the mountains: he was just a plain mountain man. Some said his father
was a trapper; if so, it explained everything--the quiet, the head bent
inquiringly forward, the modest unobtrusiveness of a man deaf. Of a size
and shape nothing remarkable, Delaroo--but a great listener, for though
he looked like a deaf man he heard like a despatcher, and saw
marvellously from out the ends of his silent eyes. Delaroo for all the
world was a trapper.
He came into the service as a roundhouse sweeper; then Neighbor, after a
long time, put him at wiping. Delaroo said nothing but wiped for years
and years, and was in a fair way to become liked, when, instead, he
became one morning pitted with umbilical vesicles, and the doctors, with
Delaroo's brevity, said smallpox. The boarding house keeper threw him
out bodily and at once. Having no better place to go, Delaroo wandered
into Steve Boyer's saloon, where he was generally welcome. Steve,
however, pointed a hospitable gun at him and suggested his getting away
immediately from the front end of it. Delaroo went from there to the
roundhouse with his umbilicals, and asked Neighbor what a man with the
smallpox ought to do with it. Neighbor wouldn't run, not even from the
smallpox--but he told Delaroo what it meant to get the smallpox started
in the roundhouse, and Delaroo wandered quietly away from the depot
grounds, a pretty sick man then, staggered up the yards, and crawled
stupid into a box car to die without embarrassing anybody.
By some hook or crook, nobody to this day knows how, that car was
switched on to Maje Sampson's train when it was made up that day for the
West. Maybe it was done as a trick to scare the wind-bag engineer. If
so, the idea was successful. When the hind-end brakeman at the second
stop came forward and reported a tramp with the smallpox in the empty
box car, Maje was angry. But his curiosity gradually got the upper
hand. This man might be, by some distant chance, he reflected, a P. Q.
W. of A., or a frater, or a fellow, or a knight or something like--and
when they stopped again to throw off crackers and beer and catsup, Maje
went back and entered the infected car like a lion-tamer to try lodge
signals and things on him. Maje advanced and gave the countersign. It
was not cordially received. He tried another and another--and another;
his passes were lost in the air. The smallpox man appeared totally
unable to come back at Maje with anything. He was not only delirious,
but by this time so frightfully broken out that Maje couldn't have
touched a sound spot with a Masonic signal of distress. Finally the
venturesome engineer walked closer into the dark corner where the sick
man lay--and by Heaven! it was the Indian wiper, Delaroo.
When Maje Sampson got back into the cab he could not speak--at least
not for publication. He was tearing mad and sputtered like a safety. He
gathered up his cushion and a water bottle and a bottle that would
explode if water touched it, and crawled with his plunder into the box
car. He straightened Delaroo up and out and gave him a drink and by way
of sanitary precaution took one personally, for he himself had never had
the smallpox--but once. When he had done this little for Delaroo he
finished his run and came back to the Bend hauling his pest-house box
car. The fireman quit the cab immediately after Maje exposed himself;
the conductor communicated with him only by signals. The Anderson
operator wired ahead that Maje Sampson was bringing back a man with
smallpox on Thirty, and when Maje, bulging out of the 264 cab, pulled
into the division yard nobody would come within a mile of him. He set
out the box car below the stock pens, cross-lots from his house up on
the hill, and, not being able to get advice from anybody else, went home
to consult Martie.
Though there were a great many women in Medicine Bend, Maje Sampson
looked to but one, Martie, the little washed-out woman up at
Sampson's--wife, mother, nurse, cook, slave--Martie.
No particular color hair; no particular color eyes; no particular color
gown; no particular cut to it. A plain bit of a woman, mother of six
boys, large and small, and wife of a great big wind-bag engineer, big as
three of her by actual measurement. By the time Maje had taken counsel
and walked down town prominent business men were fending off his
approach with shotguns. The city marshal from behind a bomb-proof asked
what he was going to do with his patient, and Maje retorted he was going
to take him home. He wasn't a M. R. W. of T. nor a P. S. G. of W. E.,
but he was a roundhouse man, and between Maje and a railroad man, a
wiper even, there was a bond stronger than grip or password or jolly
business of any kind. The other things Maje, without realizing it,
merely played at; but as to the railroad lay--if a railroad man was the
right sort he could borrow anything the big fellow had, money, plug
tobacco, pipe, water bottle, strong bottle, it made no odds what. And,
on the other hand, Maje wouldn't hesitate to borrow any or all of these
things in return; the railroad man who got ahead of Maje Sampson in this
respect had claims to be considered a past grand in the business.
