Bucks, after his eventful first night on duty, slept so heavily that
on the following afternoon he had only time to eat his supper, walk
haltingly up the main street of Medicine Bend and back to the square,
when it was time to relieve the day man at the station.
But the few minutes in the narrow business street filled him with
interest and at times with astonishment. Medicine Bend, still very
young, was a mushroom railroad town of frame store buildings hastily
thrown together, and houses, shanties, and tents. It was already
the largest and most important town between the mountains and the
Missouri River. The Union Pacific Railroad, now a double-tracked,
transcontinental highway, laid with ninety and one hundred pound
steel rails, and ballasted with disintegrated granite, a model of
railroad construction, equipment, and maintenance, was, after the
close of the Civil War, being pushed with light iron rails and heavy
gradients across what was then known to geographers as the Great
American Desert, and the project of a transcontinental railroad was
meant at that time to unite the chief port of the Pacific coast,
San Francisco, with the leading cities of the Atlantic seaboard.
A railroad in building across a country considers first the two
uttermost cities (its principal terminals), or those two portions of
the country which it seeks to connect for the interchange of traffic.
The Union Pacific and its companion road, the Central Pacific,
afforded, too, the first and last instance of the United States
Government's becoming responsible for the building of a railroad.
Although the project of aiding a railroad to be built somewhere
between and connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean ports had been
discussed by Congress for thirty years before the fall of Fort Sumter,
the extraordinary feeling caused by the Civil War alone made possible
so unusual an undertaking. President Lincoln himself had given the
subject careful thought, and when, after much controversy and
discouraging political intrigue, the Union and Central Pacific
Railroad bills were ready to pass Congress, Abraham Lincoln was
appealed to to decide a long-standing controversy concerning the
gauge, or width of track, for the new lines.
After painstaking consideration, he decided on a gauge of five feet,
but the promoters of the line then persuaded Congress to reduce the
figures to four feet eight and one-half inches, and that gauge is now
the standard gauge for all American railroads. It would have been
better if the railroad builders had followed Lincoln's suggestion,
since the traffic of American railroads has outgrown the possibilities
of their gauges. And within a few years one of the greatest of
present-day railroad builders has declared with emphasis that a
six-foot gauge must one day come to provide our railroads with the
necessary facilities for handling the enormous and constantly
expanding volume of American railroad traffic.
The young operator, who, in spite of his efforts to conceal his hurt,
now limped a little as he walked up the street of the new railroad
town might well look with curiosity and amazement on what he saw. The
street he walked in was no more than a long assemblage of saloons,
restaurants, boarding-houses, gambling-houses, dance-halls and shops.
Nearer the station and fronting on the open square, there were
barber-shops and so-called hotels. Up and down the side streets he saw
livery-stables and roughly built warehouses for contractors' supplies,
army supplies, and stage-line depots.
The main street was alive with strange-looking frontiersmen, trappers,
hunters, scouts, soldiers, settlers, railroad laborers, outlaws,
prospectors, and miners. Every face that Bucks looked into presented a
study. They were sometimes faces bronzed with the clear, dry sunshine
of the plains and mountains, rugged with adventure and keen with
dangers met and passed, but others were furrowed with dissipation and
seamed with vice, or merely vacant with the curiosity of the
wanderer.
Nearly every man carried a fire-arm of some sort. Indians were a
continual menace upon the frontier to the north and west and on the
front where the road was being built; and in the train-service and
construction work railroad men usually went armed. Moreover, when the
frontiersmen were not arming against the Indians they were arming
against one another; it being difficult at times to tell whether the
white men or the savages were the more dangerous to the peaceful
pursuit of happiness. As Bucks, returning down Front Street, neared
the square that opened before the station a group of army officers
were walking across it. They were the first regular officers he had
ever seen and he regarded them with interest. At the station the chief
despatcher, Baxter, met him at the door. "Bucks, I've been waiting for
you. Can you ride a horse?"
Bucks smiled.
"Colonel Stanley," continued Baxter, "is going to the front to-night.
He wants to take an operator with him. Giddings isn't well enough to
go, but he can take your key to-night; you can go with the colonel
instead. He will take Dancing and a detail of cavalrymen with Leon
Sublette and Bob Scott for guides."
The suddenness of the call was not unpleasant. It was such continual
excitement and new adventure that Bucks liked and he said he was
ready. The despatcher told him to hunt up Bill Dancing, who would give
him the details.
