He found Baxter needing a man in the office, and Bucks was asked to
substitute until Collins, the despatcher who was ill, could take his
trick again. This brought Bucks where he was glad to be, directly
under Stanley's eye, but it brought also new responsibilities, and
opened his mind to the difficulties of operating a new and already
over-taxed line in the far West, where reliable men and available
equipment were constantly at a premium.
The problem of getting and keeping good men was the hardest that
confronted the operating department, and the demoralization of the
railroad men from the life in Medicine Bend grew steadily worse as the
new town attracted additional parasites. When Bucks, after his return,
took his first walk after supper up Front Street, he was not surprised
at this. Medicine Bend was more than ten times as noisy, and if it
were possible to add any vice to its viciousness this, too, it would
seem, had been done.
As was his custom, he walked to the extreme end of Front Street and
turning started back for the station, when he encountered Baxter, the
chief despatcher. Baxter saw Bucks first and spoke.
"I thought you were taking your sleep at this time," returned Bucks,
greeting him.
"So I should be," he replied, "but we are in trouble. Dan Baggs is to
take out the passenger train to-night, and no one can find him. He is
somewhere up here in one of these dives and has forgotten all about
his engine. It is enough to set a man crazy to have to run trains with
such cattle. Bucks, suppose you take one side of the street while I
take the other, and help me hunt him up."
"What shall we do?"
"Look in every door all the way down-street till we find him. If we
don't get the fellow on his engine, there will be no train out till
midnight. Say nothing to anybody and answer no questions; just find
him."
Baxter started down the right-hand side of the long street and Bucks
took the left-hand side. It was queer business for Bucks, and the
sights that met him at every turn were enough to startle one stouter
than he. He controlled his disgust and ignored the questions sometimes
hurled at him by drunken men and women, intent only on getting his eye
on the irresponsible Baggs.
Half-way down toward the square he reached a dance hall. The doors
were spread wide open and from within came a din of bad music,
singing, and noise of every kind.
Bucks entered the place with some trepidation. In the rear of the
large room was a raised platform extending the entire width of it. At
one end of the platform stood a piano which a man pounded incessantly
and fiercely. Other performers were singing and dancing to entertain a
motley and disorderly audience seated in a still more disorderly array
before them.
At the right of the room a long bar stretched from the street back as
far as the stage, and standing in front of this, boisterous groups of
men were smoking and drinking, or wrangling in tipsy fashion. The
opposite side of the big room was given over to gambling devices of
every sort, and this space was filled with men sitting about small
tables and others sitting and standing along one side of long tables,
at each of which one man was dealing cards, singly, out of a metal
case held in his hand. Other men clustered about revolving wheels
where, oblivious of everything going on around them, they watched with
feverish anxiety a ball thrown periodically into the disc by the man
operating the wheel.
Bucks walked slowly down the room the full length of the bar, scanning
each group of men as he passed. He crossed the room behind the chairs
where the audience of the singers and dancers sat. He noticed, when he
reached this, the difference in the faces he was scrutinizing. At the
gambling tables the men saw and heard nothing of what went on about
them. He walked patiently on his quest from group to group, unobserved
by those about him, but without catching a sight of the elusive
engineman. As he reached the end of the gambling-room, he hesitated
for a moment and had finished his quest when, drawn by curiosity, he
stopped for an instant to watch the scene about the roulette wheels.
Almost instantly he heard a sharp voice behind him. "What are you
doing here?"
Bucks, surprised, turned to find himself confronted by the black-bearded
passenger conductor, David Hawk. Baxter's admonition to say nothing
of what he was doing confused Bucks for an instant, and he stammered
some evasive answer.
Hawk, blunt and stern in word and manner, followed the evasion up
sharply: "Don't you know this is no place for you?" and before Bucks
could answer, Hawk had fixed him with his piercing eyes.
"You want to hang around a gambling-table, do you? You want to watch
how it is done and try it yourself sometime? You want to see how much
smarter you can play the game than these sheep-heads you are
watching?
"Don't talk to me," he exclaimed sternly as Bucks tried to explain.
"I've seen boys in these places before. I know where they end. If I
ever catch you in a gambling-den again I'll throw you neck and heels
into the river."
The words fell upon Bucks like a cloud-burst. Before he could return a
word or catch his breath Hawk strode away.
