the message and stared blankly at the railroad code. Then silently she
turned and thumped up the stairs. In a moment she was down again; the
screaming foulard had given place to a house dress; the red toque had
been substituted by a shawl. But the lips were drawn no longer--a
smile was on them, and a soft hand touched Martin's white cheek as she
reached the door.
"'Tis me that's goin' to the cash-carry, Marty darlin'," came quietly.
"I never liked that high-toned market annyhow. About--about that
other, Marty, me bye, 'tis all right, it is, it is. We can always
start over again."
Over again! It had opened the doors of memory for Martin Garrity as,
at the window, he stared after her with eyes that saw in the portly,
middle-aged figure a picture of other days, when the world had centred
about a fluttering honour flag, which flew above a tiny section house
at a bit of a place called Glen Echo, when the rotund form of Jewel
Garrity was slender and graceful, when Martin's freckled face was
thinner and more engaging, and when----
Visions of the old days floated before him, days on the section with
his crew of "snipes" back in the Honour Flag times. Memories returned
to him, of blazing hours in the summer, when even the grease-lizards
panted and died, when the heat rays curled in maddening serpent-like
spirals before his glazed eyes.
And why? Why had he been willing to sacrifice, to work for wages
pitiful indeed, compared to the emoluments of other lines of
endeavour? Why had she, his Jewel, accepted the loneliness, the
impoverishment of those younger days with light-heartedness? He never
had thought of it before. Now, deposed, dethroned, defeated at the
very pinnacle of his life, the answer came, with a force that brought
a lump to his throat and a tear to his eyes. Why? Because they had
loved this great, human, glistening thing of shining steel and
thundering noise, loved it because the Blue Ribbon division had
included the Blue Ribbon section, their section, which they had built
together.
Now, all they had worked for, lived for, longed for, and enjoyed
together had been taken away, without warning, without reason, and
given to another! Martin groaned with the thought of it. Three hours
later he kissed his Jewel good-bye, roaring at her because a tear
stood in each eye--to cover the fact that tears were in his own. That
night, still grim, still white, he faced Lemuel C. Barstow, former
vice-president and general manager of the O.R.& T. in his hotel room
in St. Louis. That person spoke with biting directness.
"Politics, Martin," came his announcement. "They shelved me because I
wouldn't play the tricks of a clique that got into power before I
could stop 'em. You were my pet appointee, so you went, too. It wasn't
because we weren't efficient. They lifted the pin on me, and that
meant you. So here we are. But"--and a fist banged on the
table--"they're going to pay for it! This new crowd knows as much
about railroading as a baby does about chess. I tried to tell that to
the men with the money. They wouldn't listen. So I went to men who
could hear, the Ozark Central. I'm to be the new president of that
road."
"That wooden axle outfit?" Martin squinted. "Sure, Mr. Barstow, I'm
not knockin' the new deal, or----"
"Never mind that." Lemuel C. Barstow smiled genially. "That's where
your part of the job comes in. That's why I need you. But we'll let
that go for the present. Go back to Montgomery City, turn over the
reins to this new fish, who doesn't know an air brake from a boiler
tube, and keep quiet until I send for you."
Then ensued two weeks of nothing to do but wait. Nothing to do but to
pace the floor like some belligerent, red-faced caged animal, daring
his Jewel to feel hurt because sneering remarks had been made about
her husband's downfall. Two weeks--then came the summons.
"Careful now, Martin! No wild throws, remember!" Lemuel Barstow was
giving the final instructions. "We've got a big job ahead. I've
brought you down here because you have the faculty of making men think
they hate you--then going out and working their heads off for you,
because well, to be frank, you're the biggest, blunderingest,
hardest-working blusterer that I ever saw--and you're the only man who
can pull me through. This road's in rotten shape, especially as
concerns the roadbed. The steel and ties are all right, but the
ballast is rotten. You've got to make it the best in Missouri, and
you've got only eight months to do it in. So tear loose. Your job's
that of special superintendent, with no strings on it. Pay no
attention to any one but me. If you need equipment, buy it and tell
the purchasing agent to go to the hot place. By March 1st, and no
later, I want the track from St. Louis to Kansas City to be as smooth
as a ballroom floor."
"And why the rush?"
