Denis Mullenix never moved; no man that knew Hailey would think of
trying to supplant him even with death under the ponies. He did what a
man could do. There was no chance anyway for the cab: but the caboose
held twenty of his faithful men.
He checked--and with a scream from the flanges the special, shaking in
the clutches of the air-brake, swung the curve.
Again, the roadmaster checked heavily. The leads of the pile driver
swaying high above gravity center careened for an instant wildly to the
tangent, then the monster machine, parting from the tender, took the
elevation like a hurdle and shot into the trees, dragging the caboose
after it. But engine and tender and five in the cab plunged head on into
the Peace.
Not a man in the caboose was killed; it was as if Hailey had tempered
the blow to its crew. They scrambled out of the splinters and on their
feet, men and ready to do. One voice from below came to them through the
storm, and they answered its calling. It was Callahan; but Durden,
Mullenix, Peeto, Hailey, never called again.
At daybreak wreckers of the West End, swarming from mountain and plain,
were heading for the Peace, and the McCloud gang--up--crossed the Spider
on Hailey's bridge--on the bridge the coward trainmen had reported out,
quaking as they did in the storm at the Spider foaming over its
approaches. But Hailey's bridge stood--stands to-day.
Yet three days the Spider raged, and knew then its master, while he,
three whole days sat at the bottom of the Peace clutching the engine
levers in the ruins of Agnew's mistake.
And when the divers got them up, Callahan and Bucks tore big Peeto's
arms from his master's body and shut his staring eye and laid him at his
master's side. And only the Spider ravening at Hailey's caissons raged.
But Hailey slept.
The Striker's Story
McTERZA
I would not call her common. Not that I would be afraid to, though most
of the boys were more or less afraid of Mrs. Mullenix, but simply that
it wouldn't be right--not in my opinion.
She kept a short order house, let that be admitted at once, but her
husband was long a West End engineer. Denis Mullenix went into the Peace
with Hailey and Ed Peeto and Durden the night of the big June water on
the West End. The company didn't treat her just right. I was a strong
company man, although I went out with the boys. But I say, and I've
always said, the company did _not_ treat Mrs. Mullenix just right.
A widow, and penniless, she bought the eating-house at McCloud with the
few hundreds they gave her.
There were five young Mullenixes, and they were, every one, star
children, from Sinkers, who was foxy, to Kate, who was not merely fine,
she was royal. Twenty, and straight, and true, with a complexion like
sunrise and hair like a sunset. Kate kept the cottage going, and Mrs.
Mullenix ruled personally in the eating-house and in the short order
annex. Any one that has tasted a steak grilled swell in Chicago or in
Denver, and tasted one broiled plain by Mrs. Mullenix in McCloud, half a
block from the depot, can easily understand why the boys behaved well.
As for her coffee, believe it or not, we owe most of our world-famous
West End runs, not so much to the Baldwin Locomotive Works, renowned as
they are, nor to Mr. George Westinghouse, prince of inventors though we
rank him--but to the coffee drawn by Mrs. Mary Mullenix; honor where
honor is due.
Mrs. Mullenix's coffee for many years made the boys hot: what now makes
them hot is that she can't be persuaded to draw it for anybody except
McTerza, and they claim that's the way he holds the Yellow Mail with the
808; but all the same McTerza is fast stuff, coffee or no coffee.
[Illustration: McTerza]
They were none of them boisterous men, those Reading engineers who took
our jobs after the strike; but McTerza was an oyster, except that he
couldn't be swallowed.
McTerza didn't give up very much to anybody; not even to his own chums,
Foley and Sinclair. The fact is he was diffident, owing, maybe, to a
hesitation in his speech. It was funny, the bit of a halt, but not so
odd as his disposition, which approached that of a grizzly. He had
impudence and indifference and quiet--plenty of each.
There was one place up street that was, in special and particular,
headquarters for the bad men in our crowd--for we had some--Gatling's
billiard hall. Foley himself never had the nerve to tackle Gatling's.
But one night, all alone and come from nobody knew where, the hall
stuffed with striking men who had tasted blood that very day--McTerza
walked into Gatling's.
It was like a yearling strolling into a canon full of wolves. They were
so surprised at first they couldn't bite, but pretty soon they got
McTerza up against a mirror and began pasting pool balls at him.
