course; sweeping the office and that; but whatever his faults, the boy
did as he was told. Only one vicious habit clung to him--he had a
passion for reading the rules. In spite of this, however, he steadily
mastered the taking, and, as for sending, he could do that before he
got out of the cuspidor department. Everybody around the Wickiup bullied
him, and maybe that was his salvation. He got used to expecting the
worst of it, and nerved himself to take it, which in railroading is half
the battle.
A few months after he became competent to handle a key the nightman at
Goose River Junction went wrong. When Callahan told Bullhead he thought
about giving him the job, the boy went wild with excitement, and in a
burst of confidence showed Callahan his star. It was the best thing that
ever happened, for the assistant head of the division had an impulsive
way of swearing the nonsense out of a boy's head, and when Bullhead
confessed to being a detective a fiery stream was poured on him. The
foolishness couldn't quite all be driven out in one round; but Jamie
Lyons went to Goose River fairly well informed as to how much of a fool
he was.
Goose River Junction is not a lively place. It has been claimed that
even the buzzards at Goose River Junction play solitaire. But apart
from the utter loneliness it was hard to hold operators there on account
of Nellie Cassidy. A man rarely stayed at Goose River past the second
pay-check. When he got money enough to resign he resigned; and all
because Nellie Cassidy despised operators.
The lunch counter that Matt Cassidy, Nellie's father, ran at the
Junction was just an adjunct for feeding train crews and the few miners
who wandered down from the Glencoe spur. Matt himself took the night
turn, but days it was Nellie who heated the Goose River coffee and
dispensed the pie--contract pie made at Medicine Bend, and sent by local
freight classified as ammunition, loaded and released, O. R.
It was Nellie's cruelty that made the frequent shifts at Goose River.
Not that she was unimpressible, or had no heroes. She had plenty of them
in the engine and the train service. It was the smart-uniformed young
conductors and the kerchiefed juvenile engineers on the fast runs to
whom Nellie paid deference, and for whom she served the preferred
doughnuts.
But this was nothing to Bullhead. He had his head so full of things when
he took his new position that he failed to observe Nellie's contempt. He
was just passing out of the private detective stage; just getting over
dental beginnings; just rising to the responsibility of the key, and a
month devoted to his immediate work and the study of the rules passed
like a limited train. Previous to the coming of Bullhead, no Goose River
man had tried study of the rules as a remedy for loneliness; it proved a
great scheme; but it aroused the unmeasured contempt of Nellie Cassidy.
She scorned Bullhead unspeakably, and her only uneasiness was that he
seemed unconscious of it.
However, the little Goose River girl had no idea of letting him escape
that way. When scorn became clearly useless she tried cajolery--she
smiled on Bullhead. Not till then did he give up; her smile was his
undoing. It was so absolutely novel to Bullhead--Bullhead, who had never
got anything but kicks and curses and frowns. Before Nellie's smiles,
judiciously administered, Bullhead melted like the sugar she began to
sprinkle in his coffee. That was what she wanted; when he was fairly
dissolved, Nellie like the coffee went gradually cold. Bullhead became
miserable, and to her life at Goose River was once more endurable.
It was then that Bullhead began to sit up all day, after working all
night, to get a single smile from the direction of the pie rack. He
hung, utterly miserable, around the lunch room all day, while Nellie
made impersonal remarks about the colorless life of a mere operator as
compared with life in the cab of a ten-wheeler. She admired the
engineer, Nellie--was there ever a doughnut girl who didn't? And when
One or Two rose smoking out of the alkali east or the alkali west, and
the mogul engine checked its gray string of sleepers at the Junction
platform, and Bat Mullen climbed down to oil 'round--as he always
did--there were the liveliest kind of heels behind the counter.
Such were the moments when Bullhead sat in the lunch room, unnoticed,
somewhat back where the flies were bad, and helped himself aimlessly to
the sizzling maple syrup--Nellie rustling back and forth for Engineer
Mullen, who ran in for a quick cup, and consulted, after each swallow, a
dazzling open-faced gold watch, thin as a double eagle; for Bat at
twenty-one was pulling the fast trains and carried the best. And with
Bullhead feeding on flannel cakes and despair, and Nellie Cassidy
looking quite her smartest, Mullen would drink his coffee in an
impassive rush, never even glancing Bullhead's way--absolutely ignoring
Bullhead. What was he but a nightman, anyway? Then Mullen would take as
much as a minute of his running time to walk forward to the engine with
Miss Cassidy, and stand in the lee of the drivers chatting with her,
while Bullhead went completely frantic.