The doughty engineer lifted and dragged and hauled Delaroo home with
him. If there was no hospital, Martie had said, no pest-house, no
nothing, just bring him home. They had all had the smallpox up at
Sampson's except the baby, and the doctor had said lately the baby
appeared to need something. They had really everything up at Sampson's
sooner or later: measles, diphtheria, croup, everything on earth except
money. And Martie Sampson, with the washing and mending and scrubbing
and cooking, nursed the outcast wiper through his smallpox. The baby
took it, of course, and Martie nursed the baby through and went on just
the same as before--washing, mending, cooking, scrubbing. Delaroo when
he got well went to firing; Neighbor offered the job as a kind of
consolation prize; and he went to firing on the 264 for Maje Sampson.
It was then that Maje took Delaroo fairly in hand and showed him the
unspeakable folly of trying to get through the world without the
comradeship and benefits of the B. S. L.'s of U., and the fraters of the
order of the double-barrelled star of MacDuff. Delaroo caught a good
deal of it on the sidings, where they lay most of their time dodging
first-class trains; and evenings when they got in from their runs
Delaroo, having nowhere else to go, used to wander, after supper, up to
Sampson's. At Sampson's he would sit in the shade of the lamp and smoke
while Maje, in his shirt-sleeves, held forth on the benevolent orders,
and one boy crawled through the bowels of the organ and another pulled
off the tablecloth--Delaroo always saving the lamp--and a third harassed
the dog, and a fourth stuck pins in a fifth--and Martie, sitting on the
dim side of the shade, so the operation would not appear too glaring,
mended at Maje's mammoth trousers.
Delaroo would sit and listen to Maje and watch the heave of the organ
with the boy, and the current of the tablecloth with the lamp, and the
quarter in which the dog was chewing the baby, and watch Martie's
perpetual-motion fingers for a whole evening, and go back to the
boarding-house without passing a word with anybody on earth, he was that
silent.
In this way the big, bluffing engineer gradually worked Delaroo into all
the secret benevolent orders in Medicine Bend--that meant pretty much
every one on earth. There arose always, however, in connection with the
initiations of Delaroo one hitch: he never seemed quite to know whom he
wanted to leave his insurance money to. He could go the most complicated
catechism without a hitch every time, for Maje spent weeks on the
sidings drilling him, until it came to naming the beneficiary; there he
stuck. Nobody could get out of him to whom he wanted his money to go.
Had he no relations back in the mountains? Nobody up in the Spider
country? No wives or daughters or fathers or mothers or friends or
anything? Delaroo always shook his head. If they persisted he shook his
head. Maje Sampson, sitting after supper, would ask, and Martie, when
the dishes were side-tracked, would begin to sew and listen, and
Delaroo, of course, would listen, but never by any chance would he
answer; not even when Maje tried to explain how it bore on 16 to 1. He
declined to discuss any ratio or to name any beneficiary whatsoever. The
right honorable recording secretaries fumed and denounced it as
irregular, and Maje Sampson wore holes in his elbows gesticulating, but
in the matter of distributing his personal share of the unearned
increment, Delaroo expressed no preference whatsoever. He paid his dues;
he made his passes; he sat in his place, what more could be required? If
they put him in a post of honor he filled it with a silent dignity. If
they set him to guard the outer portal he guarded well; it was perilous
rather for a visiting frater or even a local brother to try getting past
Delaroo if he was rusty in the ritual. Not Maje Sampson himself could
work the outer guard without the countersign; if he forgot it in the
hurry of getting to lodge he had to cool his heels in the outer air
till it came back; Delaroo was pitiless.
In the cab he was as taciturn as he was in the lodge or under the
kerosene lamp at Sampson's; he just listened. But his firing was above
any man's who ever stoked the 264. Delaroo made more steam on less coal
than any man in the roundhouse. Neighbor began to hold him up as a model
for the division, and the boys found that the way to jolly Neighbor was
to say nice things about Delaroo. The head of the Motive Power would
brighten out of a sulk at the mention of Delaroo's name, and he finally
fixed up a surprise for the Indian man. One night after Delaroo came in,
Neighbor, in the bluff way he liked to use in promoting a man, told
Delaroo he could have an engine; a good one, one of the K. class; as
much finer a machine than the old 264 as Duffy's chronometer was than a
prize package watch. Delaroo never said ay, yes, or no; he merely
listened. Neighbor never had a promotion received in just that way; it
nearly gave him the apoplexy.
