The foray of the Indians at the Spider Water Bridge proved, as Bob
Scott had feared, only a forerunner of active hostilities. Casement
had already taken all necessary measures of defence. His construction
camp was moved steadily westward, though sometimes inside the picket
lines of troops, despite the warring Indians and the difficulties of
his situation. Alarms, however, were continual and the graders, many
of whom were old soldiers, worked at all times with their muskets
stacked on the dump beside them. In the construction camp Bucks saw
also many negroes, and at night the camp-fires of their quarters were
alive with the singing and dancing of the old plantation life in the
South.
While waiting for Stanley's inspection of the grading and track-laying,
Bucks relieved at times the camp operator, whose principal business
was the rushing of emphatic demands to Omaha for material and
supplies.
During other intervals Bucks found a chance to study the system that
underlay the seemingly hopeless confusion of the construction work.
The engineers moving far in advance had located the line, and
following these came the graders and bridge- and culvert-builders,
cutting through the hills, levelling the fills, and spanning the
streams and water-ways with trestles and wooden bridges, miles in
advance of the main army. Behind these came Casement's own big camp
with the tiemen, the track-layers, and the ballast gangs.
Every Eastern market was drawn upon for materials, and when these
reached Omaha, trains loaded with them were constantly pushed to the
front. The chief spiker of the rail gang, taking a fancy to Bucks,
invited him to go out with the rail-layers one day, and Bucks took a
temporary commission as spike-dropper.
To do this, he followed Dancing up the track past a long construction
train in which the men lived. The big box-cars contained sleeping-bunks,
and those men who preferred more air and seclusion had swung
sleeping-hammocks under the cars; others had spread their beds on top
of the cars. Climbing a little embankment, Bucks watched the sturdy,
broad-shouldered pioneers. A light car drawn by a single, galloping
horse was rushed to the extreme end of the laid rails. Before it had
fairly stopped, two men waiting on either side seized the end of a rail
with their trap and started forward. Ten more men, following in twos, at
a run, lifted the two rails clear of the car and dropped them in place on
the ties. The foreman instantly gauged them, the horse moved ahead, and
thirty spikers armed with heavy mauls drove the spikes furiously and
regularly, three strokes to the spike, into the new-laid ties. The
bolters followed with the fish-plates, and while Bucks looked the
railroad was made before his eyes.
The excitement of the scene was unforgettable. In less than sixty
seconds four rails had gone down. The moment a horse-car was emptied
it was dumped off one side of the track, and a loaded car with its
horse galloping to the front had passed it. The next instant the
"empty" was lifted back on the rails, and at the end of a sixty-foot
rope the horse, ridden by a hustling boy, was being urged back to
where the rails were transferred from the regular flat cars. The clang
of the heavy iron, the continuous ring of the spike mauls, the
shouting of the orders, the throwing of each empty horse-car from the
track to make way for a loaded one, these things were all new and
stimulating to Bucks. The chief spiker laughed when the young operator
told him how fine it was. He asked Bucks to look at his watch and time
the work. In half an hour Bucks looked at his watch again. In the
interval the gang had laid eight hundred feet of track.
"I don't see how you can work so fast," declared Bucks.
"Do you know how many times," demanded the spiker, "those sledges have
to swing? There are eighteen ties and thirty-six spikes to every rail,
three hundred and fifty-two rails to every mile, and eighteen hundred
miles from Omaha to San Francisco--those sledges will swing
sixty-eight million times before the rails are full-spiked--they have
to go fast."
The words were hardly out of the chief spiker's mouth when a cry of
alarm rang from the front. Bucks, looking eagerly, saw in the west a
cloud of dust. At the same time he saw the tie gang running in dozens
for their lives from the divide where they were working toward the
camp. The men beyond them on the grade had scrambled into the wagons,
dumped any ties they might contain helter-skelter to the ground, and
were clinging to the wagon boxes. In these, the drivers standing up,
lashed their horses with whip and line for life, and death, while
everywhere beside and behind them other men on foot were racing back
to safety.
New clouds of dust rose along the grade from the flying wagon wheels,
the horses tore madly on, and as the heavy wagons jolted over the
loose stones, the fugitives, yelling with excitement and alarm and
clinging to one another as they bounced up and down, looked anxiously
behind.
There was no uncertainty as to the cause of the panic. "Indians!" was
the cry everywhere. Every man in camp had dropped his working
implement and was moving somewhere on the double-quick. Every one, it
seemed to Bucks, was shouting and running. But above the confusion of
the surprise and the babel of voices, Bucks heard the sharp tones of
Jack Casement giving orders.
