Delaroo had insurance in every order in the Bend, which meant almost
every one on earth. There was no end to his benefit certificates, and no
known beneficiaries. But when they overhauled his trunk they found every
last certificate filed away up to the last paid assessment and the last
quarter's dues. Then came a shock. People found out there was a
beneficiary. While the fraters were busy making their passes Delaroo had
quietly been directing the right honorable recording secretaries to make
the benefits run to Neighbor, and so every dollar of his insurance ran.
Nobody was more thunderstruck at the discovery than the master mechanic
himself.
Yet Delaroo meant something by it. After Neighbor had studied over it
nights the best of a month; after Maje Sampson had tried to take the
color test and failed, as he persistently said he would; after he had
gone to tinkering in the roundhouse, and from tinkering respectably,
and by degrees down the hill to wiping at a dollar and forty cents a day
with time and a half for overtime--Neighbor bethought himself all of a
sudden one day of a paper Delaroo had once given him and asked him to
keep.
He had put it away in the storekeeper's safe with his own papers and the
drawings of his extension front end patent--and safely forgotten all
about it. It was the day they had to go into the county court about the
will that was not, when he recollected Delaroo's paper and pulled it out
of its envelope. There was only a half sheet of paper, inside, with this
writing from Delaroo to Neighbor:
R. B. A.--What is coming to me on ensurance give to Marty
Sampson, wife of Maje. Give my trunk to P. McGraw.
Rispk.,
P. DE LA ROUX.
When the master mechanic read that before the probate judge, Maje
Sampson took a-trembling: Martie hid her face in her shawl, crying
again. Maybe a glimmer of what it meant came for the first time in her
life over her. Maybe she remembered Delaroo as he used to sit with them
under the kerosene lamp while Maje untiringly pounded the money question
into him--smoking as he listened, and Martie mended on never-ending
trousers. Looking from Maje Sampson, heated with monologue, to his wife,
patiently stitching. No comments; just looking as Pierre Delaroux could
look.
Strange, Neighbor thought it, and yet, maybe, not so strange. It was all
there in the paper--the torn, worn little book of Delaroo's life. She
was the only woman on earth that had ever done him a kindness.
Nobody at Medicine Bend quite understood it; but nobody at Medicine Bend
quite suspected that under all the barrenness up at Maje Sampson's an
ambition could have survived; yet one had. Martie had an ambition. Way
down under her faded eyes and her faded dress there was an ambition, and
that for the least promising subjects in the Rocky Mountains--the
brickbats. Under the unending mending and the poverty and the toil,
Martie, who never put her nose out of doors, who never attended a church
social, never ventured even to a free public school show--had an
ambition for the boys. She wanted the two biggest to go to the State
University; wanted them to go and get an education. And they went; and
Maje Sampson says them boys, ary one, has forgotten more about the money
question than he ever knew. It looks as if after all the brickbats might
come out; a bit of money in Martie's hands goes so far.
There are a few soldiers buried at the Bend. Decoration Day there is an
attempt at a turn-out; a little speeching and a little marching. A thin,
straggle column of the same warped, bent old fellows in the same faded
old blue. Up the hill they go and around to the cemetery to decorate.
When they turn at Maje Sampson's place--there's a gate there now--Martie
and more or less of the boys, and Maje, kind of join in along and go
over with them carrying a basket or so of flowers and a bucket of water.
The boys soon stray over to where the crowd is, around the graves of the
Heroes. But Martie gets down by a grave somewhat apart and prods the
drifting gravel all up loose with an old case-knife. You would think she
might be kneading bread there, the way she sways under her sun-bonnet
and gloves--for her little boiled hands are in gloves now.
* * * * *
"I don't know how much good it does Delaroo spiking up his grave once a
year," Neighbor always winds up. "It may not do him a blamed bit of
good, I don't say it does. But I can see them. I see them from the
roundhouse; it does me good. Hm?
"Maje?" he will add. "Why, I've got him over there at the house, wiping.
I'm going to put him running the stationary if old John Boxer ever dies.
When will he die? Blamed if I know. John is a pretty good man yet. I
can't kill him, can I? Well, then, what's a matter with you?
