cowboy hung pitched head and arms down over the heater seat. In the
middle of the car Henry Cavanaugh, crouching in the aisle, held in his
arms Dave Hawk. At the dark front end of the coach I saw the outline of
a man sprawled on his face in the aisle. The news agent crawled out from
under a seat. It must have been short and horribly sharp.
They had flagged the train east of Bear Dance. Two men boarded the front
platform of the smoker and one the rear. But the two in front opened the
smoker door just as Dave was hurrying forward to investigate the stop.
He was no man to ask questions. He saw the masks and covered them
instantly. Dave Hawk any time and anywhere was a deadly shot. Without a
word he opened on the forward robbers. A game cowboy back of him pulled
a gun and cut into it; and was the first to go down, wounded. But the
train boy said, Hawk himself had dropped the two head men almost
immediately after the firing began and stood free handed when the man
from the rear platform put a Winchester against his back. Even then,
with a hole blown clean through him, he had whirled and fired again; we
found the man's blood on the platform in the morning, but, whoever he
was, he got to the horses and got away.
When I reached Dave, he lay in his baggage-man's arms. We threw the
carrion into the baggage car and carried the cowboy and the conductor
back into the forward sleeper. I gave the go-ahead orders and hurried
again to the side of the last of the Old Guard. Once his eyes opened,
wandering stonily; but he never heard me, never knew me, never spoke. As
his train went that morning into division he went with it. When we
stopped, his face was cold. It was up to the Grand Master.
A game man always, he was never a cruel one. He called himself a thief.
He never hesitated with the other men high and low to loot the company.
The big looters were financiers: Dave was only a thief, yet gave his
life for the very law he trampled under foot.
Thief, if you please; I don't know: we needn't quarrel about the word he
branded himself with. Yet a trust of money, of friendship, of duty were
safer far in Dave Hawk's hands than in the hands of abler financiers.
I hold him not up for a model, neither glory in his wickedness. When I
was friendless, he was my friend: his story is told.
The Yellow Mail Story
JIMMIE THE WIND
There wasn't another engineer on the division that dared talk to
Doubleday the way Jimmie Bradshaw talked.
[Illustration: Jimmy the Wind.]
But Jimmie had a grievance, and every time he thought about it, it made
him nervous.
Ninety-six years. It seemed a good while to wait; yet in the regular
course of events on the Mountain Division there appeared no earlier
prospect of Jimmie's getting a passenger run.
"Got your rights, ain't you?" said Doubleday, when Jimmie complained.
"I have and I haven't," grumbled Jimmie, winking hard; "there's younger
men than I am on the fast runs."
"They got in on the strike; you've been told that a hundred times. We
can't get up another strike just to fix you out on a fast run. Hang on
to your freight. There's better men than you in Ireland up to their belt
in the bog, Jimmie."
"It's a pity they didn't leave you there, Doubleday."
"You'd have been a good while hunting for a freight run if they had."
Then Jimmie would get mad and shake his finger and talk fast: "Just the
same, I'll have a fast run here when you're dead."
"Maybe; but I'll be alive a good while yet, my son," the master mechanic
would laugh. Then Jimmie would walk off very warm, and when he got into
the clear with himself, he would wink furiously and say friction things
about Doubleday that needn't now be printed, because it is different.
However, the talk always ended that way, and Jimmie Bradshaw knew it
always would end that way.
The trouble was, no one on the division would take Jimmie seriously, and
he felt that the ambition of his life would never be fulfilled; that he
would go plugging to gray hairs and the grave on an old freight train;
and that even when he got to the right side of the Jordan there would
still be something like half a century between him and a fast run. It
was funny to hear him complaining about it, for everything, even his
troubles, came funny to him, and in talking he had an odd way of
stuttering with his eyes, which were red. In fact, Jimmie was nearly all
red; hair, face, hands--they said his teeth were sandy.
When the first rumors about the proposed Yellow Mail reached the
mountains Jimmie was running a new ten-wheeler; breaking her in on a
freight "for some fellow without a lick o' sense to use on a limited
passenger run," as Jimmie observed bitterly. The rumors about the mail
came at first like stray mallards, opening signs of winter, and as the
season advanced flew thicker and faster. Washington never was very
progressive in the matter of improving the transcontinental service, but
once by mistake they put in a postmaster-general down there, who
wouldn't take the old song. When the bureau fellows that put their
brains up in curl papers told him it couldn't be done he smiled softly,
and sent for the managers of the crack lines across the continent,
without suspecting how it bore incidentally on Jimmie Bradshaw's
grievance against his master mechanic.
