platform. The Polacks wavered; the instinct of danger unsettled them.
Mobs are queer. A single man will head them quicker than a hundred guns.
There is nothing so dangerous as one man.
[Illustration: Old Man Nicholson.]
McTerza saw the inevitable, the steady circling that must get him at
last, and as the missiles flew at him from a score of miners he
crouched with the rage of a cornered rat, one eye always on Rucker.
"Come in, you coyote!" yelled McTerza tauntingly. "Come in!" he cried,
catching up a coupling pin that struck him and hurling it wickedly at
his nearest assailant. Rucker, swinging his club, ran straight at his
enemy.
"Kill the scab!" he cried and a dozen bristling savages, taking his
lead, closed on the Reading man like a fan. From the windows above, the
railroad men popped with their pistols; they might as well have thrown
fire-crackers. McTerza, with a cattish spring, leaped through a rain of
brickbats for Rucker.
The club in the striker's hands came around with sweep enough to drop a
steer. Quick as a sounder key McTerza's head bobbed, and he went in and
under on Rucker's jaw with his left hand. The man's head twisted with
the terrific impact like a Chinese doll's. Down he went, McTerza,
hungry, at his throat; and on top of McTerza the Polacks, with knives
and hatchets and with Cossack barks, and they closed over him like water
over a stone.
Nobody ever looked to see him pull out, yet he wormed his way through
them corkscrew fashion, while they hacked at one another, and sprang out
behind his assailants with Rucker's club. In his hands it cut through
guards and arms and knives like toothpicks. Rucker was smothering under
toppling Polacks. But others ran in like rats. They fought McTerza from
side to side of the platform. They charged him and flanked him--once
they surrounded him--but his stanchion swung every way at once. Swarm as
they would, they could not get a knife or a pick into him, and it looked
as if he would clear the whole platform, when his dancing eye caught a
rioter at the baggage room door mercilessly clubbing poor little
Sinkers. The boy lay in a pitiful heap no better than a dying mouse.
McTerza, cutting his way through the circle about him, made a swath
straight for the kid, and before the brute over him could run he brought
the truck-stake with a full-arm sweep flat across his back. The man's
spine doubled like a jack-knife, and he sunk wriggling. McTerza made but
the one pass at him; he never got up again. Catching Sinkers on his free
arm, the Reading man ran along the depot front, pulling him at his side
and pounding at the doors. But every door was barred, and none dared
open. He was clean outside the breastworks, and as he trotted warily
along, dragging the insensible boy, they cursed and chased and struck
him like a hunted dog.
At the upper end of the depot stands a huge ice-box. McTerza, dodging in
the hail that followed him, wheeling to strike with a single arm when
the savages closed too thick, reached the recess, and throwing Sinkers
in behind, turned at bay on his enemies.
With his clothes torn nearly off, his shirt streaming ribbons from his
arms, daubed with dirt and blood, the scab held the recess like a giant,
and beat down the Polacks till the platform looked a slaughter pen.
While his club still swung, old John Boxer's cannon boomed across the
yard. Neighbor had run it out between his parallels, and turned it on
the depot mob. It was the noise more than the execution that dismayed
them. McTerza's fight had shaken the leaders, and as the blacksmiths
dragged their gun up again, shotted with nothing more than an Indian
yell, McTerza's assailants gave way. In that instant he disappeared
through the narrow passage at his back, and under the shadow behind the
depot made his way along the big building and up Main Street to the
short order house. Almost unobserved he got to the side door, when
Rucker's crowd, with Rucker again on his feet, spied him dragging
Sinkers inside. They made a yell and a dash, but McTerza got the boy in
and the door barred before they could reach it. They ran to the front,
baffled. The house was dark and the curtains drawn. Their clamor brought
Mrs. Mullenix, half dead with fright, to the door. She recognized
Nicholson and Rucker, and appealed to them.
"Pray God, do you want to mob me, Ben Nicholson?" she sobbed, putting
her head out fearfully.
"We want the scab that sneaked into the side door, Mrs. Mary!" roared
Ben Nicholson. "Fire him out here."
"Sure there's no one here you want."
"We know all about that," cried Rucker breaking in. "We want the scab."