"No, Maje don't talk as much as he used to; forgetting his passes more
or less, too. Getting old like some more of us. He's kind of quit the
money question; claims he don't understand it now as well as the boys
do. But he can talk about Delaroo; he understands Delaroo pretty
well--now."
The Operator's Story
DE MOLAY FOUR
Very able men have given their lives to the study of Monsoon's
headlight; yet science, after no end of investigation, stands in its
presence baffled.
The source of its illumination is believed to be understood. I say
believed, because in a day when yesterday's beliefs are to-morrow's
delusions I commit myself personally to no theory. Whether it is a thing
living or dead; whether malign to mackerel or potent in its influence on
imperfectly understood atmospheric phenomena, I do not know. I doubt
whether anybody knows, except maybe Monsoon himself. I know only that on
the West End, Monsoon's headlight, from every point of view, stands
high, and that on one occasion it stood between Abe Monsoon and a
frightful catastrophe.
There have been of late studied efforts to introduce electric headlights
on the Mountain Division. But there are grizzled men in the cab who look
with distrust--silent, it is true, yet distrust--on the claims put forth
for them. While Monsoon's headlight does its work--as it has done even
long before Monsoon followed it to the West End, and will do long after
he leaves the West End--why, they say, and reasonably enough, take on
new and theoretical substitutes?
While the discussion deepens and even rages in the Wickiup, Monsoon
himself is silent. Brave men are modest men. Among ourselves we don't
use adjectives; where Monsoon is known it is not necessary to put
anything ahead of his name--except, may be, once a month on the payroll
when the cross-eyed accountant adds A. or Abe or Abraham, just as he
happens to be fixed for time. Monsoon's name in itself stands for a
great deal. When his brother engineers, men who have grown seamy and
weather-beaten in the service, put up their voices for Monsoon's
headlight; or when talkative storekeepers, who servilely jump at
headquarters' experiments in order to court the favor of the high, speak
for electricity, Abe Monsoon himself is silent. His light is there; let
them take it or leave it as they will. If the Superintendent of Motive
Power should attempt to throw it out for the new-fangled arrangement,
Monsoon would doubtless feel that it was not the first time Omaha had
gone wrong--and, for that matter, that neither he nor anybody else had
assurance it would be the last. However--
The story opens on Bob Duffy. Bob, right from the start, was what I call
a good-looker, and, being the oldest boy, he had more of the swing
anyway. When Martin came along, his mother hadn't got over thinking
about Bob. Doubtless she thought, too, of Martin; but he was kind of
overshadowed. Bob began by clerking in the post-office and delivering
mail to all the pretty girls. His sympathy for the girls was so great
that after a while he began passing out letters to them whether they
were addressed to the girls or to somebody else. This gradually weakened
his influence with the government.
Martin began work in the telegraph office; he really learned the whole
thing right there at the Bend under Callahan. Began, carrying Western
Unions stuck at his waist under a heavy leather belt. He wore in those
days, when he had real responsibility, a formidable brown Stetson that
appeared bent on swallowing his ears: it was about the time he was
rising trousers and eleven. Nobody but Sinkers ever beat Martin Duffy
delivering messages, and nobody, bar none--Bullhead, McTerza,
anybody--ever beat him eating pie. It was by eating pie that he was able
to wear the belt so long--and you may take that either way. But I speak
gladly of the pie, because in the usual course of events there isn't
much pie in a despatcher's life. There is, by very large odds, more
anxiety than pie, and I introduce the pie, not to give weight to the
incidents that follow but rather to lighten them; though as Duffy has
more recently admitted this was not always the effect of the pie itself.
I do not believe that Martin Duffy ever had an enemy. A right tight
little chap he was, with always a good word, even under no end of
pressure on the single track. There's many a struggling trainman that
will look quick and grateful when any fellow far or near speaks a word
about Martin Duffy. Fast as he climbed, his head never swelled. His hats
rested, even after he got a key, same as the original Stetson, right on
the wings of his ears. But his heart grew right along after his head
stopped, and that's where he laid over some other railroad men I could
mention if I had to, which I don't--not here.
About the time it looked as if Martin would make a go of it on the road,
the post-office inspectors were thinking Bob would make a go of it over
the road. But he was such a kid of a fellow that the postmaster
convinced the detectives Bob's way of doing things was simple
foolishness, which it probably was, and they merely swore him out of the
service.
