THE HOLD-UP IN SHADOW VALLEY
As the days slowly passed Ralph Fairbanks became very curious on one
particular point. And this was something quite aside from his
activities on the road or the strike developments.
He wondered if Cherry Hopkins had been sent away from home as her
father had threatened.
The young fellow never went through the street where Mr. Hopkins lived
on his way to and from his home. He would not appear to be curious
regarding the girl. He did not want to attract her father’s attention
and create more trouble for Cherry, if the latter was still in
Rockton.
He thought highly of the young girl. As his mother had intimated, he
had never paid much attention to any particular girl before.
“How is your friend, Cherry Hopkins?” the widow sometimes asked him.
“Got too much to do now to think of girls,” he would return, with a
laugh.
But perhaps neither his tone nor his laugh quite convinced Mrs.
Fairbanks that all was right. She asked shrewdly on one occasion:
“Have you seen Miss Cherry lately?”
“Not for a week. I believe she expected to go away. I don’t know
whether she has or has not gone.”
“Would you like to know, Ralph?” asked his mother softly.
At that the young fellow awoke to the discovery that his mother was
looking at him queerly.
“Why, Mother!” he exclaimed, “you don’t suppose I care particularly
about any of the Hopkins family?”
“I think you do about Cherry,” she returned. “And from what I have
heard about her, she is well worth your caring for—in a friendly way,
I mean.”
“My goodness! What is all this?” asked the wondering Ralph.
His mother smiled and shook her head at him.
“You must not think that you can hide anything from me,” she said.
“There is a little bird comes and tells me——”
“Hoh!” cried Ralph, interrupting. “There are a lot of those ‘little
birds.’ And I bet they all belong to the St. Mark’s Sewing Guild. Yes,
sir! What has Gossip’s tongue been saying now?”
“Gossip can be kind as well as cruel. After all, Ralph, gossip is the
most interesting thing in the world. Newspapers and magazines and
books are full of it. Just gossip. And what I heard about you was
anything but unkind, although it did not sound good for Mr. Hopkins.”
His mother went on to relate what she had heard from an eyewitness of
the occurrence when the supervisor had forbidden his daughter to speak
to Ralph, and then had promised to send her away from home because of
her defiance.
“She is a girl who would make any boy a faithful friend. I admire her
very much, although I have never seen her,” Mrs. Fairbanks said. “And
I wonder at that man, Mr. Hopkins, Ralph, for picking on you the way
he does. I cannot understand it.”
“Unfortunately,” her son told her, “I have unintentionally occasioned
Mr. Hopkins some ruffling of the temper. And, believe me, his temper
is easy to ruffle. Well, I am sorry if Cherry was sent away because of
me. It’s so foolish.”
“Yes, I am told she has gone,” said his mother. “To Shelby Junction.
Of course, you never go as far away from Rockton as that?”
“Not likely,” replied Ralph, laughing to hide a good bit of his
disappointment. “Nobody but the strikers is taking a vacation on this
division of the Great Northern.”
The number of strikers increased daily. News came from points all
along the division that little bunches of workmen in various
departments had thrown down their tools and joined the strikers.
Hopkins was strongly in favor of hiring men in the East and bringing
them out to take the strikers’ places, especially in the shops. And
perhaps he was right in this desire, for the locomotives and other
rolling stock were fast becoming decrepit.
Ralph, like most of the old-timers driving the engines, saw to it that
his toolbox was well fitted and he carried spare valves and cocks and
such small articles against chance trouble. It was not against the
rules for a locomotive engineer to tinker with his huge charge if it
broke down anywhere on the run.
When they came back to Rockton each day, however, Ralph and his two
firemen went over the mechanism of the big eight-wheeler with
meticulous care. The firemen took example of their chief and watched
for small faults and possible breakdowns, like two cats at a
mousehole.
Whenever the Midnight Flyer or the return eastbound express halted,
down jumped the firemen with their long nosed oilcans and squirted the
lubricant into every nook and cranny they could get at. The roundhouse
foreman sputtered like a wet firecracker about Ralph’s demands on him
for oil.
“Better be oil than brasswork and steel,” said the young engineer.
“Don’t forget that, Mike.”
“I don’t forget nothin’,” grumbled Mike. “But the super is watchin’
the out-put of lubricatin’ oil. He has an idee we feed it to the cats
and grease the turntables with it. He sees a chance of savin’ the
Great Northern two cents’ worth of oil in the course of a year. Huh!”
“Well, I am not going to buy the oil myself,” Ralph rejoined, with
conviction. “And we don’t carry a greaser’s slushpot on the Midnight
Flyer.”
“Sure, are the wheelboxes heatin’ on you?” asked the foreman.
“I think they need repacking. But, of course, there isn’t time between
runs to do all that. Is there another locomotive I could use to pull
the Flyer with?”
“You know there isn’t. Not a bull in the stable, anyway, could make
the time you are getting out of that mill. Two-o-two would be an hour
late at Hammerfest.”