Within an hour the cavalry horses were being loaded into a box-car up
at the stock chute, and while Bucks and big Bill Dancing watched them
an engine and the chief engineer's car were backed down the yard to
make up the special train. At the same moment, the two saw Stanley
walking across the yard with two engineers who were going to the front
with him.
Bucks looked with admiration at the soldier-constructionist. He was
slight in figure, wore the precise-looking military cap, and was
dressed with extreme care. He stepped with a light briskness that
implied an abundance of native energy, and his manner as he greeted
the two railroad men was intimate and gracious, putting them at once
at their ease. His smooth-shaven face, bronzed with service, and his
brown eyes, were alive every moment. Whatever the enterprise, Stanley
could call forth the loyalty and the best in those under him, and in
Dancing and Scott he had two men that worked well together and had in
their chief the unquestioning faith that insures devotion.
To these two more experienced men was now to be added a third, Bucks.
The train started almost at once, and Oliver, the colonel's cook,
prepared supper in his box-like kitchen and chopped his potatoes, for
frying, in muffled ragtime, as the puffing engine slowly drew the
train up the long gorge into the mountains. Bucks sat down at table
with the engineers and Stanley asked him many questions. He wanted to
know where Bucks had gone to school, why he had quitted at fifteen,
and what had brought him away out on the Desert to begin railroading.
When it appeared that Stanley as well as he himself was from
Pittsburgh, and even that Bucks had been named after the distinguished
officer--John Stanley Bucks--Bucks was happier than at any time since
he had left home.
The talk went on till very late. Stanley and General Park, who also
had been a regular-army man, told stories of the Civil War, just then
ended, and the giant lineman, Dancing, entertained the company with
stories of adventure incurred in the mountains and on the plains in
building the first transcontinental telegraph line.
Bucks sat for hours in silence while the three men talked; but he had
good ears and was a close listener. All the adventure books of his
boyhood reading had been bound up with this very country and with
these rugged mountains through which they were riding. The tales of
the people all about him during his youth had been of the far and
mysterious West--of the overland trail and the gold seekers, of Pike's
Peak and California, of buffaloes and trappers and Indians, and of the
Mormons and the Great Salt Lake. These had been his day-dreams, and at
last he was breathing the very air of them and listening to men who
had actually lived them.
The sleeping-bunks in the car could hardly be called berths, but they
served to lessen the fatigues of the night, and when Bucks woke in the
morning he saw from his window a vast stretch of rough, desert country
bordered by distant mountain peaks, some black, some brown, some
snow-capped in the morning sun. The train stopped in a construction
camp, near the end of the rails, and after a hasty breakfast Bucks
walked with the engineers up the track to the head-quarters of the
rail-laying gang.
The air was frosty. During the night snow had fallen, and as Bucks
followed his party the sun burst over the plain that they had crossed
in the night and lighted the busy camp with a flood of gold. It was a
camp such as few American boys had ever seen and of a type that no boy
will ever see again. Everywhere along the cuts and hillsides and in
sheltered spots the men had made temporary quarters by burrowing into
the clay or soft rock and making dugouts and canvas-roofed huts, with
earthen sides for walls.
But not all were so enterprising as this. Some laborers were camping
in old hogsheads. Even packing-boxes served others for shelter, but
were all so disposed within the cuts and among the ridges of the
railroad grade as to be safe from Indian forays. And along the
completed railroad, all the way from the Missouri River, material and
supply trains were moving to supply this noisy, helter-skelter camp,
which seemed to Bucks all confusion, yet was in reality all energy.
General Jack Casement, in charge, came forward to greet Stanley.
"And they tell me, general," said Stanley, "you are laying a mile a
day."
"If you would give us the ties, colonel," returned Casement,
short-bearded and energetic, "we should be laying two miles a day."
"I have turned the Missouri River country upside down for timber,"
returned Stanley. "The trouble is to get the material forward over a
single track so many hundred miles. However, we shall be getting ties
down the Spider Water within two weeks. I am on my way up there now to
see what the contractors are doing."