It was being ignored in that way, after her smiles had once been his,
that crushed the night operator. It filled his head with schemes for
obtaining recognition at all hazards. He began by quarrelling violently
with Nellie, and things were coming to a serious pass around the depot
when the Klondike business struck the Mountain Division. It came with a
rush and when they began running through freight extras by way of the
Goose River short line, day and night, the Junction station caught the
thick of it. It was something new altogether for the short line rails
and the short line operators, and Bullhead's night trick, with nothing
to do but poke the fire and pop at coyotes, became straightway a busy
and important post. The added work kept him jumping from sundown till
dawn, and kept him from loafing daytimes around the lunch counter and
ruining himself on fermented syrup.
On a certain night, windier than all the November nights that had gone
before, the night operator sat alone in the office facing a resolve.
Goose River had become intolerable. Medicine Bend was not to be thought
of, for Bullhead now had a suspicion, due to Callahan, that he was a
good deal of a chump, and he wanted to get away from the ridicule that
had always and everywhere made life a burden. There appeared to
Bullhead nothing for it but the Klondike. On the table before the moody
operator lay his letter of resignation, addressed in due form to J. S.
Bucks, superintendent. Near it, under the lamp, lay a well-thumbed copy
of the book of rules, open at the chapter on Resignations, with subheads
on--
Resign, who should.
Resign, how to.
Resign, when to. (See also Time.)
The fact was it had at last painfully forced itself on Bullhead that he
was not fitted for the railroad business. Pat Francis had unfeelingly
told him so. Callahan had told him so; Neighbor had told him so; Bucks
had told him so. On that point the leading West End authorities were
agreed. Yet in spite of these discouragements he had persisted and at
last made a show. Who was it now that had shaken his stubborn
conviction? Bullhead hardly dared confess. But it was undoubtedly one
who put up to be no authority whatever on Motive Power or Train Service
or Operating--it was Matt Cassidy's girl.
While he re-read his formal letter and compared on spelling with his
pocket Webster, a train whistled. Bullhead looked at the clock: 11.40 P.
M. It was the local freight, Thirty, coming in from the West, working
back to Medicine. From the East, Number One had not arrived; she was six
hours late, and Bullhead looked out at his light, for he had orders for
the freight. It was not often that such a thing happened, because One
rarely went off schedule badly enough to throw her into his turn. He had
his orders copied and O.K.'d, and waited only to deliver them.
It was fearfully windy. The 266 engine, pulling Thirty that night,
wheezed in the gale like a man with the apoplexy. She had a new fireman
on, who was burning the life out of her, and as she puffed painfully
down on the scrap rails of the first siding and took the Y, her
overloaded safety gasped violently.
When the conductor of the Number Thirty train opened the station door,
the wind followed him like a catamount. The stove puffed open with a
down draft, and shot the room full of stinging smoke. The lamp blaze
flew up the chimney--out--and left the nightman and the conductor in
darkness. The trainman with a swear shoved-to the door, and Bullhead,
the patient, turned over his letter of resignation quick in the dark,
felt for a match and relighted his lamp. Swearing again at Bullhead, the
freight conductor swaggered over to his table, felt in all the
operator's pockets for a cigar, tumbled all the papers around, and once
more, on general principles, swore.
Bullhead took things uncomplainingly, but he watched close, and was
determined to fight if the brute discovered his letter of resignation.
When the trainman could think of no further indignities he took his
orders, to meet Number One at Sackley, the second station east of Goose
River. After he had signed, Bullhead asked him about the depot fire at
Bear Dance that had been going over the wires for two hours, reminded
him of the slow order for the number nine culvert and as the rude
visitor slammed the door behind him, held his hand over the lamp. Then
he sat down again and turned over his letter of resignation.
To make it binding it lacked only his signature--James Gillespie Blaine
Lyons--now, himself, of the opinion of every one else on the West End:
that he was just a natural born blooming fool. He lifted his pen to sign
off the aspirations of a young lifetime when the sounder began to snap
and sputter his call. It was the despatcher, and he asked hurriedly if
Number Thirty was there.