It was then that Martin reached out a hand to his elder brother. There
were really just the two brothers; and back of them--as there is,
somewhere, back of every railroad man--a mother. No father--not
generally; just a mother. A quiet, sombre little woman in a shawl and a
bonnet of no special shape or size--just a shawl and a bonnet, that's
all. Anyhow, the Duffy boys' mother was that way, and there's a lot more
like her. I don't know what gets the fathers; maybe, very often, the
scrap. But there's almost always, somewhere, a mother. So after Martin
began to make a record, to help his mother and his brother both, he
spoke for Bob. Callahan didn't hesitate or jolly him as he used to do
with a good many. He thought the company couldn't have too many of the
Duffy kind; so he said, "Yes, sure." And Bob Duffy was put at work--same
thing exactly: carrying messages, reading hair-destroyers and blowing
his salary on pie.
But pie acts queer. Sometimes it makes a man's head solid and his heart
big; then again it makes a man's head big and his heart solid. I'm not
saying anything more now except that pie certainly acts different.
Bob Duffy was taller than Martin and I would repeat, handsomer; but I
can't, because Martin had absolutely no basis of beauty to start with.
He was parchment-like and palish from sitting night after night and
night after night over a sounder. Never sick a day in his life; but
always over the sounder until, sleeping or waking, resting or working,
the current purred and purred through his great little head like a
familiarity taking old tomcat. He could guess more off a wire than most
men could catch after the whole thing had tumbled in.
So up and up ladder he went. Messenger, operator--up to assistant
despatcher, up to a regular trick despatcher. Up to the orders and
signing the J. M. C., the letters that stood for our superintendent's
name and honor. Up to the trains and their movements, up to the lives,
then CHIEF!--with the honor of the division all clutched in Martin
Duffy's three quick right fingers on the key and his three quick left
fingers on the pen at the same instant scratching orders across the
clip. Talk about ambidexterity--Martin didn't know what it would be like
to use one hand at a time. If Martin Duffy said right, trains went
right. If he said wrong, trains went wrong. But Martin never said the
wrong; he said only the right. Giddings knows; he copied for him long
enough. Giddings and plenty more of them can tell all about Martin
Duffy.
Bob didn't rise in the service quite so fast as Martin. He was rather
for having a good time. He did more of the social act, and that pleased
his mother, who, on account of her bonnet-and-shawl complexion, didn't
achieve much that way. Martin, too, was proud of his brother, and as
soon as Bob could handle a wire, which was very soon (for he learned
things in no time) Martin got Callahan to put him up at Grant as operator.
Bob got the place because he was Martin's brother, nothing else. He held
it about two months, then he resigned and went to San 'Frisco. He was a
restless fellow; it was Bob up and Bob down. For a year he wandered
around out there, telegraphing, then he bobbed up again in Medicine Bend
out of a job. He wanted to go to work, and--well, Callahan--Martin's
brother, you know--sent him up to Montair as night operator. Three
months he worked steady as a clock. Then one night the despatchers at
the Bend couldn't get Montair for two hours. It laid out Number Six and
a Special with the General Manager and made no end of a row.
Martin said right off he ought to go. But there was the little mother
up home, silent, I expect, but pleading-like. It was left largely to
Martin, for the young fellow was already chief; and that was the
trouble--he hated to bear down too hard; so he compromised by asking his
superintendent not to fire Bob but to set him back. They sent him up as
night man to Rat River, the meanest place on the whole system. That was
the summer of the Templars' Conclave at San 'Frisco.
We worked the whole spring getting things up along the line, from Omaha
to the Sierras, for that Conclave. Engines were overhauled, rolling
stock touched up, roadbed put in shape, everything shaken from end to
end. Not only were the passenger records to be smashed, but beyond that
a lot of our big general officers were way-up Masons and meant that our
line should get not merely the cream of the business but the cream of
the advertising out of the thing. The general tenor of the instructions
was to nickel-plate everything, from the catalpas to the target rods.
For three months before the Conclave date we were busy getting ready for
it, and when the big day drew near on which we were to undertake the
moving and the feeding of six thousand people one way on one track
through the mountains, the car-tinks smoked cross-cut and the Russian
sectionmen began to oil their hair.