It was the first intimation Bucks had had as to the object of the
trip. Casement had a number of subjects to lay before his superior
while within consulting distance, and Bob Scott, an hour later,
announced that Stanley would not move on for two days. This left his
attendants free, and when Scott, low-voiced and good-natured, asked
Bucks if he wanted to go out on the Sweet Grass Plains with him after
an antelope, Bucks accepted eagerly. The two saddled horses and Bucks,
with a rifle borrowed from Sublette, followed Scott across a low-lying
range of hills broken by huge stone crags and studded with wind-blown
and stunted cedars, out upon the far-reaching expanse of an open
plain. The scene was inspiring, but impressions crowded so fast one
upon another that the boy from the Alleghanies could realize only that
he was filled with sensations of delight as his wiry buckskin
clattered furiously along the faint trail that carried him and his
guide to the north and west. The sun was high when Scott reined up
and, dismounting, tethered his horse in a glade hidden by a grove of
aspens and bade Bucks do the same.
"Getting hungry?" asked Scott, smiling at his companion. An answer
was written pretty plainly on Bucks's face.
"Didn't bring anything to eat, did you?" suggested Scott.
Bucks looked blank. "I never thought of it," he exclaimed. "Did you
bring anything?"
"Nothing but this," answered Scott, holding up a small buckskin sack
fitted with drawing strings.
"What is that, Bob?"
"It is what I carry wherever I ride. I carry nothing else. And it is
only a little bag of salt."
"A bag of salt!" cried Bucks. "Do you eat salt?"
"Wait and see," answered the scout. "Pull your belt up a notch. We've
got a little walking to do."
Scott, though of Chippewa blood, had been captured when a boy by the
Sioux and, adopted into the tribe, had lived with them for years. He
knew the mountains better than any man that served Stanley, and the
latter trusted him implicitly--nor was the confidence ever betrayed.
Walking rapidly over a low-lying divide beyond which lay a broad
valley marking the course of a shallow creek, Scott paused behind a
clump of cedars to scan the country. He expected to find antelope
along the creek, but could see none in any direction. Half a mile more
of scouting explained the absence of game, and Scott pointed out to
Bucks the trail of an Indian hunting party that had passed up the
valley in the morning. They were Cheyennes, Scott told his companion,
three warriors and two squaws--reading the information from signs that
were as plain to him as print--though Bucks understood nothing of it.
In the circumstances there was nothing for it but a fresh venture,
and, remounting, the Indian led the boy ten miles farther north to
where the plains stretched in a succession of magnificent plateaus,
toward the Sleepy Cat Mountains.
"We are in real Sioux country now," observed Scott, as he again
dismounted. "And we are as likely now to uncover a war party as a herd
of antelope."
"What should you do, Bob, if we met Sioux?"
"Run," smiled Bob, with Indian terseness. Yet somehow the boy felt
that Bob, in spite of what he said, would not run, and he realized for
a moment the apprehension of one but newly arrived on the frontier,
and still subject to tremors for his scalp. The scout took his stand
near a thicket of quaking asp and almost at once sighted a band of
antelope. Taking Bucks, he worked around the wind toward the band, and
directed him how and when to shoot if he got a chance. Bucks, highly
wrought up after the long crawl to get within range, did get a chance,
and with his heart beating like a trip-hammer, covered a buck and
fired. The scout shot immediately afterward, and the herd broke
swiftly for the timber along the creek. But Bucks, as well as his
experienced companion, had brought down an antelope.
Scott, as he joined his companion, looked at him with curiosity.
"Where did you learn to shoot?"
"I couldn't do it again, Bob," exclaimed Bucks frankly. "The only
shooting I've ever done is rabbit-shooting, or squirrel-shooting. I
was lucky for once, that's all."
"I hope your luck stays with us. If it does we may get back with all
of our hair," returned Scott. "The thing to do now is to lose no time
in leaving here. We are farther from camp than we ought to be. When I
get to running antelope I am apt to go as far as they do."
The two hunters got the carcasses across their horses, and acting on
Scott's admonition started to cover a good bit of the distance toward
camp before stopping.
The sun was already low in the west and Bucks realized that they had
been out all day. The hunters rode due southeast, to put every mile
possible between them and the Indian country before dark. They were
riding along in this manner at dusk, when Scott, leading, pointed to a
canyon that offered a hiding-place for the night, and directed his
horse into it. Scarcely had the two passed within the canyon walls
when Scott halted and, with a quick, low command to the boy, sprang
from his horse. Bucks lost no time in following suit: they had ridden
almost into an Indian camp, and when Bucks's feet touched the ground
Scott was covering with his rifle a Sioux brave who with two squaws
rose out of the darkness before him. Quick words passed between Scott
and the Indian in the Sioux tongue. Bucks's hair rose on end until the
confab quieted, and the scout's rifle came down. In an instant it was
all over, but in that instant the Easterner had lived years.