He pushed her back and crowded into the door after her.
The room was dark, but the fright was too great for Mrs. Mullenix, and
she cried to McTerza to leave her house for the love of God. Some one
tore down the curtains; the glow of the burning yards lit the room, and
out of the gloom, behind the lunch counter, almost at her elbow--a
desperate sight, they told me--panting, blood-stained, and torn, rose
McTerza. His fingers closed over the grip of the bread-knife on the
shelf beside him.
"Who wants me?" he cried, leaning over his breastwork.
"Leave my house! For the love of God, leave it!" screamed Mrs. Mullenix,
wringing her hands. The scab, knife in hand, leaped across the counter.
Nicholson and Rucker bumped into each other at the suddenness of it, but
before McTerza could spring again there was a cry behind.
"He sha'n't leave this house!" And Kate Mullenix, her face ablaze,
strode forward. "He sha'n't leave this house!" she cried again, turning
on her mother. "Leave this house, after he's just pulled your boy from
under their cowardly clubs! Leave it for who? He sha'n't go out. Burn it
over our heads!" she cried passionately, wheeling on the rioters. "When
he goes we'll go with him. It's you that want him, Curtis Rucker, is it?
Come, get him, you coward! There he stands. Take him!"
Her voice rang like a fire-bell. Rucker, burnt by her words, would have
thrown himself on McTerza, but Nicholson held him back. There never
would have been but one issue if they had met then.
"Come away!" called the older man hoarsely. "It's not women we're after.
She's an engineer's wife, Curt; this is her shanty. Come away, I say,"
and saying, he pushed Rucker and their coyote following out of the door
ahead of him. Mrs. Mullenix and Kate sprang forward to lock the door. As
they ran back, McTerza, spent with blood, dropped between them. So far
as I can learn that is where the courtship began, right then and
there--and as McTerza says, all along of Sinkers, for Sinkers was always
Kate's favorite brother, as he is now McTerza's.
Sinkers had a time pulling through after the clubbing. Polacks hit hard.
There was no end of trouble before he came out of it, but sinkers are
tough, and he pulled through, only to think more of McTerza than of the
whole executive staff.
At least that is the beginning of the courtship as I got it. There was
never any more trouble about serving the new men at the short order
house that I ever heard; and after the rest of us got back to work we
ate there side by side with them. McTerza got his coffee out of the hot
tank, too, though he always insisted on paying twenty-five cents a cup
for it, even after he married Kate and had a kind of an interest in the
business.
It was not until then that he made good his early threat. Sinkers being
promoted for the toughness of his skull, thought he could hold up one
end of the family himself, and McTerza expressed confidence in his
ability to take care of the other; so, finally, and through his
persuasions, the short order house was closed forever. Its coffee to-day
is like the McCloud riots, only a stirring memory.
As for McTerza, it is queer, yet he never stuttered after that night,
not even at the marriage service; he claims the impediment was scared
clean out of him. But that night made the reputation of McTerza a
classic among the good men of McCloud. McCloud has, in truth, many good
men, though the head of the push is generally conceded to be the husband
of royal Kate Mullenix--Johnnie McTerza.
The Despatcher's Story
THE LAST ORDER
In order to meet objection on the score of the impossible, and to
anticipate inquiry as to whether "The Despatcher's Story" is true, it
may be well to state frankly at the outset that this tale, in its
inexplicable psychological features, is a transcript from the queer
things in the railroad life. It is based on an extraordinary happening
that fell within the experience of the president of a large Western
railway system. Whether the story, suggestive from any point of view of
mystery, can be regarded as a demonstration of the efficacy of prayer
may be a disputable question. In passing, however, it is only fair to
say that the circumstance on which the tale is based was so regarded by
the despatcher himself, and by those familiar with the circumstance.
* * * * *
A hundred times if once the thing had been, on appeals for betterment,
before the board of directors. It was the one piece of track on the
Mountain Division that trainmen shook their heads over--the Peace River
stretch. To run any sort of a line through that canon would take the
breath of an engineer. Give him all the money he could ask and it would
stagger Wetmore himself. Brodie in his day said there was nothing worse
in the Andes, and Brodie, before he drifted into the Rockies, had seen,
first and last, pretty much all of the Chilian work.