When Ed Banks arrived it was as bad as a rapid-fire gun, and he carried
McTerza out the side door like a warm tapioca pudding. When the fellow
got round again, though, he was just as careless as ever.
It was pretty generally understood that in the strike the short order
house was with us. Mrs. Mullenix had reason to feel bitter toward the
company, and it became speedily known that Mrs. Mullenix's was not a
healthy place for the men who took our engines; their money was not
wanted. In fact, none of the new men ever tried to get service there
except McTerza. McTerza one morning dropped into the short order house.
"Coffee," said he; he always cut things short because he was afraid he
would get hung up between stations in remarks. Mrs. Mullenix, sick, had
to manage as she could. Kate was looking after things that day at the
restaurant, and she was alone. She looked at McTerza chillingly. Kate
had more than enough instinct to tell a Reading man from the Brotherhood
type. She turned in silence, and she poured a cup of coffee, but from
the night tank: it was the grossest indignity that could be perpetrated
on a man in the short order management. She set it with little of
civility and less of sugar before McTerza, and pushing her girdle down,
coldly walked front, half perched on a stool, and looked listlessly out
the window.
"Cool," ventured McTerza as he stirred a lump of sugar hopefully into
his purchase. Kate made no comment on the observation; the thing
appeared self-evident.
"Could I have a little c-c-condensed milk?" inquired McTerza presently.
"This sc-sc-scream looks pretty rich," he added, stirring thoughtfully
as he spoke at the pot of mustard, which was the only liquid in sight.
Kate Mullenix glared contemptuously at him, but she passed out a jug of
cream--and it was cream. From the defiance on her face as she resumed
her attitude she appeared to expect a protest about the cold coffee.
None came. McTerza drank the stuff very slowly, blowing it carefully the
while as if it was burning him up. It vexed Kate.
"How much?" asked McTerza humbly, as he swallowed the last drop before
it froze to the spoon, and fished for a dime to square his account.
"Twenty-five cents." He started slightly but reached again into his
pocket and without a word produced a quarter. Kate swept it into the
drawer with the royal indifference of a circus faker and resumed her
stool.
"C-c-could I get another c-c-cup?" asked McTerza patiently. It looked
like a defiance; however she boldly poured a second cup of the cold
coffee, and McTerza tackled it.
After an interval of silence he spoke again. "Do you sell tickets on
c-coffee here?" She looked at him with a questioning insolence. "I mean,
c-could a fellow buy a chance--or get into a raffle--on the h-h-h-hot
tank?" asked McTerza, throwing a sad glance on the live coffee urn,
which steamed cozily beside its silent companion.
"That tank is empty," snapped Kate Mullenix recklessly, for in spite of
herself she was getting confused.
"If it is," suggested McTerza, peering gravely underneath at the jet of
gas that blazed merrily, "you ought to draw your fire: you're liable to
b-b-burn your c-c-crown-sheet."
"What's the matter?" demanded Kate angrily; "is your coffee cold?"
"Oh, no," he responded, shaking his head and waiting for the surprising
disclaimer to sink in. "Not exactly cold. It's just dead."
"We don't serve Reading men here," retorted Kate defiantly.
"Oh, yes, you do," responded McTerza, brightening at once. "You serve
them like t-t-tramps." Then after a pause: "Could I get a cigar?"
"Yes."
"How much is that kind?"
"Fifty cents," snapped Kate, glancing into the street for some friendly
striker to appear.
"I want a good one."
"That's a good one."
"Fifty cents a b-b-box?"
"Fifty cents apiece."
"Give me a small one, please."
He put down a dollar bill as he took the cigar. She threw a half back on
the case. At that moment in walked two of our boys, Curtis Rucker and
Ben Nicholson. McTerza had a great chance to walk out, but he didn't
improve it. Rucker and Ben were Reds, both of them. Ben, in fact, was an
old terror at best. Curtis Rucker was a blackish, quick young fellow,
fine as silk in a cab, but a devil in a strike, and what was more, a
great admirer of Kate Mullenix, and the minx knew it. As McTerza bit off
the end of his cigar and reached for the gas-lighter he noticed that her
face lighted wonderfully.
With a smile the newcomers called for coffee, and with a smile they got
it. McTerza, smoking quietly at the cigar-case, watched the steaming
liquid pour from the empty tank. It was a dispiriting revelation, but he
only puffed leisurely on. When Kate glanced his way, as she presently
did, disdainfully, McTerza raised his finger, and pointed to the change
she had thrown at him.