Callahan was superintendent under Bucks, then General Manager, and
Martin Duffy, Chief Despatcher, Neighbor, Superintendent of Motive
Power, and Doubleday, Division Master Mechanic, and with everything
buttoned up on the West End we went that Sunday morning on the firing
line to take the first of the Templar Specials.
Medicine Bend had the alkali pretty well washed out of its eyes, and
never before in its history had it appeared really gay. The old Wickiup
was decorated till it looked like a buck rigged for a ghost dance. Right
after daybreak the trains began rolling in on Harold Davis's trick.
Duffy had annulled all local freights and all through odds and evens,
all stock tramps east and all westbound empties--everything that could
be, had been suspended for that Sunday; and with it all there were still
by five times more trains than ever before rolled through Medicine Bend
in twenty-four hours.
It was like a festival day in the mountains. Even the Indians and the
squaw men turned out to see the fun. There was a crowd at the depot by
five o'clock, when the first train rolled up the lower gorge with St.
John's Commandery, Number Three from Buffalo; and the Pullmans were gay
with bunting. The Medicine Bend crowd gave them an Indian yell and in
two minutes the Knights, with their scalps in their hands as a token of
surrender, were tumbling out of their sleepers into the crisp dawn. They
were just like schoolboys, and when Shorty Lovelace--the local curiosity
who had both feet and both hands frozen off the night he got drunk with
Matt Cassidy at Goose River Junction--struck up on his mouth-organ "Put
Me Off at Buffalo," they dropped seven dollars, odd, and three baggage
checks into his hat while the crews were changing engines. It appeared
to affect them uncommon, to see a fellow without any hands or feet play
the mouth-organ and before sundown Shorty made the killing of his life.
With what he raked in that day he kept the city marshal guessing for
three months--which was also pretty good for a man without any hands or
feet.
All day it was that way: train after train and ovation after ovation.
The day was cool as a watermelon--August--and bright as a baby's face
all through the mountains; and the Templars went up into the high passes
with all the swing and noise we could raise. Harold Davis took it all
morning steady from 4 A. M. at the despatcher's key. He was used up long
before noon; but he stayed, and just at twelve o'clock, while a big
Templar train from Baltimore was loading its commandery in front of the
Wickiup after an early dinner, and a big Templar band played a tingling
two-step, Martin Duffy stuck his dry, parchment face into the platform
crowd, elbowed his way unnoticed through it, climbed the Wickiup stairs,
walked into the despatcher's room, and, throwing off his hat and coat,
leaned over Harold Davis's shoulder and took a transfer.
Young Giddings had been sitting there in a perspiration half an hour
then; he copied for Martin Duffy that day. At noon they figured to get
the last Templar over the Eagle Pass with the set of the sun. When Duffy
took the key he never looked his force cleaner, only he was tired;
Giddings could see that. The regular man had been sick a week and Martin
had been filling in. Besides that, all Saturday, the day before, he had
been spiking the line--figuring what could be annulled and what
couldn't; what could be run extra and what could be put into regulars.
Callahan had just got married and was going out to the Coast on his
wedding tour in Bucks's car. He had refused to look at an order after
Saturday night. Sunday morning, and from Sunday morning on, it was all
against Duffy. When the Chief took the middle trick there were fourteen
Templar Specials still to come with the last one just pulling out of
McCloud on the plains. They were ordered to run with right of track over
all eastbound trains thirty minutes apart all the way through.
A minute after Martin Duffy sat in, the conductor of the train below
registered out. There was a yell pretty soon, and away went the
Baltimore crowd--and they were corkers, too, those Baltimore fellows,
and travelled like lords.
At five o'clock in the evening the trains in the West Division were
moving just like clocks on the hour and the half--thirty minutes, thirty
minutes, thirty minutes--and, as far as young Giddings could see, Duffy,
after five booming hours, was fresher than when he took the chair. The
little despatcher's capacity for work was something enormous; it wasn't
till after supper-time, with the worst of the figuring behind him, and
in the letting down of the anxiety, that Martin began to look older and
his dry Indian hair began to crawl over his forehead. By that time his
eyes had lost their snap, and when he motioned Giddings to the key, and
got up to walk up and down the hall in the breeze, he looked like a
wilted potato vine. His last batch of orders was only a little one
compared with those that had gone before. But with the changes to the
different crews they read about like this--
Telegraphic Train Order Number 68. Mountain Division.