But our men had the job to do with one half the money they needed. The
lines to run, the grades to figure, the culverts to put in, the fills to
make, the blasting to do, the tunnel to bore, the bridge to build--in a
limit; that was the curse of it--the limit. And they did the best they
could. But I will be candid: if a section and elevation of Rosamond's
bower and a section and elevation of our Peace River work were put up to
stand for a prize at a civil engineers' cake-walk the decision would go,
and quick, to the Peace River track. There are only eight miles of it;
but our men would back it against any eighty on earth for whipping
curves, tough grades, villainous approaches, and railroad tangle
generally.
The directors always have promised to improve it; and they are promising
yet. Thanks to what Hailey taught them, there's a good bridge there
now--pneumatic caissons sunk to the bed. It's the more pity they haven't
eliminated the dread main line curves that approach it, through a valley
which I brief as a canon and the Mauvaises Terres rolled into one single
proposition.
Yet, we do lots of business along that stretch. Our engineers thread the
cuts and are glad to get safely through them. Our roadmasters keep up
the elevations, hoping some night the blooming right of way will tumble
into perdition. Our despatchers, studying under shaded lamps, think of
it with their teeth clinched and hope there never will be any trouble on
that stretch. Trouble is our portion and trouble we must get; but not
there. Let it come; but let it come anywhere except on the Peace.
It was in the golden days of the battered old Wickiup that the story
opens; when Blackburn sat in the night chair. The days when the Old
Guard were still there; before Death and Fame and Circumstance had
stolen our first commanders and left only us little fellows, forgotten
by every better fate, to tell their greater stories.
Hailey had the bridges then, and Wetmore the locating, and Neighbor the
roundhouses, and Bucks the superintendency, and Callahan, so _he_
claimed, the work, and Blackburn had the night trick.
I
When Blackburn came from the plains he brought a record clean as the
book of life. Four years on a station key; then eight years at Omaha
despatching, with never a blunder or a break to the eight years. But it
was at Omaha that Blackburn lost the wife whose face he carried in his
watch. I never heard the story, only some rumor of how young she was and
how pretty, and how he buried her and the wee baby together. It was all
Blackburn brought to the West End mountains, his record and the little
face in the watch. They said he had no kith or kin on earth, besides the
wife and the baby back on the bluffs of the Missouri; and so he came on
the night trick to us.
I was just a boy around the Wickiup then, but I remember the crowd; who
could forget them? They were jolly good fellows; sometimes there were
very high jinks. I don't mean anybody drunk or that sort; but good
tobacco to smoke and good songs to sing and good stories to tell--and
Lord! how they could tell them. And when the pins slipped, as they
would, and things went wrong, as they will, there were clear heads and
pretty wits and stout hearts to put things right.
Blackburn, as much as I can remember, always enjoyed it; but in a
different way. He had such times a manner like nobody else's--a silent,
beaming manner. When Bucks would roll a great white Pan-Handle yarn
over his fresh linen shirt-front and down his cool clean white arms, one
of them always bared to the elbow--sanding his points with the ash of a
San Francisco cigar--and Neighbor would begin to heave from the middle
up like a hippopotamus, and Callahan would laugh his whiskers full of
dew, and Hailey would yell with delight, and the slaves in the next room
would double up on the dead at the story, Blackburn would sit with his
laugh all in a smile, but never a noise or a word. He enjoyed it all;
not a doubt of that; only it was all tempered, I reckon, by something
that had gone before. At least, that's the way it now strikes me, and I
watched those big fellows pretty close--the fellows who were to turn,
while I was growing up among them, into managers and presidents and
magnates; and some of them from every day catch-as-catch-can men with
the common alkali flecking their boots into dead men for whom marble
never rose white enough or high enough.
Blackburn was four years at the Wickiup on the night trick; it wouldn't
have seemed natural to see him there in daylight. It needed the yellow
gloom of the old kerosene lamp in the room; the specked, knotted,
warped, smoky pine ceiling losing itself in black and cobwebbed corners;
the smoldering murk of the soft-coal fire brooding in the shabby old
salamander, and, outside in the darkness, the wind screwing down the
gorge and rattling the shrunken casements, to raise Blackburn in the
despatcher's chair. Blackburn and the lamp and the stove and the ceiling
and the gloom--in a word, Blackburn and the night trick--they went
together.
