SUSPENSE
What shapes the legends of the Wickiup? Is it because in the winter
night the wind never sleeps in the gorge above the headquarters shack
that despatchers talk yet of a wind that froze the wolf and the sheep
and the herder to marble together? Is it because McGraw runs no more
that switchmen tell of the run he made over Sweetgrass the night he
sent a plough through eight hundred head of sheep in less than a tenth
as many seconds? Could the night that laid the horse and the hunter
side by side in the Spider Park drift have been wildest of all wild
mountain nights? Or is it because Gertrude Brock and her railroad
lover rode out its storm together that mountain men say there was never
a storm like that? What shapes the Wickiup legends?
For three days Medicine Bend did not see the sun. Veering uneasily,
springing from every quarter at once, the wind wedged the gray clouds
up the mountain sides only to roll them like avalanches down the ragged
passes. At the end of the week snow was falling.
Not until the morning of the third day when reports came in of the
unheard-of temperatures in the North and West did the weather cause
real apprehension. The division never had been in such a position to
protect its winter traffic--for a year Callahan, Blood, and Glover had
been overhauling and assembling the old and the new bucking equipment.
But the wind settled at last in the northeast, and when it stilled the
mercury sunk, and when it rose the snow fell, roofing the sheds on the
passes, levelling the lower gulches, and piling up reserves along the
cuts.
The first trouble came on the main line in the Heart Mountains, and
Morris Blood, with the roadmaster of the sixth district and Benedict
Morgan, got after it with a crew together.
Between the C bridge and Potter's Gap they spent two days with a rotary
and a flanger and three consolidated engines and went home, leaving
everything swept clean, only to learn in the morning that west of the
gap there were four feet of fresh snow clear to Rozelle. From the
northern ranges came unusual reports of the continued severity of the
storms. It was hardly a series of storms, for that winter the first
storm that crossed the line lasted three weeks.
In the interval Bucks was holding to the directors at Medicine Bend,
waiting for the weather to settle enough to send them to the coast.
The Pittsburg party waited at Glen Tarn for Mr. Brock's word to join
him. At the Bend, Gertrude made love to her father, forfending the
awful moment of disclosure that must come, and the cause of her hidden
happiness and trouble strenuously made love to her.
To the joy of the conspirators, Bucks held Glover closely at
headquarters, keeping him closeted for long periods on the estimates
that were in final cooking for the directors; and so dense are great
people and so keen the simple, that Gertrude held her lone seat of
honor beside her father, at the table of the great financiers in the
dining-room, without the remotest suspicion on their parts that the
superb woman meeting them three times a day was carrying on a
proudly-hidden love affair with the muscular, absorbed-looking man who
sat alone across the aisle.
But the asthmatic old pastry cook, who weighed at least two hundred and
thirty pounds and had not even seen the inside of the dining-room for
three years, was thoroughly posted on every observable phase of the
affair down to the dessert orders; and no one acquainted with the frank
profanity of a mountain meat cook will doubt that the best of
everything went hot from the range to Glover and Gertrude. Dollar tips
and five-dollar tips from Eastern epicures could not change this, for
the meals were served by waitresses who felt a personal responsibility
in the issue of the pretty affair of the heart.
The whole second floor of the little hotel had been reserved for the
directors' party, and among the rooms was the parlor. There Glover
called regularly every evening on Mr. Brock, who, somewhat at a loss to
understand the young man's interest, excused himself after the first
few minutes and left Gertrude to entertain the gentleman who had been
so kind to everybody that she could not be discourteous even if he was
somewhat tedious.
One night after a particularly happy evening near the piano for
Gertrude and Glover, Mr. Brock, re-entering the parlor, found the
somewhat tedious gentleman bending very low, as his daughter said
good-night, over her hand; in fact, the gentleman that had been so kind
to everybody was kissing it.
When Glover recovered his perpendicular the cold magnate of the West
End stood between the folding doors looking directly at him. If the
owner of several trunk lines expected his look to inspire consternation
he was disappointed. Each of the lovers feared but one person in the
world; that was the other. Gertrude, with perhaps an extra touch of
dignity, put her compromised hand to her belt for her handkerchief.