The postmaster-general called the managers of the big lines, and they
had a dinner at Chamberlain's, and _they_ told him the same thing. "It
has been tried," they said in the old, tired way; "really it can't be
done."
"California has been getting the worst of it for years on the mail
service," persisted the postmaster-general moderately. "But Californians
ought to have the best of it. We don't think anything about putting New
York mail in Chicago in twenty hours. It ought to be simple to cut half
a day across the continent and give San Francisco her mail a day
earlier. Where's the fall down?" he asked, like one refusing no for an
answer.
The general managers looked at our representative sympathetically, and
coughed cigar smoke his way to hide him.
"West of the Missouri," murmured a Pennsylvania swell, who pulled
indifferently at a fifty-cent cigar. Everybody at the table took a drink
on the _expose_, except the general manager who sat at that time for the
Rocky Mountains.
The West End representative was unhappily accustomed to facing the
finger of scorn on such occasions. It had become with our managers a
tradition. There was never a conference of transcontinental lines in
which we were not scoffed at as the weak link in the chain of
everything--mail, passenger, specials, what not--the trouble was
invariably laid at our door.
This time a new man was sitting for the line at the Chamberlain dinner;
a youngish man with a face that set like cement when the West End was
trod on.
The postmaster-general was inclined, from the reputation we had, to look
on our man as one looks at a dog without a pedigree, or at a dray horse
in a bunch of standard-breds. But something in the mouth of the West End
man gave him pause; since the Rough Riders, it has been a bit different
with verdicts on things Western. The postmaster-general suppressed a
rising sarcasm with a sip of Chartreuse, for the dinner was ripening,
and waited; nor did he mistake, the West Ender _was_ about to speak.
"Why west of the Missouri?" he asked, with a lift of the face not
altogether candid. The Pennsylvania man shrugged his brows; to explain
might have seemed indelicate.
"If it is put through, how much of it do you propose to take yourself?"
inquired our man, looking evenly at the Allegheny official.
"Sixty-five miles, including stops from the New York post-office to
Canal Street," replied the Pennsylvania man, and his words flowed with
irritating ease.
"What do you take?" continued the man with the jaw, turning to the
Burlington representative, who was struggling, belated, with an
artichoke.
"_About_ seventy from Canal to Tenth and Mason. Say, seventy," repeated
the "Q" manager, with the lordliness of a man who has miles to throw at
almost anybody, and knows it.
"Then suppose we say sixty-five from Tenth and Mason to Ogden,"
suggested the West Ender. There was a well-bred stare the table round, a
lifting of glasses to mask expressions that might give pain. Sixty-five
miles an _hour_? Through the _Rockies_?
The postmaster-general struck the table quick and heavily; he didn't
want to let it get away. "Why, hang it, Mr. Bucks," he exclaimed with
emphasis, "if you will say sixty, the business is done. We don't ask you
to do the Rockies in the time these fellows take to cut the Alleghenies.
Do sixty, and I will put mail in 'Frisco a day earlier every week in the
year."
"Nothing on the West End to keep you from doing it," said General
Manager Bucks. He had been put up then only about six months. "But----"
Every one looked at the young manager. The Pennsylvania man looked with
confidence, for he instantly suspected there must be a string to such a
proposition, or that the new representative was "talking through his
hat."
"But what?" asked the Cabinet member, uncomfortably apprehensive.
"We are not putting on a sixty-five mile schedule just because we love
our country, you understand, nor to heighten an already glorious
reputation. Oh, no," smiled Bucks faintly, "we are doing it for 'the
stuff.' You put up the money; we put up the speed. Not sixty miles;
sixty-five--from the Missouri to the Sierras. No; no more wine. Yes, I
will take a cigar."
The trade was on from that minute. Bucks said no more then; he was a
good listener. But next day, when it came to talking money, he talked
more money into the West End treasury for one year's running than was
ever talked before on a mail contract for the best three years' work we
ever did.