"What is it, sir?"
"Mistake."
The strikers pricked up their ears.
"There isn't any mistake, sir. I told you the cigars were fifty cents
each," replied Kate Mullenix. Rucker pushed back his coffee, and sliding
off his stool walked forward.
"Change isn't right," persisted McTerza, looking at Kate Mullenix.
"Why not?"
"You forgot to take out twenty-five cents more for that last cup of
c-c-coffee," stammered the Reading man. Kate took up the coin and handed
a quarter back from the register.
"That's right," put in Rucker promptly, "make the scabs p-p-pay for what
they g-g-get. They're sp-p-p-pending our money." The hesitating Reading
man appeared for the first time aware of an enemy; interested for the
first time in the abuse that had been continually heaped on him since he
came to town: it appeared at last to reach him. He returned Rucker's
glare.
"You call me a scab, do you?" he said at last and with the stutter all
out. "I belong to a labor order that counts thousands to your hundreds.
Your scabs came in and took our throttles on the Reading--why shouldn't
we pull your latches out here? Your strike is beat, my buck, and Reading
men beat it. You had better look for a job on a threshing machine."
Rucker jumped for McTerza, and they mixed like clouds in a cyclone. For
a minute it was a whirlwind, and nothing could be made of it; but when
they could be seen McTerza had the best man in our camp pinned under a
table with his throat in one hand like the latch of a throttle.
Nicholson at the same moment raising an oak stool smashed it over
McTerza's head. The fellow went flat as a dead man, but he must have
pulled up quick, for when Neighbor, rushing in, whirled Nicholson into
the street, the Reading man already had his feet, and a corner to work
from. Reed, the trainmaster, was right behind the big master mechanic.
Rucker was up, but saw he was outnumbered.
"Hurt, Mac?" asked Reed, running toward the Reading man. The blow had
certainly dazed him; his eyes rolled seasick for a minute, then he
stared straight ahead.
"Look out," he muttered, pointing over Reed's shoulder at Kate Mullenix,
"she's going to faint." The trainmaster turned, but Kate was over before
her brother Sinkers could reach her as he ran in. Rucker moved towards
the door. As he passed McTerza he sputtered villanously, but Neighbor's
huge bulk was between the two men.
"Never mind," retorted McTerza; "next time I get you I'll ram a billiard
c-c-c-cue down your throat."
It was the first intimation our fighting men had that the Reading fellow
could do business, and the affair caused McTerza to be inspected with
some interest from behind screens and cracker boxes as he sauntered up
and down the street. When the boys asked him what he was going to do
about his treatment in the short order house he seemed indifferent; but
the indifference, as our boys were beginning to find out, covered live
coals; for when he was pressed he threw the gauntlet at the whole lodge
of us, by saying that before he got through he would close the short
order house up. That threat made him a marked man. The Reading men were
hated; McTerza was slated for the very worst of it. Everybody on both
sides understood that--except McTerza himself. He never understood
anything, for that matter, till it was on him, and he dropped back into
his indifference and recklessness almost at once. He even tried the
short order house again. That time Mrs. Mullenix herself was in the
saddle. There were things in life which even McTerza didn't hanker after
tackling more than once, and one was a second interview with Mrs.
Mullenix. But the fellow must have made an impression on even the
redoubtable Mrs. Mary, for she privately asked Neighbor, as one might of
an honorable adversary, for peace' sake to keep that man away from her
restaurant; so McTerza was banned. He took his revenge by sauntering in
and out of Gatling's, until Gatling himself went gray-headed with the
fear that another riot would be brought on his place.
Oddly enough, McTerza had one friend in the Mullenix family. On the
strike question, like many other McCloud families, the house of Mullenix
was divided against itself. All held for the engineers except the
youngest member, Sinkers. Sinkers was telegraph messenger, and was
strictly a company man in spite of everything. He naturally saw a great
deal of the new men, but Sinkers never took the slightest interest in
McTerza till he handled Rucker; after that Sinkers cultivated him.
Sinkers would listen just as long as McTerza would stutter, and they
became fast friends long before the yard riots.
* * * * *
The day the carload of detectives was imported the fight was on.