"Just this: The O.R.& T. treated me like a dirty dog. I'm going to
make 'em pay for it; I'm after my pound of flesh now! There's just one
thing that road prizes above all else--it's St. Louis-Kansas City mail
contracts. The award comes up again in March. The system that can make
the fastest time in the government speed trials gets the plum.
Understand?"
"I do!" answered Martin, with the first real enthusiasm he had known
in weeks. "'Tis me budget I'll be fixin' up immejiate at once. Ye'll
get action, ye will." He departed for a frenzied month. Then he
returned at the request of President Barstow.
"You're doing wonderful work, Martin," said that official. "It's
coming along splendidly. But--but----I understand there's a bit of a
laugh going around among the railroad men about you."
"About me?" Garrity's chest bulged aggressively. "An' who's laughin?"
"Nearly everybody in the railroad game in Missouri. They say you let
some slick salesman sting you for a full set of Rocky Mountain
snow-fighting machinery, even up to a rotary snow plough. I----"
"Sting me?" Martin bellowed the words. "That I did not!"
"Good! I knew----"
"I ordered it of me own free will. And if annybody laughs----"
"But, Martin"--and there was pathos in the voice--"a rotary snow
plough? On a Missouri railroad? Flangers, jull-ploughs, wedge
ploughs--tunnel wideners--and a rotary? Here? Why--I--I thought better
of you than that. We haven't had a snow in Missouri that would require
all of those things, not in the last ten years. What did they cost?"
"Eighty-three thousand, fi'hunnerd an' ten dollars," answered Martin
gloomily. He _had_ pulled a boner. Mr. Barstow figured on a sheet of
paper.
"At three dollars a day, that would hire nearly a thousand track
labourers for thirty days. A thousand men could tamp a lot of ballast
in a month, Martin."
"That they could, sir," came dolefully. Then Garrity, the old lump in
his throat, waited to be excused, and backed from the office. That
rotary snow plough had been his own, his pet idea--and it had been
wrong!
Gloomily he returned to Northport, his headquarters, there to observe
a group of grinning railroad men gathered about a great, bulky object
parked in front of the roundhouse. Behind it were other contraptions
of shining steel, all of which Martin recognized without a second
glance--his snow-fighting equipment, just arrived. Nor did he approach
for a closer view. Faintly he heard jeering remarks from the crowd;
then laughter. He caught the mention of his own name, coupled with
derisive comment. His hands clenched. His red neck bulged. His big
lungs filled--then slowly deflated; and Martin went slowly homeward,
in silence.
"And is it your liver?" asked Jewel Garrity as they sat at dinner.
"It is not!" bawled Martin. He rose. He pulled his napkin from his
chin with Garrity emphasis and dropped it in the gravy. He thumped
about the table, then stopped.
One big freckled paw reached uncertainly outward and plunked with
intended gentleness upon the woman's shoulder, to rest, trembling
there, a second. Then silently Martin went on upstairs. For that touch
had told her that it was--his heart!
A heart that ached with a throbbing sorrow which could not be downed
as the summer passed and Martin heard again and again the reflexes
brought about by the purchase of his snow ploughs. Vainly he stormed
up and down the line of the Ozark Central with its thousands of
labourers. Vainly he busied himself with a thousand intricacies of
construction, in the hope of forgetfulness. None of it could take from
his mind the fact that railroad men were laughing at him, that
chuckling train-butchers were pointing out the giant machinery to
grinning passengers, that even the railroad journals were printing
funny quips about Barstow's prize superintendent and his mountain snow
plough. Nor could even the news that Aldrich, over on the Blue Ribbon
division, was allowing that once proud bit of rail to degenerate into
an ordinary portion of a railroad bring even a passing cheer. They,
too, were laughing! In a last doglike hope Martin looked up the
precipitation reports. It only brought more gloom. Only four times in
thirty years had there been a snowfall in Missouri that could block a
railroad!
The summer crept into autumn; autumn to early winter, bringing with it
the transformation of the rickety old Ozark Central to a smooth,
well-cushioned line of gleaming steel, where the trains shot to and
fro with hardly a tremor, where the hollow thunder of culvert and
trestle spoke of sturdy strength, where the trackwalker searched in
vain for loose plates or jutting joints; but to Garrity, it was only
the fulfilment or the work of a mechanical second nature. December was
gliding by in warmth and sunshine. January came, with no more than a
hatful of snow, and once more Martin found himself facing the
president.