Glover finished the sentence he was in the middle of--"If I am not
ordered out. Good-night."
But when Mr. Brock had turned abruptly on his heel and disappeared
between the portières they certainly did look at one another.
"Have I got you into trouble now?" murmured Glover, penitently.
Uneasiness was apparent in her expression, but with her back to the
piano Gertrude stood steadfast.
"Not," she said, with serious tenderness, "just now. Don't you know?
It was the first, the very first, day you looked into my eyes, dear,
that you got me into trouble."
Her pathetic sweetness moved him. Then he flamed with determination.
He would take the burden on himself--would face her father at once, but
she hushed him in real alarm and said, that battle she must fight
unaided; it was after all only a little one, she whispered, after the
one she had fought with herself. But he knew she glossed over her
anxiety, for when he withdrew her eyes looked tears though they shed
none.
In the morning there were two vacancies at the breakfast table; neither
Gertrude nor her father appeared. When Glover returned to the hotel at
five o'clock the first person he saw was Mrs. Whitney. She and Marie,
with the doctor and Allen Harrison, had arrived on the first train out
of the Springs in four days, and Mrs. Whitney's greeting of Glover in
the office was disconcerting. It scarcely needed Gertrude's face at
dinner, as she tried to brave the storm that had set in, or her
reluctant admission when she saw him as she passed up to her room that
she and her father had been up nearly the whole of the night before, to
complete his depression.
Every effort he made during the evening to speak to Gertrude was balked
by some untoward circumstance, but about nine o'clock they met on the
parlor floor and Glover led her to the elevator, which was being run
that night by Solomon Battershawl. Solomon lifted them to the top
floor and made busy at the end of the hall while they had five short
minutes. When they descended he knew what she was facing. Even Marie,
the one friend he thought he had in the family, had taken a stand
against them, and her father was deaf to every appeal.
They parted, depressed, with only a hand pressure, a look and a whisper
of constancy. At midnight, as Glover lay thinking, a crew caller
rapped at his door. He brought a message and held his electric
pocket-lamp near, while Glover, without getting up, read the telegram.
It was from Bucks asking if he could take a rotary at once into the
Heart Mountains.
Glover knew snow had been falling steadily on the main line for two
days. East of the middle range it was nothing but extreme cold, west
it had been one long storm. Morris Blood was at Goose River. The
message was not an order; but on the division there was no one else
available at the moment that could handle safely such a battery of
engines as would be needed to bore the drifts west of the sheds.
Moreover, Glover knew how Bucks had chafed under the conditions that
kept the directors on his hands. They were impatient to get to the
coast, and the general manager was anxious to be rid of them as soon as
there should be some certainty of getting them safely over the
mountains.
Glover, on the back of the telegram, scrawled a note to Crosby, the
master-mechanic, and turned over not to sleep, but to think--and to
think, not of the work before him, but of her and of her situation. A
roundhouse caller roused him at half-past three with word that the snow
battery was marked up for four o'clock. He rose, dressed deliberately
and carefully for the exposure ahead, and sat down before a candle to
tell Gertrude, in a note, when he hoped to be back.
Locking his trunk when he had done, he snuffed out the candle and
closed his room door behind him. The hall was dark, but he knew its
turns, and the carpeted stairs gave no sound as he walked down. At the
second floor there were two stairways by which he could descend. He
looked up the dim corridor toward where she slept. Somehow he could
not make up his mind to leave without passing her room.
His heavy tread was noiseless, and at her door he paused and put his
hand uncertainly upon the casing. In the darkness his head bent an
instant on his outstretched arm--it had never before been hard to go;
then he turned and walked softly away.
At the breakfast table and at the dinner table the talk was of the
snow. The evening paper contained a column of despatches concerning
the blockade, now serious, in the eighth district. Half the first page
was given to alarming reports from the cattle ranges. Two
mail-carriers were reported lost in the Sweetgrass country, and a ski
runner from Fort Steadman, which had been cut off for eight days, told
of thirty-five feet of snow in the Whitewater hills.
Sleepy Cat reported eighteen inches of fresh snow, and a second delayed
despatch under the same date-line reported that a bucking special from
Medicine Bend, composed of a rotary, a flanger, and five locomotives
had passed that point at 9 A.M. for the eighth district.