When they asked him how much time he wanted to get ready, and told him
to take plenty, three months was stipulated. The contracts were drawn,
and they were signed by our people without hesitation because they knew
Bucks. But while the preparations for the fast schedule were being made,
the government weakened on signing. Nothing ever got through a
Washington department without hitch, and they said our road had so often
failed on like propositions that they wanted a test. There was a deal of
wrangling, then a test run was agreed on by all the roads concerned. If
it proved successful, if the mail was put to the Golden Gate on the
second of the schedule, public opinion and the interests in the
Philippines, it was concluded, would justify the heavy premium asked for
the service.
In this way the dickering and the figuring became, in a measure, public,
and keyed up everybody interested to a high pitch. We said nothing for
publication, but under Bucks's energy sawed wood for three whole months.
Indeed, three months goes as a day getting a system into shape for an
extraordinary schedule. Success meant with us prestige; but failure
meant obloquy for the road and for our division chief who had been so
lately called to handle it.
The real strain, it was clear, would come on his old, the Mountain,
division; and to carry out the point, rested on the Motive Power of the
Mountain Division; hence, concretely, on Doubleday, master mechanic of
the hill country.
In thirty days, Neighbor, superintendent of the Motive Power, called for
reports from the division master mechanics on the preparations for the
Yellow Mail run, and they reported progress. In sixty days he called
again. The subordinates reported well except Doubleday. Doubleday said
merely, "Not ready"; he was busy tinkering with his engines. There was a
third call in eighty days, and on the eighty-fifth a peremptory call.
Everybody said ready except Doubleday. When Neighbor remonstrated
sharply he would say only that he would be ready in time. That was the
most he would promise, though it was generally understood that if he
failed to deliver the goods he would have to make way for somebody that
could.
The Plains Division of the system was marked up for seventy miles an
hour, and, if the truth were told, a little better; but, with all the
help they could give us, it still left sixty for the mountains to take
care of, and the Yellow Mail proposition was conceded to be the toughest
affair the Motive Power at Medicine Bend had ever faced. However,
forty-eight hours before the mail left the New York post-office
Doubleday wired to Neighbor, "Ready"; Neighbor to Bucks, "Ready"; and
Bucks to Washington, "Ready"--and we were ready from end to end.
Then the orders began to shoot through the mountains. The test run was
of especial importance, because the signing of the contract was believed
to depend on the success of it. Once signed, accidents and delays might
be explained; for the test run there must be no delays. Despatchers
were given the eleven, which meant Bucks; no lay-outs, no slows for the
Yellow Mail. Roadmasters were notified; no track work in front of the
Yellow Mail. Bridge gangs were warned, yard masters instructed, section
bosses cautioned, track walkers spurred--the system was polished like a
barkeeper's diamond, and swept like a parlor car for the test flight of
the Yellow Mail.
Doubleday, working like a boiler washer, spent all day Thursday and all
Thursday night in the roundhouse. He had personally gone over the
engines that were to take the racket in the mountains. Ten-wheelers they
were, the 1012 and the 1014, with fifty-six-inch drivers and cylinders
big enough to sit up and eat breakfast in. Spick and span both of them,
just long enough out of the shops to run smoothly to the work; and on
Friday Oliver Sollers, who, when he opened a throttle, blew miles over
the tender like feathers, took the 1012, groomed like a Wilkes mare,
down to Piedmont for the run up to the Bend.
Now Oliver Sollers was a runner in a thousand, and steady as a clock;
but he had a fireman who couldn't stand prosperity, Steve Horigan, a
cousin of Johnnie's. The glory was too great for Steve, and he spent
Friday night in Gallagher's place celebrating, telling the boys what the
1012 would do to the Yellow Mail. Not a thing, Steve claimed after five
drinks, but pull the stamps clean off the letters the minute they struck
the foothills. But when Steve showed up at five A.M. to superintend the
movement, he was seasick. The minute Sollers set eyes on him he objected
to taking him out. Mr. Sollers was not looking for any unnecessary
chances on one of Bucks's personal matters, and for the general manager
the Yellow Mail test had become exceedingly personal. Practically
everybody East and West had said it would fail; Bucks said no.