"We'll win that contract, Martin!" It almost brought a smile to the
superintendent's face. "I've just been over the road--on the quiet. We
made eighty miles an hour with hardly a jolt!"
"Thankee, sir." A vague sense of joy touched Martin's aching
heart--only to depart.
"By the way, I noticed when I went through Northport that you've still
got that rotary where everybody can see it. I wish you'd move that
stuff--behind the roundhouse, out of sight."
Then Martin, heavier at heart than ever, went back to Northport. There
he said a quaking good-bye to his last hope--and executed the
president's orders, trying not to notice the grins of the "goat" crew
as they shunted the machinery into hiding. That night, after Jewel was
asleep, and the cat outside had ceased yowling, Martin climbed
stealthily out of bed and went on his knees, praying with all the
fervour of his big being for snow. And the prayer was answered----
By the worst rain that a Missouri January had known in years,
scattering the freshly tamped gravel, loosening the piles of trestles,
sending Martin forth once more to bawl his orders with the thunder of
the old days back at Glen Echo, even to leap side by side with the
track labourers, a tamping bar in his big hands, that one more blow
might be struck, one more impression made upon the giant task ahead.
January slid by; February went into the third week before the job was
finished. Martin looked at the sky with hopeful eyes. It was useless.
March the first--and Martin went into St. Louis to make his report,
and to spend an uneasy, restless night with the president in his room
at the hotel.
"It's only a few days off now"--they were in bed the next morning,
finishing the conversation begun the night before--"and I want you to
keep your eyes open every second! The mail marathon agreement reads
that no postponement can be made on account of physical or mechanical
obstacles. If a trestle should happen to go out--that would be our
finish."
"I wish"--Martin rolled out of bed and groped for his shoes--"we'd
been workin' with me old Blue Ribbon division. I know every foot o'
----"
"Oh, chase the Blue Ribbon division! Every time I see you you've got
something on your chest about it. Why, man, don't you know it's the
Blue Ribbon division that I'm counting on! Aldrich has let it run down
until it's worse than a hog trail. If they can make forty-five an hour
on it, I'm crazy. You can't win mail contracts with that. So forget
it. Anyhow, you're working for the Ozark Central now."
Martin nodded, then for a long moment crouched silent humiliated, his
thick fingers fumbling with the laces of his shoes. At last, with a
sigh, he poked his shirt into his trousers and thumped across the room
to raise the drawn shades.
He stared. He gulped. He yelped--with an exclamation of joy, of
deliverance, of victory! The outside world was white! A blinding,
swirling veil shrouded even the next building. The street below was
like a stricken thing; the vague forms of the cars seemed to no more
than crawl. Wildly Martin pawed for the telephone and bawled a number.
Barstow sat up in bed.
"Snow!" he gasped. "A blizzard!"
"Order the snow ploughs!" Garrity had got the chief dispatcher, and
was bawling louder than ever. "All of thim! Put an injine on each and
keep thim movin'! Run that rotary till the wheels drop off!"
Then he whirled, grasping wildly at coat, hat, and overcoat.
"And now will ye laugh?" he roared, as he backed to the door. "Now
will ye laugh at me snow plough?"
Twenty-four hours later, when trains were limping into terminals hours
behind time, when call after call was going forth to summon aid for
the stricken systems of Missouri, when double-headers, frost-caked
wheels churning uselessly, bucked the drifts in a constantly losing
battle; when cattle trains were being cut from the schedules, and
every wire was loaded with the messages of frantic officials, someone
happened to wonder what that big boob Garrity was doing with his snow
ploughs. The answer was curt and sharp--there on the announcement
board of the Union Station:
OZARK CENTRAL ALL TRAINS ON TIME
But Martin had only one remark to make, that it still was snowing.
Noon of the third day came, and the Ozark Central became the detour
route of every cross-Missouri mail train. Night, and Martin Garrity,
snow-crusted, his face cut and cracked by the bite of wind and the
sting of splintered, wind-driven ice, his head aching from loss of
sleep, but his heart thumping with happiness, took on the serious
business of moving every St. Louis-Kansas City passenger and express
train, blinked vacuously when someone called him a wizard.
Railroad officials gave him cigars, and slapped him on his snow-caked
shoulders. He cussed them out of the way. The telephone at Northport
clanged and sang with calls from President Barstow; but Martin only
waved a hand in answer as he ground through with the rotary.