Scattering collisions breaking here and there into open fights showed
the feeling, but it wasn't till Little Russia went out that things
looked rocky for the company property at McCloud. Little Russia had
become a pretty big Russia at the time of the strike. The Russians,
planted at Benkleton you might say by Shockley, had spread up and down
the line like tumbleweeds, and their first cousins, the Polacks, worked
the company coal mines. At McCloud they were as hard a crowd after dark
as you would find on the steppes. The Polacks, four hundred of them,
struck while the engineers were out, and the fat went into the fire with
a flash.
The night of the trouble took even us by surprise, and the company was
wholly unprepared. The engineers in the worst of the heat were accused
of the rioting, but we had no more to do with it than homesteaders. Our
boys are Americans, and we don't fight with torches and kerosene. We
don't have to; they're not our weapons. The company imported the
Polacks, let them settle their own accounts with them, said our fellows,
and I called it right. Admitting that some of our Reds got out to mix in
it, we couldn't in sense be held for that.
It was Neighbor, the craftiest old fox on the staff of the division, who
told the depot people in the afternoon that something was coming, and
thinking back afterward of the bunches of the low-browed fellows dotting
the bench and the bottoms in front of their dugouts, lowering at the
guards who patrolled the railroad yards, it was strange no one else saw
it. They had been out three weeks, and after no end of gabbling turned
silent. Men that talk are not so dangerous; it's when they quit talking.
Neighbor was a man of a thousand to act on his apprehension. All the
afternoon he had the switch engines shunting cars about the roundhouse;
the minute the arc lights went on the result could be seen. The old man
had long lines of furniture vans, box cars, gondolas, and dead Pullmans
strung around the big house like parapets. Whatever anybody else
thought, Neighbor was ready. Even old John Boxer, his head blacksmith,
who operated an amateur battery for salutes and celebrations, had his
gun overhauled: the roundhouse was looking for trouble.
It was barely eight o'clock that night when a group of us on Main Street
saw the depot lights go out, and pretty soon telephone messages began
coming in to Gatling's from the company plant up the river for the
sheriff; the Polacks were wrecking the dynamos. The arc lights covering
the yards were on a different circuit, but it didn't take the whiskered
fellows long to find that out. Half an hour later the city plant was
attacked; no one was looking for trouble there, and the great system of
arcs lighting the yard for miles died like fireflies. We knew then,
everybody knew, that the Polacks meant business.
Not a man was in sight when the blaze sputtered blue, red, and black
out; but in five minutes a dozen torches were moving up on the
in-freight house like coyotes. We could hear the crash of the big oak
doors clear down on Main Street. There, again, the company was weak;
they hadn't a picket out at either of the freight houses. There wasn't
so much as a sneeze till they beat the doors in; then there was a cry;
the women were taking a hand, and it was a loot with a big L. The
plunder maddened them like brandy. Neighbor, who feared not the Polacks
nor the devil, made a sortie with a dozen men from his stockade, for
that was what the roundhouse defenses looked like, to try to save the
building. It wasn't in men to do it. The gutting was done and the
kerosene burning yellow before he was half-way across, and the mob,
running then in a wavering black line from the flames that licked the
high windows, were making for the storehouse. The fellows were certainly
up to everything good, for in plundering the freight house first they
gave their women the chance to lay in supplies for months. Neighbor saw
in a minute there was nothing left for him to protect at the east end,
and before he could cut off the constantly lengthening line of rioters,
they were between him and the long storehouse. It must have made the old
man weep blood, and it was there that the first shooting occurred.
A squad of the detectives reenforcing Neighbor's little following, ran
in on the flank of the rioters as the master mechanic caught up with
their rear. They wheeled, on his command to disperse, and met it with a
cloud of stones and coupling pins. The detectives opened with their
Winchesters, and a yell went up that took me back to the Haymarket.
Their answer was the torch to the storehouse and a charge on the
imported guards that shook their front like a whirlwind. The detectives
ran for Neighbor's breastworks, with the miners hot behind, and a hail
of deadly missiles on their backs. One went down at the turn-table, and
it didn't look as if his life was worth a piece of waste. But the
fellow, raising on one arm, began picking off the Polacks closest with a
revolver. They scattered like turkeys, and he staggered across the table
before they could damage him any worse. Half a dozen of us stood in the
cupola of the fire-engine house, with the thing laid below like a
panorama.
