"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 canon. 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 canon 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 canon 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 canon, 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.