Gertrude found no interest in the news or the discussion. She could
only wonder why she did not see Glover during the day, and when he made
no appearance at dinner she grew sick with uncertainty. Leaving the
dining-room ahead of the party in some vague hope of seeing him,
Solomon hurried up with the note that Glover had left to be given her
in the morning. The boy had gone off duty before she left her room and
had over-slept, but instead of waiting for his apologies she hastened
to her room and locked her door to devour her lover's words. She saw
that he had written her in the dead of night to explain his going, and
to say good-by. Bucks' message he had enclosed. "But I shall work
very hard every hour I am gone to get back the sooner," he promised,
"and if you hear of the snow flying over the peaks on the West End you
will know that I am behind it and headed straight for you."
When Marie and Mrs. Whitney came up, Gertrude sat calmly before the
grate fire, but the note lay hidden over her heart, for in it he had
whispered that while he was away every night at eight o'clock and every
morning, no matter where she should be, or what doing, he should kiss
her lips and her eyes as he had kissed them that first morning in the
dark, warm office. When eight o'clock came her aunt and her sister sat
with her; but Gertrude at eight o'clock, musing, was with her lover and
her lips and eyes again were his to do with what he would. Later
Doctor Lanning came in and she roused to hear the news about the snow.
Between Sleepy Cat and Bear Dance two passenger trains were stalled,
and on Blackbird hill the snow was reported four feet deep on the level.
When the doctor had gone and Marie had retired, Gertrude's aunt talked
to her seriously about her father, whose almost frantic condition over
what he called Gertrude's infatuation was alarming.
Her aunt explained how her final refusal of Allen Harrison, a
connection on which her father had set his heart, might result in the
total disruption of the plans which held so mighty interests together;
and how impossible it was that he should ever consent to her throwing
herself away on an obscure Western man.
Only occasionally would Gertrude interrupt. "Don't strip the poor man
of everything, auntie. If it must come to family--the De Gallons and
Cirodes and Glovers were lords of the Mississippi when our Hessian
forefathers were hiding from Washington in the Trenton hazelbushes."
She could meet her aunt's fears with jests and her tears with smiles
until the worried lady chancing on a deeper chord disarmed her. "You
know you are my pet, Gertrude. I am your foster-mother, dear, and I
have tried to be mother to you and Marie, and sister to my brother
every day of my life since your mother died. And if you----"
Then Gertrude's arms would enfold her and her head hide on her aunt's
shoulder, and they would part utterly miserable.
One morning when Gertrude woke it was snowing and Medicine Bend was cut
completely off from the western end of the division. The cold in the
desert districts had made it impossible to move freights. During the
night they had been snowed in on sidings all the way from Sleepy Cat
east. By night every wire was down; the last message in was a private
one from Glover, with the ploughs, dated at Nine Mile.
Solomon brought the telegram up to Gertrude with the intimation that,
confidentially, Mr. Blood's assistant, in charge of the Wickiup, would
be glad to hear any news it might contain about the blockade, as
communication was now cut entirely off.
Gertrude told the messenger only that she understood the blockade in
the eighth district had been lifted and that the ploughs were headed
east. Then as the lad looked wonderingly at her, she started. Have I,
she asked herself, already become a part of this life, that they come
to me for information? But she did not add that the signer of the
message had promised to be with her in twenty-four hours.
That day for the first time in eighteen years, no trains ran in or out
of Medicine Bend, and an entire regiment of cavalry bound for the
Philippines was known to be buried in a snowdrift near San Pete. The
big hotel swarmed with snow-bound travellers. The snow fell all day,
but to Gertrude's relief her father and the men of the party were at
the Wickiup with Bucks, who had come in during the night with
reinforcements from McCloud. Unfortunately, the batteries that
followed him were compelled to double about next morning to open the
line back across the plains.