Before the Short line was opened the Number One and Number Five trains
caught practically all the coast passenger business. They were immensely
heavy trains; month after month we sent out two and three sections of
them each way, and they always ran into our division on the night trick.
Blackburn handled all that main line business with a mileage of eight
hundred and five, besides the mountain branches, say four hundred more;
and the passenger connections came off them, mostly at night, for One
and Five.
Now, three men wrestle with Blackburn's mileage; but that was before
they found out that despatchers, although something tougher than steel,
do wear out. Moreover, we were then a good way from civilization and
extra men. If a despatcher took sick there was no handy way of filling
in; it was just double up and do the best you could.
One lad in the office those days everybody loved: Fred Norman. He was
off the Burlington. A kid of a fellow who looked more like a choir boy
than a train despatcher. But he was all lightning--a laughing, restless,
artless boy, open as a book and quick as a current. There was a better
reason still, though, why they loved Fred: the boy had consumption;
that's why he was out in the mountains, and his mother in Detroit used
to write Bucks asking about him, and she used to send us all things in
Fred's box. His flesh was as white and as pink as mountain snow, and he
had brown eyes; he was a good boy, and I called him handsome. I reckon
they all did. Fred brought out a tennis set with him, the first we ever
saw in Medicine Bend, and before he had been playing an hour he had
Neighbor, big as a grizzly, and Callahan, with a pipe in one hand and a
tennis guide in the other, chasing all over the yard after balls; and
Hailey trying to figure forty love, while Fred taught Bucks the Lawford
drive. I don't say what he was to me; only that he taught me all I ever
knew or ever will know about handling trains; and, though I was carrying
messages then, and he was signing orders, we were really like kids
together.
Fred for a long time had the early trick. He came on at four in the
morning and caught most of the through freights that got away from the
River behind the passenger trains. There was no use trying to move them
in the night trick. Between the stock trains eastbound and the both-way
passenger trains, if a westbound freight got caught in the mountains at
night the engine might as well be standing in the house saving
fuel--there wasn't time to get from one siding to another. So Fred
Norman took the freights as they came and he handled them like a
ringmaster. When Fred's whip cracked, by Joe! a train had to dance right
along, grade or no grade. Fred gave them the rights and they had the
rest to do--or business to do with the superintendent or with Doubleday,
Neighbor's assistant in the motive power.
There was only one tendency in Fred Norman's despatching that anybody
could criticise: he never seemed, after handling trains on the plains,
to appreciate what our mountain grades really meant, and when they
pushed him he sent his trains out pretty close together. It never
bothered him to handle a heavy traffic; he would get the business
through the mountains just as fast as they could put it at the Division;
but occasionally there were some hair-curling experiences among the
freights on Norman's trick trying to keep off each other's coat-tails.
One night in July there was a great press moving eight or nine trains of
Montana grassers over the main line on some kind of a time contract--we
were giving stockmen the earth then. Everybody was prodding the Mountain
Division, and part of the stuff came in late on Blackburn and part of it
early on Fred, who was almost coughing his head off about that time,
getting up at 3.30 every morning. Fred at four o'clock took the steers
and sent them train after train through the Rat River country like
bullets out of a Maxim gun. It was hot work, and before he had sat in an
hour there was a stumble. The engineer of a big ten-wheeler pulling
twenty-five cars of steers had been pushing hard and, at the entrance of
the canon, set his air so quick he sprung one of the driver shoes and
the main rod hit it. The great steel bar doubled up like a man with a
cramp. It was showing daylight; they made stop, and, quick as men could
do it, flagged both ways. But the last section was crowding into the
canon right behind; they were too close together, that was all there was
to it. The hind section split into the standing train like a butcher
knife into a sandwich. It made a mean wreck--and, worse, it made a lot
of hard feeling at the Wickiup.
