As Bucks looked through his embrasure to see if all had been served,
his eye fell on the group in the corner and he heard the woman
suppressing the sobbing of her little girl. He walked out into the
waiting-room to ask what the trouble was. He learned afterward that
she was the wife of a gambler, but she told him only that she had
followed her husband to Medicine Bend and was now trying to get back
with her two children to her parents in Iowa. When she had ascertained
the price of the railroad ticket she found that she lacked five
dollars of the sum needed to make up the fare. Bucks had just a little
money of his own, but he had counted on using that for his meals.
While he was debating what to do, the elder child tugging still at the
mother's dress asked for something to eat, and while the mother tried
to quiet it Bucks felt he could manage somehow without the price of
the ticket better than this woman could.
"Give me what money you have," he said. "I will get you a ticket."
"But isn't the train gone?"
"No."
The black-bearded man dozing near the stove had his ears open although
his eyes were closed. He had heard fragments of the talk and saw the
boy dig into his own pocket, as he would have expressed it, to start
the woman home. After Bucks had given her the ticket and she was
trying to thank him and to quiet again the tired child, the drowsy man
rose, picked up the woman's hand-bag and told her gruffly he would put
her on the train. As he started with her out into the drizzling rain,
he carried her little girl, and, stopping down the platform at a
sheltered lunch-counter, he bought a bag of doughnuts big enough to
sink a ship. He offered no money to the man at the counter, but his
credit seemed unquestioned. In the train the seats appeared all to be
taken, but the drowsy man again showed his authority by rolling a
tipsy fellow out of a seat and piling him up in a corner near the
stove--which fortunately had no fire in it.
During all this time he had not said a word. But at the last, having
placed the woman and the children in two seats and made them
comfortable, he asked the mother one question--her husband's name. She
told him, and, without any comment or good-bys, he left the car and
started through the rain uptown.
After the train pulled out, the wind shifted and the rain changed
into a snow which, driven from the mountains, thickened on the wet
window in front of the operator's table. A message came for the
night yardmaster, and the operator, seeing the head-light of the
switch-engine which was working close by, put on his cap and stepped
out to deliver the message. As he opened the waiting-room door, a man
confronted him--the bearded man who had taken the woman and children
to the train. Bucks saw under the visor of a cloth cap, a straight
white nose, a dark eye piercingly keen, and a rather long, glossy,
black beard. It was the passenger conductor, David Hawk. Without
speaking, Hawk held out his hand with a five-dollar bank note in it.
"What is this?" asked Bucks.
"The money you gave the woman."
Bucks, taking the bill, regarded his visitor with surprise. "Where did
you get this?"
"What's that to you?"
"But----"
"Don't ask questions," returned Hawk brusquely. "You've got your
money, haven't you?"
"Yes, but----"
"That's enough." And with Bucks staring at him, Hawk, without a word
or a smile, walked out of the station.
But Bill Dancing had seen the incident and was ready to answer Bucks's
question as he turned with the money in his hand. "That is Dave Hawk,"
explained Dancing. "Dave hates a sneak. The way he got the money from
the woman's husband was probably by telling him if he didn't pay for
his wife's ticket and add enough to feed her and her babies to the
river he would blow his head off. Dave doesn't explain things
especially."
Bucks put the money in his pocket and started on with his message. The
yards covered the wide flat along the river. Medicine Bend was then
the western operating point for the railroad and the distributing
point for all material used in the advancing construction through the
mountains.
Not until he left the shelter of the station building did he realize
the force of the storm that was now sweeping across the flat. The wind
had swung into the northwest and blew almost a gale and the snow stung
his face as he started across the dark yard. There were practically no
lights at all beyond the platform except those in the roundhouse, too
far away to be seen, but the operator saw the moving head-light of the
switch-engine and hastened across the slippery tracks toward it. The
crew were making up a material train to send west and the engine was
snorting and puffing among long strings of flat cars loaded with
rails, ties, stringers, and bridge timbers.
