing in an engine in that
+condition?" choked Doubleday, pointing to the blown machine.
+
+"I thought you wanted the mail?" winked Jimmie.
+
+"How the devil are we to get the mail with you blocking the track two
+hours?" demanded Callahan, insanely.
+
+"Why, the mail's here, in these box-cars," answered Jimmie Bradshaw,
+pointing to his bobtail train. "Now don't look daffy like that; every
+sack is right here. I thought the best way to get the mail here was to
+bring it. Hm? We're forty minutes late, ain't we?"
+
+Doubleday waited to hear no more. Orders flew like curlews from the
+superintendent and the master mechanic. They saw there was a life for it
+yet. Before the fire brigade had done with the trucks a string of new
+mail cars was backed down beside the train. The relieving mail crews
+waiting at the Bend took hold like cats at a pudding, and a dozen extra
+men helped them sling the pouches. The 1014, blowing porpoisewise, was
+backed up just as Benedict Morgan's train pulled down for Crockett's
+siding, and the Yellow Mail, rehabilitated, rejuvenated, and exultant,
+started up the gorge for Bear Dance, only fifty-three minutes late with
+Hawksworth in the cab.
+
+"And if you can't make that up, Frank, you're no good on earth,"
+sputtered Doubleday at the engineer he had put in for that especial
+endeavor. And Frank Hawksworth did make it up, and the Yellow Mail went
+on and off the West End on the test, and into the Sierras for the coast,
+ON TIME.
+
+"There's a butt of plug tobacco and transportation to Crockett's coming
+to these bucks, Mr. Doubleday," wheezed Jimmie Bradshaw uncertainly, for
+with the wearing off of the strain came the idea to Jimmie that he might
+have to pay for it himself. "I promised them that," he added, "for
+helping with the transfer. If it hadn't been for the blankets we
+wouldn't have got off for another hour. They chew Tomahawk, rough and
+ready preferred, Mr. Doubleday. Hm?"
+
+Doubleday was looking off into the yard.
+
+"You've been on a freight run some time, Jimmie," said he tentatively.
+
+The Indian detachment was crowding in pretty close on the red-headed
+engineer. He blushed. "If you'll take care of my tobacco contract,
+Doubleday, we'll call the other matter square. I'm not looking for a
+fast run as much as I was."
+
+"If we get the mail contract," resumed Doubleday reflectively, "and it
+won't be your fault if we don't--hm?--we may need you on one of the
+runs. Looks to me as if you ought to have one."
+
+Jimmie shook his head. "I don't want one, don't mind me; just fix these
+gentlemen out with some tobacco before they scalp me, will you?"
+
+The Indians got their leaf, and Bucks got his contract, and Jimmie
+Bradshaw got the pick of the runs on the Yellow Mail, and ever since
+he's been kicking to get back on a freight. But they don't call him
+Bradshaw any more. No man in the mountains can pace him on a run. And
+when the head brave of the hunting party received the butt of tobacco on
+behalf of his company, he looked at Doubleday with dignity, pointed to
+the sandy engineer, and spoke freckled words in the Sioux.
+
+That's the way it came about. Bradshaw holds the belt for the run from
+Bad Axe to Medicine Bend; but he never goes any more by the name of
+Bradshaw. West of McCloud, everywhere up and down the mountains, they
+give him the name the Sioux gave him that day--Jimmie the Wind.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Held for Orders, by Frank H. Spearman
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