"Number Thirty is on the Y," answered Bullhead.
Then came a train order. "Hold Number Thirty till Number One arrives."
Bullhead repeated the order, and got back the O. K. He grabbed his hat
and hurried out of the door to deliver the new order to the local
freight before it should pull out.
To reach the train Bullhead had to cross the short line tracks. The wind
was scouring the flats, and as he tacked up the platform the dust swept
dead into him. At the switch he sprang across the rails, thinking of
nothing but reaching the engine cab of the local--forgetting about the
track he was crossing. Before he could think or see or jump, a through
freight on the short line, wild, from the West, storming down the grade
behind him, struck Bullhead as a grizzly would a gnat--hurled him,
doubling, fifty feet out on the spur--and stormed on into the East
without a quiver out of the ordinary. One fatality followed another. The
engineer of the short line train did not see the man he had hit, and
with the nightman lying unconscious in the ditch, the local freight
pulled out for Sackley.
Bullhead never knew just how long he lay under the stars. When his head
began to whirl the wind was blowing cool and strong on him, and the
alkali dust was eddying into his open mouth. It was only a matter of
seconds, though it seemed hours, to pull himself together and to put up
his hand unsteadily to feel what it was soaking warm and sticky into his
hair; then to realize that he had been struck by a short line train; to
think of what a failure he had lately acknowledged himself to be; and of
what it was he was clutching so tightly in his right hand--the holding
order for Number Thirty. He raised his reeling head; there was a drift
of starlight through the dust cloud, but no train in sight; Number
Thirty was gone. With that consciousness came a recollection--he had
forgotten to put out his red light.
His red light wasn't out. He kept repeating that to himself to put the
picture of what it meant before him. He had started to deliver an order
without putting out his light, and Number Thirty was gone; against
Number One--a head end collision staring the freight and the belated
passenger in the face. Number Thirty, running hard on her order to make
Sackley for the meeting, and One, running furiously, as she always
ran--to-night worse than ever.
He lifted his head, enraged with himself; enraged. He thought about the
rules, and he grew enraged. Only himself he blamed, nobody
else--studying the rules for a lifetime and just when it would mean the
death of a trainload of people forgetting his red signal. He lifted his
head; it was sick, deadly sick. But up it must come, Thirty gone, and it
wabbled, swooning sick and groggy as he stared around and tried to
locate himself. One thing he could see, the faint outline of the station
and his lamp blazing smoky in the window. Bullhead figured a second;
then he began to crawl. If he could reach the lamp before his head went
off again, before he went completely silly, he might yet save himself
and Number One.
It wasn't in him to crawl till he thought of his own mistake; but there
was a spur in the sweep of that through his head. His brain, he knew,
was wabbling, but he could crawl; and he stuck fainting to that one
idea, and crawled for the light of his lamp.
It is a bare hundred feet across to the Y. Bullhead taped every foot of
the hundred with blood. There was no one to call on for help; he just
stuck to the crawl, grinding his teeth in bitter self-reproach. They
traced him, next morning when he was past the telling of it, and his
struggle looked the track of a wounded bear. Dragging along one crushed
leg and half crazed by the crack on his forehead, Bullhead climbed to
the platform, across, and dragged himself to the door. He can tell yet
about rolling his broken leg under him and raising himself to grasp the
thumb latch. Not until he tried to open it did he remember it was a
spring lock and that he was outside. He felt in his pocket for his
keys--but his keys were gone.
There were no rules to consult then. No way on earth of getting into the
office in time to do anything; to drag himself to the lunch room, twice
further than the station, was out of the question. But there was a way
to reach his key in spite of all bad things, and Bullhead knew the way.
He struggled fast around to the window. Raising himself with a frightful
twinge on one knee, he beat at the glass with his fist. Clutching the
sash, he drew himself up with a hand, and with the other tore away the
muntin, stuck his head and shoulders through the opening, got his hand
on the key, and called the first station east, Blaisdell, with the 19.
Life and death that call meant; the 19, the despatcher's call--hanging
over the key, stammering the 19 over the wire, and baptizing the call in
his own blood--that is the way Bullhead learned to be a railroad man.