Far as the blazing freight house lit the yards, we could see the rioters
swarming in from the bottoms. The railroad officials gathered up stairs
in the passenger depot waited helpless for the moment when the fury of
the mob should turn on the unprotected building. The entire records of
the division, the despatchers' offices, the headquarters of the whole
West End were under that roof, with nothing to stand between it and the
torches.
Awkwardly as the rioters had maneuvered, they seemed then to be getting
into better shape for mischief. They were quicker at expedients, and two
intensely active leaders rose out of the crowds. Following the shouts of
the pair, which we could just hear, a great body of the strikers dashed
up the yard.
"By the Gods!" cried Andy Cameron at my elbow, "they're going for the
oil-house!"
Before the words were out we could hear the dull stroke of the picks
sinking into the cleated doors. Buckets were passed in and out from the
house tanks. Jacketed cans of turpentine and varnish were hustled down
the line to men drunk with riot; in a moment twenty cars were ablaze. To
top the frenzy they fired the oil-house itself. Destruction crazed the
entire population of the bottoms. The burning cars threw the front of
the big brick depot up into the sky. As the reflection struck back from
the plate-glass windows, the mob split into two great waves, and one
headed for the passenger depot. They crossed the coal spurs brandishing
torches and sledges and bars. We could see them plain as block signals.
Every implement that ever figured in a yard showed in their line, but
their leader, a youngish fellow, swung a long, tapering stake. As the
foremost Polack climbed up on the last string of flats that separated
them from the depot, the storage tanks in the oil-house took fire. The
roof jumped from the wall-plates like one vast trap-door, and the liquid
yellow spurted flaming a hundred feet up into the black. A splitting
yell greeted the burst, and the Polacks, with added fury, raced towards
the long depot. I made out then the man with the club. It was Rucker.
The staff of the superintendent, and the force of despatchers, a handful
of men all told, gathered at the upper windows and opened fire with
revolvers. It was just enough to infuriate the rioters. And it appeared
certain that the house would be burned under the defenders' feet, for
the broad platform was bare from end to end. Not a ghost of a
barricade, not a truck, not a shutter stood between the depot and the
torch, and nobody thought of a man until Cameron with the quicker eyes
cried:
"For God's sake! There's McTerza!"
Such as pay-day there he was, walking down the platform towards the
depot, and humping alongside--Sinkers.
I guess everybody in both camps swore. Like a man in his sleep he was
walking right in the teeth of the Polacks. If we had tried ourselves to
pit him it couldn't have been done cleaner. His friends, for McTerza had
them, must have shivered--but that was just McTerza; to be where he
shouldn't, when he shouldn't. Even had there not been more pressing
matters, nobody could have figured out where the fellow had come from
with his convoy, or where he was going. He was there; that was all--he
was there.
The despatchers yelled at him from above. The cry echoed back short from
a hundred Polack throats, and they sent a splitter; it was plain they
were mad for blood. Even that cry didn't greatly faze the fellow, but in
the clatter of it all he caught another cry--a cry sent straight to
McTerza's ear, and he turned at the voice and the word like a man stung.
Rucker, leaping ahead and brandishing the truck-stake at the hated
stutterer, yelled, "The scab!"
The Reading engineer halted like a baited bear.
Rucker's cry was enough--in that time and at that place it was enough.
McTerza froze to the platform. There was more--and we knew it, all of
us--more between those two men than scab and brotherhood, strike and
riot, flood or fire: there was a woman. We knew it so well there was
hardly a flutter anywhere, I take it, when men saw McTerza stooping,
grasp Sinkers, shove him towards the depot, slip like a snake out of his
pea-jacket, and turn to front the whole blooming mob. There wasn't any
fluttering, I take it--and not very much breathing; only the scab, never
a tremendous big man, swelled bigger in the eyes then straining his way
than any man in McCloud has ever swelled before or since.
Mobs are queer. A minute before it was the depot, now it was the
scab--kill him.
The scab stood. Rucker stumbled across a rail in his fury, and went
sprawling, but the scab stood. The line wavered like tumbleweeds. They
didn't understand a man fronting forty. Then Ben Nicholson--I recognized
his whiskers--began blazing at him with a pistol. Yet the scab stood and
halted the Polack line. They hesitated, they stopped to yell; but the
scab stood.