As Bucks neared the working engine it receded from him, and following
it up he soon found his feet slipping in the wet mud and the wind at
times taking his breath. Conscious of the folly of running farther, he
halted for a moment and turning his back to the storm resolved to wait
till the engine returned. He chose a spot under the lee of a box-car,
and was soon rewarded by hearing a new movement from the working
engine. By the increasing noise of the open cylinder cocks he
concluded it was backing toward him. He stepped across the nearest
track to reach a switch-stand, a car-length away, whence he thought he
could signal the engine with his lantern. He had nearly reached the
switch when his foot slipped from a rail into a frog that held him
fast. Holding his lantern down, he saw how he was caught and tried to
free his heel. It seemed as if it might easily be done, but the more
he worked the faster caught he found himself. For a moment he still
made sure he could loosen his foot. Even when he realized that this
was not easy, he felt no alarm until he heard the switch-engine
whistle. Through the driving snow he could see that it was coming
toward him, pushing ahead of it a lead of flat cars.
Bucks was no stranger to railroad yards even then, and the realization
of his peril flashed across his mind. He renewed his efforts to loosen
his imprisoned heel. They were useless. He stood caught in the iron
vice. A sweat of fear moistened his forehead. He hoped for an instant
that the moving cars were not coming on his track; but almost at once
he saw that they were being pushed toward the very switch he was
trying to reach. Even where he stood, struggling, he was not six feet
away from the switch-stand and safety. It seemed as if he could almost
reach it, as he writhed and twisted in his agony of apprehension.
He swung his lantern frantically, hoping to catch the eye of one of
the switching crew. But the only answer was the heavy pounding of the
loaded cars over the rail joints as they were pushed down upon the
helpless operator. Worst of all, while he was swinging his lantern
high in the air, the wind sucked the flame up into the globe and it
went out and left him helpless in the dark. Like the hare caught in
the steel teeth of a trap, the boy stood in the storm facing impending
death.
The bitterest feelings overwhelmed him. After coming hundreds of miles
and plunging into his work with the most complacent self-confidence,
he stood before the close of the first day about to be snuffed out of
existence as if he were no more than the flame of his useless lantern.
A cruel sense of pain oppressed his thoughts. Each second of
recollection seemed to cover the ground of years. The dull, heavy
jolting of the slow-coming cars shook the ground. He twisted and
writhed this way and that and cried out, knowing there were none to
hear him: the wind swept away his appeal upon its heedless wings; the
nearest car was almost upon him. Then a strange feeling of calm came
over him. He felt that death was knocking at his heart. Hope had gone,
and his lips were only moving in prayer, when a light flashed out of
the darkness at his very side and he felt himself seized as if by a
giant and wrenched away from where he stood and through the air.
He heard a quick exclamation, saw a lighted lantern fall to the
ground, felt a stinging pain in his right foot, and knew no more.
When he recovered consciousness, three lanterns shone in his eyes. He
was lying in the mud near the switch with the engine crew standing
over him. One of the men knelt at his side and he saw the thin, strong
features of a face he had seen among the railroad men, but one that he
knew then he was never to forget--the face of the yardmaster,
Callahan. Callahan knelt in the storm with a good-natured expression.
The men about the yardmaster were less kindly.
"Who are you, tar heels?" demanded the engineman angrily.
Resentment, which would have been quick in the operator a little
earlier, had died in the few moments in which he had faced death. He
answered only in the quietest way:
"I am the night operator."
"The deuce you are!" exclaimed the man bending over him.
"Who are you?" demanded the operator, in turn.
"I am Callahan, the night yardmaster."
"I have an order for you to send a car of spikes on No. 7, Callahan. I
was trying to find you when I got caught in the frog." The pain in his
foot overcame Bucks as he spoke. Another dread was in his mind and he
framed a question to which he dreaded to hear the answer. "Is my foot
gone?" he faltered.
The yardmaster hesitated a moment and turned to an older man at his
side wearing a heavy cap. "How about it, doctor?" he asked.
Doctor Arnold, the railway surgeon, a kindly but stern man, answered
briefly, "We won't take it off this time. But if he is that careless
again we will take his head off."
"How old are you, boy?" demanded Callahan.
"Seventeen."
"Well, your foot isn't hurt," he continued gruffly. "But it's only
God's mercy that I got here in time to pull you out of the frog."
The operator was already up. "I hope I shan't forget it," he said,
putting out his hand. "Will you remember the spikes?"
"I will," responded Callahan grimly. "And I guess----"
"Say it," said the operator gamely, as the yardmaster hesitated.
"I guess you will."