The old soldiers in the working gang needed no further discipline. The
timid and the skulkers scurried for the box-cars and the dugouts. On
the other hand, the soldiers ran for the dumps where the arms were
stacked, and seizing their muskets hurried back and, trained for the
emergency, fell into line under their foremen.
Casement, musket in hand, taking the largest company of men as they
formed in fours behind him, started forward at the double-quick,
yelling now for the moral effect, to protect the retreat of the
wagons. The men, scattering as they reached the edge of the camp,
dropped into every spot of shelter, and at the same moment Stanley,
mounted and alive with the vim and fire of the soldier, led a smaller
body of men rapidly back to guard the rear of the camp, deploying his
little force about the box-cars and flat cars as they hastened on. In
an instant the construction camp had become a fortress defended by a
thousand men.
It was none too soon. Stirring the yellow plain with the fury of a
whirlwind, a band of Sioux warriors rode the fleeing railroaders
furiously down. They appeared phantom-like out of every slip and
canyon, and rode full-panoplied from behind every hill. The horizon
that had shown five minutes before only the burning sunshine and the
dull glare of the alkali sinks, danced now with the flying ponies of
the Indians, and the hills echoed with ominous cries.
Without a word of warning, the few fleeing men who had been working
too far from camp to reach it in safety were mercilessly cut down.
Their comrades under arms, with an answering cry of defiance poured a
volley of cartridge balls into the thin, black circle that rode ever
closer and closer to the muzzles of the muskets. Jack Casement and his
brother Dan recklessly urged their men to the most advanced posts of
defence, and from behind scrapers, wagons, flat cars, and friendly
hillocks the railroad men poured a galling fire into their active
foe.
The Indians, seeking with unerring instinct the weakest point in the
defence, converged in hundreds upon the long string of box-cars that
made up the construction train at the rear of the camp, where Stanley,
extending his few men in a resolute skirmish line, endeavored to
prevent the savages from scalping the non-combatant cooks and burning
the sleeping-cars. Bucks saw, conspicuous in the attack, a slender
Sioux chief riding a strong-limbed, fleet pony with a coat of
burnished gold and as much filled with the fire of the fight as his
master was. Riding hither and thither and swinging a long, heavy
musket like a marshal's baton, the Sioux warrior, almost everywhere at
once, urged his men to the fighting, and the fate of the few white men
they were able to cut down or scalp before Stanley could cover the
line of box-cars seemed to add vigor to their onslaught.
Stanley himself, attacked by ten braves for every man he could muster
at that point with a gun, dashed up and down the old wagon roads along
the right of way, a conspicuous target for the Indians. His hat, in
the melee, had disappeared, and, swinging a heavy Colt's revolver,
which the Indians shrank from with a healthy instinct of danger, he
pressed back the hungry red line again and again, supported only by
such musketry fire as the men crouching under, within, and between the
box-cars could offer.
Wherever he rode his wily foes retreated, but they closed in
constantly behind him, and one brave, more daring than his fellows,
succeeded in setting fire to a box-car. A shout of triumph rose from
the circling horsemen, but it was short-lived. Stanley, wheeling like
a flash, gave chase to the incendiary. The Sioux rode for his life,
but his pony's pace was no match for the springing strides of
Stanley's American horse.
For an instant the attention of the whole fight in the rear of the
camp was drawn upon the rash brave and his pursuer. Bucks, with
straining eyes and beating heart, awaited the result. He saw Stanley
steadily closing the gap that separated him from his fleeing enemy.
Then the revolver was thrown suddenly upward and forward, and smoke
flashed from the muzzle. The echo of the report had hardly reached
Bucks's ears when the revolver, swung high again to balance the rhythm
of the horse's flight, was fired again, and a third time, at the
doomed man.
The Indian, bending forward on his horse, caught convulsively at his
mane, then rising high in his seat plunged head-foremost to the
ground, and his riderless horse fled on. His pursuer, wheeling, threw
himself flat in his saddle to escape the fire bent upon him from
behind as he rode back. At that moment Dan Casement and his men
hurried up on the double-quick. With him came Bucks, who had secured a
rifle and fallen in. Some men of the welcome reinforcement were set at
putting out the fire. Others strengthened Stanley's scattered skirmish
line.
Convinced by the determined front now opposed to him of the
impossibility of rushing the camp, the Sioux chief gave the signal to
retire.
As if the earth had opened to swallow them up, the warriors melted
away, and as suddenly as the plain had borne them into life it now
concealed their disappearance. In twenty minutes they had come and
gone as completely as if they had never been. But in that short
interval they had left death and consternation in their wake.