But if Delaroo treated the proposal coolly, not so Maje Sampson; when
the news of the offer reached him, Maje went into an unaccountable
flutter. He acted at first exactly as if he wanted to hold his man back,
which was dead against cab ethics. Finally he assented, but his cheeks
went flabby and his eyes hollow, and he showed more worry than his
creditors. Nobody understood it, yet there was evidently something on,
and the Major's anxiety increased until Delaroo, the Indian fireman and
knight companion of the Ancient Order of Druids and Fluids, completely
took Neighbor's breath by declining the new engine. That was a West End
wonder. He said if it made no odds he would stay on the 264. The men all
wondered; then something new came up and the thing was forgotten. Maje
Sampson's cheeks filled out again, he regained his usual nerve, and
swore on the money question harder than ever.
After that it was pretty generally understood that Delaroo and Maje
Sampson and the 264 were fixtures. Neighbor never gave any one a chance
to decline an engine more than once. The boys all knew, if Delaroo
didn't, that he would be firing a long time after throwing that chance
by; and he was.
The combination came to be regarded as eternal. When the sloppy 264 hove
in sight, little Delaroo and big Maje Sampson were known to be behind
the boiler pounding up and down the mountains, up and down, year in and
year out. Big engines came into the division and bigger. All the time
the division was crowding on the Motive Power and putting in the mammoth
types, until, when the 264 was stalled alongside a consolidated, or a
mogul skyscraper, she looked like an ancient beer glass set next an
imported stein.
With the 264, when the 800 or the 1100 class were concerned, it was
simply a case of keep out of our way or get smashed, Maje Sampson or no
Maje Sampson, money question or no money question. Benevolent benefits
fraternally proposed or ante-room signals confidentially put forth by
the bald-headed 264 were of no sort of consequence with the modern
giants that pulled a thousand tons in a string up a two-thousand-foot
grade at better than twenty miles an hour. It was a clear yet cold, "You
old tub, get out of our way, will you?" And the fast runners, like Moore
and Hawksworth and Mullen and the Crowleys, Tim and Syme, had about as
much consideration for Maje and his financial theories as their machines
had for his machine. His jim-crow freight outfit didn't cut much of a
figure in _their_ track schedules.
So the Maje Sampson combination, but quite as brassy as though it had
rights of the first class, dodged the big fellows up and down the line
pretty successfully until the government began pushing troops into the
Philippines, and there came days when a Rocky Mountain sheep could
hardly have kept out of the way of the extras that tore, hissing and
booming, over the mountains for 'Frisco. For a time the traffic came
hot; so hot we were pressed to handle it. There was a good bit of
skirmishing on the part of the passenger department to get the
business, and then tremendous skirmishing in the operating department to
deliver the goods. Every broken-down coach in the backyards was scrubbed
up for the soldier trains. We aimed to kill just as few as possible of
the boys en route to the islands, though that may have been a mistaken
mercy. However, we handled them well; not a man in khaki got away from
us in a wreck, and in the height of the push we put more live stock into
South Omaha, car for car, than has ever gone in before or since.
* * * * *
It was November, and great weather for running, and when the rails were
not springing under the soldiers westbound, they were humming under the
steers eastbound. Maje Sampson, with his beer kegs and his crackers and
his 264 and his be-knighted fireman, hugged the sidings pretty close
that week. Some of the trains had part of the rights and others had the
remainder. The 264 and her train took what was left, which threw Maje
Sampson most of the time on the worn-out, run-down, scrap rails that
made corduroy roads of the passing tracks. Then came the night that
Moulton, the Philippine commandant, went through on his special. With
his staff and his baggage and his correspondents and that kind he took
one whole train. Syme Crowley pulled them, with Ben Sherer, conductor,
and whatever else may be said of that pair, they deliver their trains on
time. Maje Sampson left Medicine Bend with Twenty-nine at noon on his
regular run and tried to get west. But between the soldiers behind him
and the steers against him, he soon lost every visionary right he ever
did possess. They laid him out nearly every mile of the way to the end
of the run. At Sugar Buttes they held him thirty minutes for the Moulton
Special to pass, and, to crown his indignities, kept him there fifteen
minutes more waiting for an eastbound sheep train. Sampson afterward
claimed that Barnes Tracy, the despatcher that did it, was a Gold
Democrat, but this never was proved.