When the investigation came it was pretty near up to Fred Norman right
from the start, and he knew it. But Blackburn, who shielded him when he
could, just as all the despatchers did, because he was a boy--and a sick
one among men--tried to take part of the blame himself. He could afford
it, Blackburn; his shoulders were broad and he hadn't so much as a
fly-speck on his book. Bucks looked pretty grave when the evidence was
all in, and around the second floor they guessed that meant something
for Norman. Fred himself couldn't sleep over it, and to complicate
things the engineer of the stalled train, who hated Doubleday, hinted
quietly that the trouble came in the first place from Doubleday's
new-fangled idea of putting the driver shoes behind instead of in front
of the wheels. Then the fat was in the fire. Fred got hold of it, and,
boy-like--sore over his own share in the trouble and exasperated by
something Doubleday was reported to have said about _him_ over at the
house--lighted into Doubleday about the engine failure.
Doubleday was right in his device, as time has proved; but it was
unheard of then and moreover, the assistant master mechanic sensitive to
criticism at any time, was a fearful man to run against. Sunday morning
he and Norman met in the trainmaster's office. They went at each other
like sparks, and when Doubleday, who had a hard mouth, began cursing
Fred, the poor little despatcher, rankling with the trouble, anyway half
sick, went all to pieces and flew at the big fellow like a sparrowhawk.
He threw a wicked left into the master mechanic before Doubleday could
lift a guard. But Walter Doubleday, angry as he was, couldn't strike
Fred. He caught up both the boy's hands and pushed him, struggling
madly, back against the wall to slap his face, when a froth of blood
stained Fred's lips and he fell fainting; just at that minute Blackburn
stepped into the room.
It wasn't the kind of a time--they weren't the kind of men--to ask or
volunteer explanations. Blackburn was on Doubleday in a wink, and before
Walter could right himself the night despatcher had thrown him headlong
across the room. As the operators rushed in, Blackburn and the tall
master mechanic sprang at each other in a silent fury. No man dare say
where it might have ended had not Fred Norman staggered between them
with his hands up--but the blood was gushing from his mouth.
It was pretty serious business. They caught him as he fell, and the boy
lay on Blackburn's arm limp as a dead wire: nobody thought after they
saw that hemorrhage that he would ever live to have another. I was
scared sick, and I never saw a man so cut up as Doubleday. Blackburn was
cool in a second, for he saw quicker than others and he knew there was
danger of the little despatcher's dying right there in his tracks.
Blackburn stood over him, as much at home facing death as he was in a
fight or in a despatcher's chair. He appeared to know just how to handle
the boy to check the gush, and to know just where the salt was and how
to feed it, and he had Doubleday telephoning for Dr. Carhart and me
running to a saloon after chopped ice in a jiffy. When anybody was
knocked out, Blackburn was as regular a nurse as ever you saw; even
switchmen, when they got pinched, kind of looked to Blackburn.
That day the minute he got Fred into Carhart's hands there was Fred's
trick to take care of, and nobody, of course, but Blackburn to do it. He
sat in and picked up the threads and held them till noon; then Maxwell
relieved him. Doubleday was waiting outside when Blackburn left the
chair. I saw him put out his hand to the night despatcher. They spoke a
minute, and went out and up Third Street toward Fred Norman's room. It
was a gloomy day around the depot. Everybody was talking about the
trouble, and the way it had begun and the way it had ended. They talked
in undertones, little groups in corners and in rooms with the doors
shut. There wasn't much of that in our day there, and it was depressing.
I went home early to bed, for I was on nights. But the wind sung so,
even in the afternoon, that I couldn't quiet down to sleep.
II
We were handling trains then on the old single-order system. I mention
this because in no other way could this particular thing have happened;
but there's no especial point in that, since other particular things do
happen all the time, single order, double order, or no order system.
The wind had dropped, and there was just a drizzle of rain falling
through the mountains when I got down to the depot at seven o'clock that
Sunday evening. I don't know how much sleep Blackburn had had during the
day, but he had been at Fred Norman's bed most of the afternoon with
Doubleday and Carhart, so he couldn't have had much. About half-past
seven Maxwell sent me over there with a note and his storm-coat for him
and the three men were in the room then. Boy-like, I hung around until
it was time for Blackburn to take his trick, and then he and Doubleday
and I walked over to the Wickiup together.