The gravity of the situation about her, the spectacle of the struggle,
now vast and all absorbing, made by the operating department to cope
with the storm and cold, and the anxieties of her own position plunged
Gertrude into a gloom she had never before conceived of. Her aunt's
forebodings and tears, her father's unbending silence and aloofness,
made escape from her depression impossible. When Solomon appeared she
besought him surreptitiously for news, but though Solomon fairly
staggered with the responsibilities of his position he could supply
nothing beyond rumors--rumors all tending to magnify the reliance
placed on Glover's capabilities in stress of this sort, but not at the
moment definitely locating him.
Next morning the creeping eastern light had not yet entered her room
when a timid rap aroused her. Solomon was outside the door with news.
"The ploughs will be here in an hour," he whispered.
"The ploughs?"
Solomon couldn't resist the low appeal for more definite word. He had
no information more than he had given, but he bravely journalized, "Mr.
Glover and everybody, ma'am."
"Oh, thank you, Solomon."
She rose, with wings beating love across the miles that separated him
from her. Day with its perplexities may beset, the stars bring
sometimes only grief; but to lovers morning brings always joy, because
it brings hope. She detained Solomon a moment. A resolve fixed itself
at once in her heart; to greet her lover the instant he arrived. She
could dress and slip down to the station and back before the others
awoke even. It was hazardous, but what venture is less attractive for
a hazard if it bring a lover? She made her rapid toilet with affection
in her supple fingers, and welcome glowing in her quick eyes, and she
left her room with the utmost care. Enveloped in the Newmarket,
because he loved it, her hands in her big muff, and her cheeks closely
veiled, she joined Solomon in the reception room downstairs.
The morning was gray with a snow fog hanging low, and feathery flakes
were sinking upon the whitened street. "Listen!" cried the boy,
excitedly, as they neared the Wickiup. From somewhere in the sky came
the faint scream of a locomotive whistle. "That's them, all right.
Gee! I'd like to buck snow."
"Would you?"
"Would I? Wouldn't you?"
A hundred men were strung along the platform, and a sharper blast
echoed across the upper flat. "There they are!" cried Solomon,
pressing forward. Gertrude saw a huge snow-covered monster swing
heavily around the yard hill. The ploughs were at hand. The head
engine whistled again, those in the battery took up the signal, and
heeled in snow they bore down on the Wickiup whistling a chorus.
Before the long battery had halted, the men about Gertrude were running
toward the cabs, cheering. Many men poured out of the battered
ice-bound cars at the end of the string. While Gertrude's eyes
strained with expectation a collie dog shot headlong to the platform
from the steps of the hind caboose, and wheeling about, barked madly
until, last of three men together, Glover, carrying his little bag,
swung down, and listening to his companions, walked leisurely forward.
Swayed by the excitement which she did not fully understand all about
her, Gertrude, with swimming eyes, saw Solomon dash toward Glover and
catch his bag. As the boy spoke to him she saw Glover's head lift in
the deliberate surprise she knew so well. She felt his wandering eyes
bend upon her, and his hand rose in suppressed joyfulness.
Doubt, care, anxiety, fled before that gesture. Stumah, wild with
delight, bounded at her, and before she could greet him, Glover, a
giant in his wrappings, was bending over her, his eyes burning through
the veil that hid her own. She heard without comprehending his words;
she asked questions without knowing she asked, because his hand so
tightly clasped hers.
They walked up the platform and he stopped but once; to speak to the
snugly clad man that got down from the head engine. Gertrude
recognized the good-natured profile under the long cap; Paddy McGraw
lifted his visor as she advanced and with a happy laugh greeted him.
Smiling at her welcome he drew off his glove and took from an inner
pocket her ring and held it out on his hand. "I am taking good care of
my souvenir."
"I hope you are taking good care of yourself," Gertrude responded,
"because every time I ride in the mountains, Mr. McGraw, I want you for
engineer."
Glover was saying something to her as they turned away together, but
she gave no heed to his meaning. She caught only the low, pretty
uncertainty in his utterance, the unfailing little break that she loved
in his tone.
He was saying, "Yes--some of it thirty feet. Morris Blood is
tunnelling on the Pilot branch this morning; it's bad up there, but the
main line is clear from end to end. Surely, you never looked so sweet
in your life. Gertrude, Gertrude, you're a beautiful girl. Do you
know that? What are those fellows shouting about? Me? Not at all.
They're cheering you."