"It is all right," said Bob, turning to reassure his charge. "He is a
young chief--Iron Hand. I know his father. These three are alone.
Eight of them went out after buffalo five days ago. The second day
they fell in with Turkey Leg and a Cheyenne war party. Two of Iron
Hand's warriors were killed. The rest got separated and these three
lost their horses. Iron Hand," Scott nodded toward the silent Indian,
"was hit in the arm, and with his squaw and her sister has been trying
to get north, hiding by day and travelling by night. He can't shoot
his rifle; he thinks his arm is broken; and the squaws haven't been
able to kill anything. They are hungry, I guess."
"And did they tell you all this in those few words?" demanded Bucks
incredulously.
"It doesn't take many words to tell stories in this country. If a man
talked much he would be dead and buried before he got through."
"Bob, if they are hungry, give them some antelope."
Scott, who had meant to suggest the same thing, was pleased that the
offer should come from his companion, and so told the wounded Indian.
The latter drew himself up with dignity and spoke a few rapid words.
"He says he is glad," translated Bob, "that your heart is big. And
that it will be safer to go farther into the canyon. The Cheyennes are
hunting for them all around here, and if you are not afraid to camp
with the Sioux, we will stay with them here to-night. While the
Cheyennes are hunting them, they might find us. It will be about the
safest thing we can do."
"You know best," said his companion. "Can you trust this man?"
"Trust him?" echoed Bob mildly. "I wish I could trust the word of a
white man half as far as I can that of a Sioux. He understands
everything you say."
"Can he talk English?" asked Bucks in surprise.
"Better than I can."
It was with queer sensations that Bucks found himself in a hostile
country and with the deadliest enemies of the white man going into
camp for the night. Within a minute or two after Scott and the wounded
brave had picked a defended camp near a rivulet of water, the two
squaws had a fire going, and they set to work at once dressing an
antelope.
Savory morsels were cut from choice spots on the carcasses and these
were broiled by impaling them on long sticks over the fire. Bucks,
learning very fast with his eyes, saw how surprisingly small an affair
an Indian camp-fire is, and how much could be done with a few buffalo
chips, if one understood how to keep them renewed. Both safety and
convenience were served by the tiny blaze, and meat never tasted as
good to Bucks as it did on that clear, frosty night, broiled by the
two women and garnished from Bob Scott's provident salt bag.
After satisfying his ravenous hunger, which the Indians considered not
even a fair appetite, Bucks asked to look at the warrior's injured
arm, explaining that his father had been an army surgeon in the great
white man's war, as Bob Scott designated the Civil War in translating
for the Sioux. The arm, which was badly swollen, he found had indeed
been broken by a bullet near the wrist, but only one bone was
fractured, and, finding no trace of the bullet, the confident young
surgeon offered to set the fracture.
Iron Hand, nothing loath, accepted the offer, and after cleansing the
wound as well as it could be cleansed in running water hard by, Bucks
took the rough splints handily supplied by Scott's hunting-knife, and
pulling the bone into place with the scout's aid--though the brave
winced a little at the crude surgery--he soon had the forearm set and
was rewarded with a single guttural, "Wa-sha-ta-la!" from the stalwart
warrior, which, Bob explained, meant, "Heap good."
Sitting afterward by the camp-fire, Scott and Iron Hand, since the
young chief would not talk English, conversed in the Sioux tongue,
the scout translating freely for his younger companion, while the
squaws dressed the second antelope and cut it up for convenience in
carrying on the horses to Casement's camp. Scott reserved only the
hind-quarters of each animal for himself and Bucks, giving the rest to
their hosts.
When it was late, Scott showed the boy how to pillow his head on his
saddle and then stretched himself out to sleep. Bucks lay a long time
looking up at the stars. When he fell asleep, he woke again very soon.
His companion was sleeping peacefully beside him, and he saw Iron Hand
sitting by the fire. Bucks easily imagined his arm would keep him
awake. The squaws were still broiling pieces of antelope over the
little blaze, which was neither bigger nor smaller than before, and
together with the chief they were still eating. Bucks slumbered and
woke again and again during the night, but always to see the same
thing--the three Indians sitting about the fire, broiling and eating
the welcome and wholly unexpected venison.