For Blaisdell got him and his warning, and had Number One on the siding
just as the freight tore around the west curve, headed for Sackley.
While it was all going on, Bullhead lay on the wind-swept platform at
Goose River with a hole in his head that would have killed anybody on
the West End, or, for that matter on earth except James Gillespie Blaine
Lyons.
After Number Thirty had passed so impudently, Number One felt her way
rather cautiously to Goose River, because the despatchers couldn't get
the blamed station. They decided, of course, that Bullhead was asleep,
and fixed everything at the Wickiup to send a new man up there on Three
in the morning and fire him for good.
But about one o'clock Number One rolled, bad-tempered, into Goose River
Junction, and Bat Mullen, stopping his train, strode angrily to the
station. It was dark as a pocket inside. Bat smashed in the door with
his heel, and the trainmen swarmed in and began looking with their
lanterns for the nightman. The stove was red-hot, but he was not asleep
in the arm-chair, nor napping under the counter on the supplies. They
turned to his table and discovered the broken window, and thought of a
hold-up. They saw where the nightman had spilled something that looked
like ink over the table, over the order book, over the clip, and there
was a hand print that looked inky on an open letter addressed to the
superintendent--and a little pool of something like ink under the key.
Somebody said suicide; but Bat Mullen suddenly stuck his lamp out of the
broken window, put his head through after it, and cried out. Setting his
lantern down on the platform, he crawled through the broken sash and
picked up Bullhead.
Next morning it was all over the West End.
"And Bullhead!" cried everybody. "That's what gets me. Who'd have
thought it of _Bullhead_!"
When they all got up there and saw what Bullhead had done, everybody
agreed that nobody but Bullhead could have done it.
The pilot bar of the short line mogul, in swiping Bullhead unmercifully,
had really made a railroad man of him. It had let a great light in on
the situation. Whereas before every one else on the line had been to
blame for his failures, Bullhead now saw that he himself had been to
blame, and was man enough to stand up and say so. When the big fellows,
Callahan and Kenyon and Pat Francis, saw his trail next morning, saw the
blood smeared over the table, and saw Bullhead's letter of resignation
signed in his own blood manual, and heard his straight-out story days
afterward, they said never a word.
But that morning, the morning after, Callahan picked up the letter and
put it just as it was between the leaves of the order book and locked
both in his grip. It was some weeks before he had a talk with Bullhead,
and he spoke then only a few words, because the nightman fainted before
he got through. Callahan made him understand, though, that as soon as he
was able he could have any key on that division he wanted as long as
_he_ was running it--and Callahan is running that division yet.
It all came easy after he got well. Instead of getting the worst of it
from everybody, Bullhead began to get the best of it, even from pretty
Nellie Cassidy. But Nellie had missed her opening. She tried tenderness
while the boy was being nursed at the Junction. Bullhead looked grim and
far-off through his bulging bandages, and asked his mother to put the
sugar in his coffee for him; Bullhead was getting sense.
Besides, what need has a young man with a heavy crescent-shaped scar on
his forehead, that people inquire about and who within a year after the
Goose River affair was made a train despatcher under Barnes Tracy at
Medicine Bend--what need has he of a coquette's smiles? His mother, who
has honorably retired from hard work, says half the girls at the Bend
are after him, and his mother ought to know, for she keeps house for
him.
Bullhead's letter of resignation with the print of his hand on it hangs
framed over Callahan's desk, and is shown to railroad big fellows who
are accorded the courtesies of the Wickiup. But when they ask Bullhead
about it, he just laughs and says some railroad men have to have sense
pounded into them.
The Master Mechanic's Story
DELAROO
"You tell it. I can't tell it," growled Neighbor.
"Oh, no. No. That's your story, Neighbor."
"I ain't no story-teller--"
"Just an able-jawed liar," suggested Callahan through a benevolent
bluish haze.
"Delaroo's story wasn't any lie, though," muttered Neighbor. "But a
fellow would think it was to hear it; now he would, for a fact, wouldn't
he?"
I
If you want him, quick and short, it would be: whiskers, secret
societies, statistics and plug tobacco--the latter mostly worked up.
That was Maje Sampson.