It was nearing dark when the crew of local freight Twenty-nine heard the
dull roar of the Moulton Special speeding through the canon of the Rat.
A passenger train running through the canon at night comes through with
the far roll of a thousand drums, deepening into a rumble of thunder.
Then out and over all comes the threatening purr of the straining engine
breaking into a storm of exhausts, until like a rocket the headlight
bursts streaming from the black walls, and Moore on the 811, or Mullen
with the 818, or Hawksworth in the 1110, tear with a fury of alkali and
a sweep of noise over the Butte switch, past caboose and flats and boxes
and the 264 like fading light. Just a sweep of darkened glass and dead
varnish, a whirl of smoking trucks beating madly at the fishplates, and
the fast train is up, and out, and gone!
Twenty-nine, local, was used to all this. Used to the vanishing tail
lights, the measured sinking of the sullen dust, the silence brooding
again over the desert with, this night, fifteen minutes more to wait for
the eastbound stock train before they dared open the switch. Maje
Sampson killed the time by going back to the caboose to talk equities
with the conductor. It was no trick for him to put away fifteen minutes
discussing the rights of man with himself; and with an angel of a
fireman to watch the cab, why not? The 264 standing on the siding was
chewing her cud as sweet as an old cow, with maybe a hundred and forty
pounds of steam to the right of the dial, maybe a hundred and fifty--I
say maybe, because no one but Delaroo ever knew--when the sheep train
whistled.
Sheep--nothing but sheep. Car after car after car, rattling down from
the Short line behind two spanking big engines. They whistled, hoarse as
pirates, for the Butte siding, and, rising the hill a mile west of it,
bore down the grade throwing Dannah coal from both stacks like hydraulic
gravel.
No one knew or ever will know how it happened. They cat-hauled men on
the carpet a week about that switch. The crew of the Moulton Special
testified; the crews of the stock train testified; Maje Sampson
testified; his conductor and both brakemen testified; the roadmaster and
the section boss each testified, and their men testified--but however or
whatever it was--whether the Moulton Special fractured the tongue, or
whether the pony of the lead engine flew the guard, or whether the
switch had been opened, or whether, in closing, the slip rail had
somehow failed to follow the rod--the double-headed stocker went into
that Butte switch, into that Butte siding, into the peaceable old 264
and the Twenty-nine, local, like a lyddite shell, crashing, rearing,
ripping, scattering two whole trains into blood and scrap. Destruction,
madness, throes, death, silence; then a pyre of dirty smoke, a wail of
sickening bleats, and a scream of hissing steam over a thousand sheep
caught in the sudden shambles.
There was frightened crawling out of the shattered cabooses, a hurrying
up of the stunned crews, and a bewildering count of heads. Both engine
crews of the stock train had jumped as their train split the switch. The
train crews were badly shaken; the head brakeman of the sheep train lay
torn in the barbed-wire fencing the right of way; but only one man was
missing--the fireman of Twenty-nine--Delaroo.
"Second 86 jumped west switch passing track and went into train 29,
engine 264. Bad spill. Delaroo, fireman the 264, missing," wired Sugar
Buttes to Medicine Bend a few minutes later.
Neighbor got up there by ten o'clock with both roadmasters and the
wrecking outfit. It was dark as a canon on the desert that night.
Benedict Morgan's men tore splintered car timber from the debris, and on
the knolls back of the siding lighted heaping bonfires that threw a
light all night on the dread pile smoking on the desert. They dug by the
flame of the fires at the ghastly heap till midnight; then the moon
rose, an extra crew arrived from the Bend, and they got the derrick at
work. Yet with all the toil when day broke the confusion looked worse
confounded. The main line was so hopelessly blocked that at daylight a
special with ties and steel was run in to lay a temporary track around
the wreck.
"What do I think of it?" muttered Neighbor, when the local operator
asked him for a report for Callahan. "I think there's two engines for
the scrap in sight--and the 264, if we can ever find anything of
her--and about a million sheep to pay for--" Neighbor paused to give an
order and survey the frightful scene.