As Bucks stood collecting his wits, Baggs, the man for whom he was
looking, passed directly before his eyes. Bucks sprang forward, caught
Baggs by the arm, and led him toward the door, as he gave him Baxter's
message. Baggs, listening somewhat sheepishly, made no objection to
going down to take his train and walked through the front door with
Bucks out into the street.
As they did this, a red-faced man who was standing on the doorstep
seized Bucks's sleeve and attempted to jerk him across the sidewalk.
Bucks shook himself free and turned on his assailant. He needed no
introduction to the hard cheeks, one of which was split by a deep
scar. It was Perry, Rebstock's crony, whom Stanley had driven out of
Sellersville on the Spider Water.
"What are you doing around here interfering with my business?" he
demanded of Bucks harshly. "I've watched you spying around. The next
time I catch you trying to pull a customer out of my place, I'll knock
your head off."
Bucks eyed the bully with gathering wrath. He was already upset
mentally, and taken so suddenly and unawares lost his temper and his
caution. "If you do, it will be the last head you knock off in
Medicine Bend," he retorted. "When I find trainmen in your joint that
are needed on their runs, I'll pull them out every time. The safest
thing you can do is to keep quiet. If the railroad men ever get
started after you, you red-faced bully, they'll run you and your whole
tribe into the river again."
It was a foolish defiance and might have cost him his life, though
Bucks knew he was well within the truth in what he said. Among the
railroad men the feeling against the gamblers was constantly growing
in bitterness. Perry instantly attempted to draw a revolver, when a
man who had been watching the scene unobserved stepped close enough
between him and Bucks to catch Perry's eye. It was Dave Hawk again.
What he had just heard had explained things to him and he stood now
grimly laughing at the enraged gambler.
"Good for the boy," he exclaimed. "Want to get strung up, do you,
Perry? Fire that gun just once and the vigilantes will have a rope
around your neck in five minutes."
Perry, though furious, realized the truth of what Hawk said. He poured
a torrent of abuse upon Bucks, but made no further effort to use his
gun. The dreaded word "vigilantes" had struck terror to the heart of a
man who had once been in their hands and escaped only by an accident.
"You know what he said is so, don't you?" laughed Hawk savagely.
"What? You don't?" he demanded, as Perry tried to face him down.
"You'll be lucky, when that time comes, if you don't get your heels
tangled up with a telegraph pole before you reach the river,"
concluded Hawk tauntingly.
"Let him keep away from me if he doesn't want trouble," snarled the
discomfited gambler, eying Bucks threateningly. But he was plainly
out-faced, and retreated, grumbling, toward the dance-hall steps.
Dan Baggs, at the first sign of hostilities, had fled. Bucks, afraid
of losing him, now followed, leaving Hawk still abusing the gambler,
but when he overtook the engineman he found he was going, as he had
promised, straight to the roundhouse.
It was almost time for the night trick. Bucks hastened upstairs to the
despatchers' office and reported to Baxter, who had returned ahead of
him and was elated at Bucks's success. Before the young substitute
took up his train-sheet, he told the chief despatcher of how strangely
the conductor, Dave Hawk, had talked to him.
"He has a reason for it," responded Baxter briefly.
"What reason?"
"There is as good a railroad man as ever lived," said Baxter,
referring to the black-bearded conductor. "He is the master of us all
in the handling of trains. He could be anything anybody is on this
line to-day that he might want to be but for one thing. If he hadn't
ruined his own life, Dave Hawk could be superintendent here. He knows
whereof he speaks, Bucks."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean he is a gambler. Did you hear the shooting after I left
you?"
"No, what was it?"
"It must have been while you were in Perry's. Not five minutes after
we parted, a saloon-keeper shot a woman down right in front of me; I
was standing less than ten feet from her when she fell," said the
despatcher, recounting the incident. "But I was too late to protect
her; and I should probably have been shot myself if I had tried to."
"Was the brute arrested?"
"Arrested! Who arrests anybody in this town?"
"How long is this sort of thing going on?" asked Bucks, sitting down
and signing a transfer.
"How long!" echoed the despatcher, taking up his hat to go to his
room. "I don't know how long. But when their time comes--God help that
crowd up Front Street!"