Superintendent's Office, August 8, 1892.
For Medicine Bend to C. and E. of Engines 664, 738, 810, 326,
and 826.
Engines 664, 738, 810, and 326 will run as four Specials,
Medicine Bend to Bear Dance. Engine 826 will double-head
Special 326 to summit of Eagle Pass.
First No. 80, Engine 179, will run two hours thirty minutes
late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend.
Second No. 80, Engine 264, will run three hours and fifteen
minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend.
Third No. 80, Engine 210, will run four hours and thirty
minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend.
J. M. C.
D.
When young Giddings sat in, the sun was dropping between the Tetons. In
the yard the car-cleaners were polishing the plates on Bucks's private
car and the darky cook was pulling chickens out of the refrigerator.
Duffy had thirteen Conclaves moving smoothly on the middle trick. The
final one was due, and the hostlers were steaming down with the
double-header to pull it over the Pass. This, the last of the Commandery
trains, was to bring DE MOLAY COMMANDERY NUMBER FOUR of Pittsburg, and
the orders were to couple Bucks's car on to it for the run west. De
Molay--and everybody had notice--was Bucks's old commandery back in
Pennsylvania, and he was going to the end of the division that night
with the cronies of his youth. Little fellows they were in railroading
when he rode the goat with them, but now mostly, like him, big fellows.
Half a dozen old salts had been pounding ahead at him all day over the
wire. They were to join him and Mr. and Mrs. Callahan for supper in the
private car, and the yellow cider lay on the thin-shaven ice and the
mountain grouse curled on the grill irons when De Molay Four, Pittsburg,
pulled into Medicine Bend.
We had seen a good many swell trains that day, the swellest that ever
pounded _our_ fishplates, Pullmans solid, and the finest kind of people.
Boston, Washington, New York, Philadelphia sent some pretty gorgeous
trains. But with at least half the town on the platform, when De Molay
Four rolled in it took their breath so they couldn't yell till the Sir
Knights began pouring from the vestibules and gave Medicine Bend their
own lordly cheer.
Mahogany vestibules they were and extension platforms; salon lamps and
nickeled handrails; buffet smoker and private diner: a royal train and a
royal company; olive green from tender to tail lights--De Molay Four,
Pittsburg.
Bucks's old gang spied him. Modestly back under the portico, he stood
near the ticket window, and they broke through at him solid. They pulled
him and hauled him and mauled him and passed him from hand to hand. They
stood him on his head and on his hands and on his feet again, and told
him of something they wanted and wanted right off.
Bucks looked the least bit uncertain as he considered the opening
request. It wasn't much in some ways, what they asked; in other ways it
was a good deal. He laughed and bantered and joked them as long as they
would stand it; then he called up to Martin Duffy, who was leaning out
the despatchers' window, "We'll see how he talks," laughed Bucks in his
great big way. "But, boys, it's up to the Chief. I'm not in it on the
orders, you know. Martin," he called, as Duffy bent his head, "they want
fifteen minutes here to stretch their legs. Say they've been roasted in
the alkali all day. Can you do anything for the boys?"
The boys! Big fellows in fezes, Shriner style, and slim fellows in duck,
sailor style, and bow-legged fellows in cheviot, any old style. Chaps in
white flannel, and chaps in gray, and chaps in blue. Turkish whiskers
and Key West cigars and Crusaders' togs--and, between them, Bucks, his
head most of the time in chancery. It was the first time they had seen
him since he had made our Jim Crow line into a system known from the
Boston and Maine to the Mexican Central, and, bar none, run cleaner or
better. The first time they had seen him since he had made a name for
himself and for his road from Newport News to 'Frisco, and they meant
now to kill him, dead.
You know about what it meant and about how it went, how it had to go.
What could Martin say to the man who had made him all he was and who
stood, now a boy again among the boys of his boyhood, and asked for
fifteen minutes--a quarter of an hour for De Molay Number Four? It threw
the little Chief completely off his schedules; just fifteen minutes was
more than enough to do that. All the work was done, the anxiety nearly
past--Martin had risen to rest his thumping head. But fifteen minutes;
once in a lifetime--Bucks asking it.