"Tell him to send me tilegrams!" he blustered. "Don't he know I'm
busy?"
Twelve hours more. The snow ceased. The wind died. Ten miles out of
Kansas City Martin gave the homeward-bound order for Northport, then
slumped weakly into a corner. Five minutes before he had heard the
news--news that hurt. The O.R.& T., fighting with every available man
it could summon, had partially opened its line, with the exception of
one division, hopelessly snowed under--his old, his beloved Blue
Ribbon.
"Tis me that would have kept 'er open," he mused bitterly. "And they
fired me!"
He nodded and slept. He awoke--and he said the same thing again. He
reached Northport, late at night, to roar at Jewel and the hot water
she had heated for his frost-bitten feet--then to hug her with an
embrace that she had not known since the days when her Marty wore a
red undershirt.
"And do ye be hearin?" she asked. "The Blue Ribbon's tied up! Not a
wheel----"
"Will ye shut up?" Martin suddenly had remembered something. The mail
test! Not forty-eight hours away! He blinked. One big hand smacked
into the other. "The pound of flesh!" he bellowed. "Be gar! The pound
of flesh!"
"And what are ye talkin' ----"
"Woman, shut up," said Martin Garrity. "'Tis me that's goin' to bed.
See that I'm not disturbed. Not even for Mr. Barstow."
"That I will," said Jewel--but that she didn't. It was Martin himself
who answered the pounding on the door four hours later, then, in the
frigid dining room, stared at the message which the chief dispatcher
had handed him:
GARRITY, NORTHPORT: If line is free of snow assemble all snow-fighting
equipment and necessary locomotives to handle same, delivering same
fully equipped and manned with your own force to Blue Ribbon Division
O.R. & T. Accompany this equipment personally to carry out
instructions as I would like to have them carried out. Everything
depends on your success or failure to open this line.
LEMUEL C. BARSTOW.
So! He was to make the effort; but if he failed that mail contract
came automatically to the one road free to make the test, the Ozark
Central! That was what Barstow meant! Make the effort, appear to fight
with every weapon, that the O.R. & T. might have no claim in the
future of unfairness but to fail! Let it be so! The O.R. & T. had
broken his heart. Now, at last, his turn had come!
He turned to the telephone and gave his orders. Then up the stairs he
clambered and into his clothes. Jewel snorted and awoke.
"Goo'by!" roared Martin as he climbed into his coat. "They've sent for
me to open the Blue Ribbon."
"And have they?" Jewel sat up, her eyes beaming. "I'd been wishin'
it--and ye'll do it, Marty; I've been thinkin' about the old section
snowed under--and all the folks we knew----"
"Will ye shut up?" This was something Martin did not want to hear. Out
of the house he plumped, to the waiting double-header of locomotives
attached to the rotary, and the other engines, parked on the switches,
with their wedge ploughs, jull-ploughs, flangers, and tunnel wideners.
The "high-ball" sounded. At daybreak, boring his way through the
snow-clogged transfer at Missouri City, Martin came out upon the main
line of the O.R. & T.--and to his duty of revenge.
On they went, a slow, deliberate journey, steam hissing, black smoke
curling, whistles tooting, wheels crunching, as the rotary bucked the
bigger drifts and the smaller ploughs eliminated the slighter raises,
a triumphant procession toward that thing which Martin knew he could
attack with all the seeming ferocity of desperation and yet fail--the
fifty-foot thickness of Bander Cut.
Face to face, in the gaunt sun of early morning he saw it--a little
shack, half covered with snow, bleak and forbidding in its loneliness,
yet all in all to the man who stared at it with eyes suddenly
wistful--his little old section house, where once the honour flag had
flown.
He gulped. Suddenly his hand tugged at the bell cord. Voices had come
from without, they were calling his name! He sought the door, then
gulped again. The steps and platform of his car were filled with
eager, homely-faced men, men he had known in other days, his old crew
of section "snipes."
All about him they crowded; Martin heard his voice answering their
queries, as though someone were talking far away. His eyes had turned
back to that section house, seeking instinctively the old flag, his
flag. It spoke for a man who gave the best that was in him, who
surpassed because he worked with his heart and with his soul in the
every task before him. But the flag was not there. The pace had not
been maintained. Then the louder tones of a straw boss called him
back:
"You'll sure need that big screw and all the rest of them babies,
Garrity. That ole Bander Cut's full to the sky--and Sni-a-bend Hill!