“Don’t tell me that!” gasped Ralph. “I am having a hard enough time as
it is. Guess I’ll have to coax this one along until they can send you
a Class-A locomotive over from the main.”
“And when will that be, I dunno,” muttered the pessimistic foreman.
So Ralph was pulling out of the Rockton terminal every night with a
sort of sick feeling at the pit of his stomach. He said nothing to
anybody about this nervous apprehension—not even to his mother. It
seemed unmanly, he thought. He never knew before that he was a coward!
That is what he called it, cowardice. But it was not. It was the
effect of increased responsibility on his mind. The threat of some
terrible accident to the train he pulled was always hanging over him.
Strikers and their sympathizers now gathered about the crossings at
midnight when the Flyer pulled out and booed and threatened the train
crew. It was spread broadcast in the labor journals that something was
likely to happen to the crippled engines pulling the division trains.
Passengers were warned by big posters to refrain from traveling by
this division of the Great Northern in particular, because the strike
of shopmen and maintenance of way men made it impossible for the
trains to be run safely and on time.
But Barton Hopkins was by no means a fool. He gave an interview to the
reporters of the fair-minded journals in which he showed by schedule
that the passenger trains, at least, over the division, were
ordinarily on time. He even took advantage of Ralph Fairbanks’
governing the engine pulling the Midnight Flyer to prove that that
important train had kept closer to the schedule since the beginning of
the strike than ever before.
This statement to the press angered the strikers more than anything
that Hopkins had done. Its truth hurt their cause. When Ralph pulled
the Flyer out of the yards that night, at Hammerby Street the cab was
assailed with stones and rotten vegetables from a gang of hoodlums, of
course egged on my McCarrey.
“Scab! Scab!” these fellows yelled as the broken glass tinkled about
the ears of the engineer and his two firemen.
“Jim Perkins ought to be big enough to stop that,” urged one of the
firemen. “They say he still holds his job in the old union but has
spoken at the meetings in Beeman Hall.”
“There is a bunch of fellows helping him stir up trouble, too,”
observed his mate. “Billy Lyons and Sam Peters and some others. But
they all keep their cards in the old union. Something rotten—something
rotten, boy, believe me!”
This suspicion that the small unions were playing an underhanded
game—or that officers of those unions were doing so—kept many of the
wiser employees of the Great Northern in line.
Ralph secretly told himself that that fusillade of rotten vegetables
and stones aimed at his firemen and himself in the cabin of the big
locomotive that pulled the Midnight Flyer cured both of the firemen of
any suspicion of sympathy with the men who had struck and their
supporters.
But, after all, Ralph would have felt safer if there had been guards
riding on the train and on the locomotive, as there had been in war
times when he helped get the soldiers through to the embarkation port.
Mr. Adair, however, did not believe in a show of force. He had men in
plain clothes unobtrusively distributed along the division; but they
could not be discovered from the passengers save by those who had
inside information.
Coming down the hill beyond Shadow Valley Station on this very morning
that the Midnight Flyer engine crew had been bombarded, Ralph chanced
to be thinking of Zeph. It was a black hour; there was not a star
visible. The locomotive was steaming well. She was going so fast, in
fact, that if there had been any obstruction on the straight track it
is doubtful if the headlight would have picked it out in time for
Ralph to have stopped the heavy train.
But he had to take that chance to make the schedule. He knew the track
walkers of this section were all true and tried men. Under ordinary
circumstances and conditions, the inspection of this piece of track
had been made within half an hour.
Ralph sat with his hand on the throttle. He could shut off, without
reversing, and set the brakes with two swift motions in five seconds.
The brakes were really dragging a bit on the wheels, for the curve was
near and he must ease the engine around that.
No startling figure appeared this night on the bowlder beside the
right of way. Ralph needed no heart-stimulant, his pulse throbbed just
a little rapidly. He almost held his breath as he shut down the
throttle and the headlight flashed off the rails as the heavy engine
approached the turn.
This was the dangerous spot. For several moments the light did not
reveal the ribbons of steel very far ahead. Behind that turn wreck and
disaster might lie!
And yet, the young engineer dared not creep around it. To lose time on
this important run meant much to the Great Northern. He must keep on——
The head of the locomotive swerved and the light caught the two rails
again at a distance. The great white ray of the lamp shot into the
tunnel of blackness under the trees.
And then, as one of the watching firemen sang out from the other side
of the cab, Ralph grabbed the reverse lever and threw it down in the
corner. He could not stop for easing her off. He slapped on the
brakes. Fire flashed from the coach wheels and a grinding and bumping
told of the damage being done because of this vicious stop.
The occasion called for such drastic measures, however. The Midnight
Flyer was held up. What it meant, Ralph did not know, but in the
middle of the westbound track stood a man’s figure outlined by fire!
Had he not pulled down the heavy train as he had, the locomotive would
have collided with the flaming object.