"And Delaroo," repeated the operator. "He wants to know about Delaroo--"
"Missing."
At dawn hot coffee was passed among the wreckers, and shortly after
sunrise the McCloud gang arrived with the second derrick. Then the men
of the night took hold with a new grip to get into the heart of the
pile; to find--if he was there--Delaroo.
None of the McCloud gang knew the man they were hunting for, but the men
from the Bend were soon telling them about Maje Sampson's Indian. Not a
mute nod he ever gave; not a piece of tobacco he ever passed; not a
brief word he ever spoke to one of the battered old hulks who rode and
cut and slashed and stormed and drank and cursed with Benedict Morgan,
was forgotten then. Every slewed, twisted, weather-beaten, crippled-up,
gin-shivered old wreck of a wrecker--they were hard men--had something
to say about Delaroo. And with their hair matted and their faces
streaked and their shirts daubed and their elbows in blood, they said
it--whatever it was, much or little--of Delaroo.
The picks swung, the derricks creaked, and all day with the heaving and
the calling they toiled; but the sun was sinking before they got to the
middle of it. Then Benedict Morgan, crawling under the drivers of the
hind mogul, partly uncovered, edged out with a set face; he swore he
heard breathing. It was alcohol to the veins of the double gang.
Neighbor himself went in and heard--and stayed to fasten a grapple to
pull the engine truck off the roof of a box car that was jammed over and
against the mogul stack.
The big derrick groaned as the slack drew and the truck crashed through
a tier of stays and swung whirling into the clear. A giant wrecker
dodged the suspended wheels and raising his axe bit a hole into the
jammed roof. Through that they passed a second grapple, and presently it
gave sullenly, toppled back with a crash, and the foremost axman,
peering into the opening, saw the heart of the wreck. Bending forward,
he picked up something struggling in his arms. They thought it was a
man; but it was a sheep, alive and uninjured, under all the horror: that
was the breathing they heard. Benedict Morgan threw the man and his
burden aside and stepped himself into the gap and through. One started
to follow, but the chief of the wreckers waved him back. Close by where
the sheep had been freed stood Delaroo. He stood as if with ear alert,
so closely did the counterfeit seem the real. So sure was the impression
of life that not until Morgan, speaking to the fireman, put his hand on
his shoulder did he realize that the Indian stood quite dead just where
the shock had caught him in his cab.
Stumbling over the wreckage, they passed him in the silence of the
sunset from hand to hand into the open. A big fellow, pallid and scared,
tottered after them, and when they laid the dead man down, half fell at
his side: it was Maje Sampson.
It surprised everybody the way Maje Sampson went to pieces after Delaroo
was killed. The Indian was carried back to the Bend and up to Sampson's
and laid out in the God-forsaken parlor; but Maje wasn't any good fixing
things up that time. He usually shone on like occasions. He was the
comforter of the afflicted to an extraordinary degree; he gave the usual
mourner no chance to let up. But now his day was as one that is
darkened. When Neighbor went up next night to see about some minor
matters connected with the funeral and the precedence of the various
dozen orders that were to march, he found Maje Sampson and Martie alone
in the darkness of the parlor with the silent Delaroo.
Maje turned to the master mechanic from where Delaroo lay. "Neighbor,
you might as well know it now as any time. Don't you say so, Martie?
Martie, what do you say?" Martie burst into tears; but through them
Neighbor caught the engineer's broken confession. "Neighbor--I'm color
blind." The master mechanic sat stunned.
"True as God's word. You might as well know it now. There's the man that
stood between me and the loss of my job. It's been coming on me for two
year. He knew it, that's why he stayed in my cab. He stayed because I
was color blind. He knowed I'd git ketched the minute a new fireman come
in, Neighbor. He watched the signals--Delaroo. I'm color blind, God help
me." Maje Sampson sat down by the coffin. Martie hushed her crying; the
three sat in the darkness.
"It wouldn't worry me so much if it wasn't f'r the family, Neighbor. The
woman--and the boys. I ain't much a-savin'; you know that. If you can
gi' me a job I can get bread an' butter out of, give it to me. I can't
pull a train; my eyes went out with this man here. I wish to God it was
me, and him standing over. A man that's color blind, and don't know a
thing on God's earth but runnin' an engine, is worse 'n' a dead man."
Neighbor went home thinking.