Neighbor himself was on the Piedmont platform that morning, watching
things. The McCloud despatchers had promised the train to our division
on time, and her smoke was due with the rise of the sun. The big
superintendent of Motive Power, watching anxiously for her arrival, and
planning anxiously for her outgoing, glared at the bunged fireman in
front of him, and, when Sellers protested, Neighbor turned on the
swollen Steve with sorely bitter words. Steve swore mightily he was fit
and could do the trick--but what's the word of a railroad man that
drinks? Neighbor spoke wicked words, and while they poured on the guilty
Steve's crop there was a shout down the platform. In the east the sun
was breaking over the sandhills, and below it a haze of black thickened
the horizon. It was McTerza with the 808 and the Yellow Mail. Neighbor
looked at his watch; she was, if anything, a minute to the good, and
before the car tinks could hustle across the yard, a streak of gold cut
the sea of purple alfalfa in the lower valley, and the narrows began to
smoke with the dust of the race for the platform.
When McTerza blocked the big drivers at the west end of the depot, every
eye was on the new equipment. Three standard railway mail cars, done in
varnished buttercup, strung out behind the sizzling engine, and they
looked pretty as cowslips. While Neighbor vaguely meditated on their
beauty and on his boozing fireman, Jimmie Bradshaw, just in from a night
run down from the Bend, walked across the yard. He had seen Steve
Horigan making a "sneak" for the bath-house, and from the yard gossip
Jimmie had guessed the rest.
"What are you looking for, Neighbor?" asked Jimmie Bradshaw.
"A man to fire for Sollers--up. Do you want it?"
Neighbor threw it at him cross and carelessly, not having any idea
Jimmie was looking for trouble. But Jimmie surprised him; Jimmie did
want it.
"Sure, I want it. Put me on. Tired? No. I'm fresh as rainwater. Put me
on, Neighbor; I'll never get fast any other way. Doubleday wouldn't give
me a fast run in a hundred years.
"Neighbor," cried Jimmie, greatly wrought, "put me on, and I'll plant
sunflowers on your grave."
There wasn't much time to look around; the 1012 was being coupled on to
the mail for the hardest run on the line.
"Get in there, you blamed idiot," roared Neighbor presently at Jimmie.
"Get in and fire her; and if you don't give Sollers two hundred and ten
pounds every inch of the way I'll set you back wiping."
Jimmie winked furiously at the proposition while it was being hurled at
him, but he lost no time climbing in. The 1012 was drumming then at her
gauge with better than two hundred pounds. Adam Shafer, conductor for
the run, ran backward and forward a minute examining the air. At the
final word from his brakeman he lifted two fingers at Sollers; Oliver
opened a notch, and Jimmie Bradshaw stuck his head out of the gangway.
Slowly, but with swiftly rising speed, the yellow string began to move
out through the long lines of freight cars that blocked the spurs; and
those who watched that morning from the Piedmont platform, thought a
smoother equipment than Bucks's mail train never drew out of the
mountain yards.
Jimmie Bradshaw jumped at the work in front of him. He had never lifted
a pick in as swell a cab. The hind end of the 1012 was big as a private
car; Jimmie had never seen so much play for a shovel in his life, and he
knew the trick of his business better than most men even in West End
cabs, the trick of holding the high pressure every minute, of feeling
the drafts before they left the throttle; and as Oliver let the engine
out very, very fast, Jimmie Bradshaw sprinkled the grate bars craftily
and blinked at the shivering pointer, as much as to say, "It's you and
me now for the Yellow Mail, and nobody else on earth."
There was a long reach of smooth track in front of the foothills. It was
there the big start had to be made, and in two minutes the bark of the
big machine had deepened to a chest tone full as thunder. It was all fun
for an hour, for two hours. It was that long before the ambitious
fireman realized what the new speed meant: the sickening slew, the lurch
on lurch so fast the engine never righted, the shortened breath along
the tangent, the giddy roll to the elevation and the sudden shock of the
curve, the roar of the flight on the ear, and, above and over it all,
the booming purr of the maddened steel. The canoe in the heart of the
rapid, the bridge of a liner at sea, the gun in the heat of the fight,
take something of this--the cab of the mail takes it all.