Good-night! But you'll make 'er. You've got to, Garrity; we've made up
a purse an' bet it down in Montgomery that you'll make 'er!"
Martin went within and the crew waited for a high-ball order that did
not come. In his private car, alone, Martin Garrity was pacing the
floor. The call of the old division, which he had loved and built, was
upon him, swaying him with all the force of memory.
"I guess we could sell the flivver----" he was repeating. "Then I've
got me diamond ... and Jewel ... she's got a bit, besides what we've
saved bechune us. And he'll win the test, anyhow ... they'll never
beat him over this division ... if I give him back what I've earned
... and if he wins anyhow------"
Up ahead they still waited. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. At last a figure
appeared in the cab of the big rotary, looking for a last time at that
bleak little section house and the bare flagpole. Then:
"Start 'er up and give 'er hell!"
Martin was on the job once more, while outside his old section snipes
cheered, and reminded him that their hopes and dreams for a division
still beloved in spite of a downfall rested upon his shoulders. The
whistles screamed. The bells clanged. Smoke poured from the stacks of
the double-header, and the freshening sun, a short time later, glinted
upon the white-splotched equipment, as the great auger followed by its
lesser allies, bored into the mass of snow at Bander Cut.
Hours of backing and filling, of retreats and attacks, hours in which
there came, time after time, the opportunity to quit. But Martin did
not give the word. Out the other side they came, the steam shooting
high, and on toward the next obstacle, the first of forty, lesser and
greater, which lay between them and Montgomery City.
Afternoon ... night. Still the crunching, whining roar of the rotary
as it struck the icy stretches fought against them in vain, then
retreated until pick and bar and dynamite could break the way for its
further attack. Midnight, and one by one the exhausted crew approached
the white-faced, grim-lipped man who stood tense and determined in the
rotary cab. One by one they asked the same question:
"Hadn't we better tie up for the night?"
"Goon! D'ye hear me? Goon! What is it ye are, annyhow, a bunch of
white-livered cowards that ye can't work without rest?"
The old, dynamic, bulldozing force, the force that had made men hate
Martin Garrity only to love him, had returned into its full power, the
force that had built him from a section snipe to the exalted possessor
of the blue pennon which once had fluttered from that flagpole, was
again on the throne, fighting onward to the conclusion of a purpose,
no matter what it might wreck for him personally, no matter what the
cost might be to him in the days to come. He was on his last job--he
knew that. The mail contract might be won a thousand times over, but
there ever would rest the stigma that he had received a telegram which
should have been plain to him, and that he had failed to carry out its
hidden orders. But with the thought of it Martin straightened, and he
roared anew the message which carried tired, aching men through the
night:
"Go on! Go on! What's stoppin' ye? Are ye going to let these
milk-an'-water fellys over here say that ye tried and quit?"
Early morning--and there came Sni-a-bend Hill, with the snow packed
against it in a new plane which obliterated the railroad as though it
had never been there. Hot coffee came from the containers, sandwiches
from the baskets, and the men ate and drank as they worked--all but
Garrity. This was the final battle, and with it came his battle cry:
"Keep goin'! This is the tough one--we've got to go on--we've got to
go on!"
And on they went. The streaking rays of dawn played for a moment upon
an untroubled mound of white, smooth and deep upon the eastern end of
Sni-a-bend. Then, as though from some great internal upheaval, the
mass began to tremble. Great heaps of snow broke from their place and
tumbled down the embankment. From farther at the rear, steam,
augmented by the vapours of melting snow and the far-blown gushes of
spitting smoke, hissed upward toward the heights of the white-clad
hill. Then a bulging break--the roar of machinery, and a monster came
grinding forth, forcing its way hungrily onward, toward the next and
smaller contest. Within the giant auger a man turned to Garrity.
"Guess it's over, Boss. They said up at Glen Echo--"
A silent nod. Then Garrity turned, and reaching into the
telegram-blank holder at the side of the cab, brought forth paper and
an envelope. Long he wrote as the rotary clattered along, devouring
the smaller drifts in steady succession, a letter of the soul, a
letter which told of an effort that had failed, of a decision that
could not hold. And it told, too, of the return of all that Martin had
worked for--Mr. Barstow had been good to him, and he, Martin Garrity,
could not take his money and disobey him. He'd pay him back.