Bluntly, a wind-bag; two hundred and seventy pounds of atmosphere. Up on
benevolent fraternities, up on politics, up on the money question, up
on everything. The Seven Financial Conspiracies engaged Maje Sampson's
attention pretty continually, and had for him a practical application:
there were never less than seven conspiracies afoot in Medicine Bend to
make Maje Sampson pay up.
Pay? Indeed, he did pay. He was always paying. It was not a question of
paying. Not at all. It was a question of paying up, which is different.
The children--they were brickbats. Tow-headed, putty-faced, wash-eyed
youngsters of all sizes and conditions. About Maje Sampson's children
there was but one distinguishing characteristic, they were all boys,
nothing but boys, and they spread all over town. Was there a baby run
over? It was Maje Sampson's. Was there a child lost? Maje Sampson's. Was
there a violently large-headed, coarse-featured, hangdog, clattering
sort of a chap anywhere around? In the street, station, roundhouse,
yards, stock pens? It was a brickbat, sure, one of Maje Sampson's
brickbat boys.
The Sampsons were at the end of the street, and the end of the street
was up the mountain. Maje Sampson's lot, "raired," as Neighbor put
it--stood on its hind legs. His house had a startling tumble-over aspect
as you approached it. The back end of his lot ran up into the sheer, but
he marked the line sharply by a kind of horizontal fence, because the
cliff just above belonged to the corporation that owned everything else
on earth around Medicine Bend.
Maje Sampson did not propose to let any grasping corporation encroach on
his lines, so he built, and added to from time to time, a cluster of
things on the hind end of his lot--an eruption of small buildings like
pimples on a boy's nose, running down in size from the barn to the last
dry-goods box the boys had heaved up the slope for a dog house. To add
to the variety, some one of the structures was always getting away in
the wind, and if anything smaller than a hotel was seen careening
across-lots in a Medicine Bend breeze it was spotted without further
investigation as Maje Sampson's. When the gale abated, Joe McBracken,
who conducted the local dray line, was pretty sure to be seen with a
henhouse or a woodshed, or something likewise, loaded on his trucks
headed for Maje Sampson's. Once the whole lean-to of the house blew off,
but Joe McBracken stood ready for any emergency. He met the maverick
addition at the foot of the grade, loaded it on his house-moving truck,
hitched on four bronchos, crawled inside the structure, and, getting the
lines through the front window, drove up Main Street before the wind
had gone down. Joe was photographed in the act, and afterward used the
exhibit in getting judgment against Maje Sampson for his bill.
Now a man like Maje wouldn't be likely to have very much of a run nor
very much of an engine. He had the 264; an old pop bottle with a stack
like a tepee turned upside down. For a run he had always trains Number
Twenty-nine and Thirty, the local freights, with an accommodation coach
east of Anderson. There were times of stress frequently on the West End,
times when everybody ran first in first out, except Maje Sampson; he
always ran Twenty-nine and Thirty west to Silver River and back. A
pettifogging, cheap, jerk-water run with no rights to speak of, not even
against respectable hand-cars. The only things Maje Sampson did not have
to dodge were tramps, blanket Indians and telegraph poles; everything
else side-tracked Twenty-nine and Thirty and Maje Sampson. Almost
everybody on through trains must at some time have seen Maje Sampson
puffing on a siding as Moore or Mullen shot by on Number One or Number
Two. Maje was so big and his cab so little that when he got his head
through the window you couldn't see very much of the cab for shoulders
and whiskers and things. From the cab window he looked like a
fourteen-year-old boy springing out of a ten-year-old jacket. Three
things only, made Maje tolerable. First, the number of benevolent orders
he belonged to; second, Delaroo; third, Martie.
Maje Sampson was a joiner and a sitter up. He would join anything on the
West End that had a ritual, a grip and a password, and he would sit up
night after night with anybody that had a broken leg or a fever: and if
nothing better offered, Maje, rather than go to bed, would tackle a man
with the stomachache. This kind of took the cuss off; but he was that
peculiar he would sit up all night with a sick man and next day make
everybody sick talking the money question--at least everybody but
Delaroo. If Delaroo was bored he never showed it. As long as Maje would
talk Delaroo would listen. That single word was in fact the key to
Delaroo: Delaroo was a listener; for that reason nobody knew much about
him.