When they struck the foothills Sollers and Jimmie Bradshaw looked at
their watches and looked at each other like men who had turned their
backs on every mountain record. There was a stop for water, speed drinks
so hard, an oil round, an anxious touch on the journals; then the Yellow
Mail drew reeling into the hills. Oliver eased her just a bit for the
heavier curves, but for all that the train writhed frantically as it cut
the segments, and the men thought, in spite of themselves, of the
mountain curves ahead. The worst of the run lay ahead of the pilot,
because the art in mountain running is not alone or so much in getting
up hill; it is in getting down hill. But by the way the Yellow Mail got
that day up hill and down, it seemed as if Steve Horigan's dream would
be realized, and that the 1012 actually would pull the stamps off the
letters. Before they knew it they were through the gateway, out into
the desert country, up along the crested buttes, and then, sudden as
eternity, the wheel-base of the 1012 struck a tight curve, a pent-down
rail sprang out like a knitting-needle, and the Yellow Mail shot
staggering off track into a gray borrow-pit.
There was a crunching of truck and frame, a crashing splinter of
varnished cars, a scream from the wounded engine, a cloud of gray ash in
the burning sun, and a ruin of human effort in the ditch. In the twinkle
of an eye the mail train lay spilled on the alkali; for a minute it
looked desperate bad for the general manager's test.
It was hardly more than a minute; then like ants out of a trampled hill
men began crawling from the yellow wreck. There was more--there was
groaning and worse, yet little for so frightful a shock. And first on
his feet, with no more than scratches, and quickest back under the cab
after his engineer, was Jimmie Bradshaw, the fireman.
Sollers, barely conscious, lay wedged between the tank and the
footboard. Jimmie, all by himself, eased him away from the boiler. The
conductor stood with a broken arm directing his brakeman how to chop a
crew out of the head mail car, and the hind crews were getting out
unaided. There was a quick calling back and forth, and the cry, "Nobody
killed!" But the engineer and the conductor were put out of action.
There was, in fact, only one West End man unhurt--Jimmie Bradshaw.
The first wreck of the fast mail, there have been worse since, took
place just east of Crockett's siding. A westbound freight lay at that
moment on the passing track waiting for the mail. Jimmie Bradshaw, the
minute he righted himself, cast up the possibilities of the situation.
Before the freight crew had reached the wreck Jimmie was hustling ahead
to tell them what he wanted. The freight conductor demurred; and when
they discussed it with the freight engineer, Kingsley, he objected. "My
engine won't never stand it; it'll pound her to scrap," he argued. "I
reckon the safest thing to do is to get orders."
"Get orders!" stormed Jimmie Bradshaw, pointing at the wreck. "Get
orders! Are you running an engine on this line and don't know the orders
for those mail bags? The orders is to move 'em! That's orders enough.
Move 'em! Uncouple three of those empty box-cars and hustle 'em back. By
the Great United States! any man that interferes with moving this mail
will get his time, that's what he'll get. That's Doubleday, and don't
you forget it. The thing is to move the mail, not to stand here chewing
about it!"
"Bucks wants the stuff hustled," put in the freight conductor, weakening
before Jimmie's eloquence, "everybody knows that."
"Uncouple there!" cried Jimmie, climbing into the mogul cab. "I'll pull
the bags, Kingsley; you needn't take any chances. Come back there, every
mother's son of you, and help on the transfer."
He carried his points with a gale. He was conductor and engineer and
general manager all in one. He backed the boxes to the curve below the
spill, and set every man at work piling the mail from the wrecked train
to the freight cars. The wounded cared for the wounded, and the dead
might have buried the dead; Jimmie moved the mail. Only one thing turned
his hair gray; the transfer was so slow, it threatened to defeat his
plan. As he stood fermenting, a stray party of Sioux bucks on a vagrant
hunt rose out of the desert passes, and halted to survey the confusion.
It was Jimmie Bradshaw's opportunity. He had the blanket men in council
in a trice. They talked for one minute; in two, he had them regularly
sworn in and carrying second-class. The registered stuff was jealously
guarded by those of the mail clerks who could still hobble--and who,
head for head, leg for leg, and arm for arm, can stand the wrecking that
a mail clerk can stand? The mail crews took the registered matter; the
freight crews and Jimmie, dripping sweat and anxiety, handled the
letter-bags; but second and third-class were temporarily hustled for the
Great White Father by his irreverent children of the Rockies.
Before the disabled men could credit their senses the business was done,
they made as comfortable as possible, and, with the promise of speedy
aid back to the injured, the Yellow Mail, somewhat disfigured, was
heading again westward in the box-cars. This time Jimmie Bradshaw, like
a dog with a bone, had the throttle. Jimmie Bradshaw for once in his
life had the coveted fast run, and till he sighted Fort Rucker he never
for a minute let up.