He was a little gray-haired hostler, wiper, sweeper, assistant night
man in the roundhouse at Big Cloud, anything you like, and this is the
story he told me one night, leaning against the blackened jamb of one
of the big doors, wiping his hands occasionally upon a hunk of greasy
waste.
They were a rough lot out in the mountains in the days when the Hill
Division was shaking her steel into something like a permanent right
of way--a pretty rough lot. The railroaders because they had to be; the
rest because they were just that way naturally. Miners and Indians made
up the citizenship mostly, and there’s no worse mixture. They’ve got the
redskins corralled on reserves now; but they hadn’t then, and it didn’t
take more than one bad word and one drop of bad whisky to set things in
lively motion.
There’s a few highfaluting poems, and some other things, about the noble
red man that works you up so when you read them that you get to wishing
the Almighty had seen fit to let you be a red man, too. Well, that’s all
right in its way because, after you’ve rubbed elbows with some of the
real thing, you realize that the world owes the poets a living just as
much as it does anybody else, and that what they say has to sound good;
so you just come to keep the cautionary signals up by instinct, and let
it go at that.
But, to give the poets their due, there’s one thing they never trip up
on, and that’s the Indian’s compound efficiency for smell. The Indian
can smell. When he sticks out his chest, faces southeast, and begins
to draw in the God-given mountain air, you’re free to bet that the
distilleries down Kentucky way are doing enough business to make regular
dividend checks a sure thing. That’s generally good whisky. Bad whisky,
in smell and otherwise, carries farther--and it’s only fifteen miles
from here to Coyote Bend!
Coyote Bend wasn’t even a pin prick on the engineers’ blue prints when
they mapped out the right of way, and there wasn’t any such place when
the steel was all spiked down until the day some wandering prospector
staked out a bunch of claims--and the news spread.
Gold in the Rockies? No; there’s never been much of it _found_, but
there’s an all-fired big superstition that the mother lode of the whole
country is tucked away here somewhere. That’s why, in two days, the
wilderness and a gurgling stream that trickled peacefully down through
a high-walled canon became Coyote Bend; and that’s why the local freight
began to make regular stops to dump off supplies alongside the track.
There was no station, of course, no agent, no nothing; the stuff was
just dumped, that’s all. The consignees picked out their goods if they
could read, or guessed at it if they couldn’t.
Maybe I ought to have told you this before; anyway, I’ll stick it in
now. There are three men that figure in this story, though one of
them doesn’t count for much. He was a young chap named Charlie Lee. A
graduate of an Eastern college he was, and all he had to his name was
his diploma and the clothes he stood in when he hit the West. He struck
the super for a job, and he got it--braking on the local freight. Hell
for a man like him, eh? Well, it was, in more ways than one! Anyway,
from that day to this it was the best job he ever held down long enough
to draw a second month’s pay check.
The other two were Matt Perley and Faro Clancy--“Breed” Clancy, they
called him behind his back.
Perley was a very good sort, pretty straight, pretty clean, measuring
by the standards out here in those days; a little bit of a sawed-off,
blond-haired, blueeyed man, full of grit inside, and an out-and-out
railroad man--only a freight conductor, conductor on the local, but he
knew his business; he’d have gone up, ‘way up, in time.
Clancy was a hellion, there’s no other name for him, and even that
doesn’t express it--no one word could. Indian one way, Irish the other.
He looked mostly Indian; the Irish came out in the brogue. Black,
swarthy, small eyes like needle points, coarse dry hair that straggled
down over his eyebrows, a hulking bony frame with the strength of a
wrecking crane--that’s Clancy, Breed Clancy.
Oh, yes, he was slick, slick as they’re made--with his hands. Faro,
stud poker, dice, anything--it was his business; that, and running
booze joints. Mining camps and brand-new boom towns were Clancy’s meat
mostly--after Perley drove him out of Big Cloud.
Don’t ask me. I don’t know what there was between them. That was before
my time. A woman probably--a woman’s generally blamed anyhow. Anyway,
one night Perley got the drop on Breed and marched him down the street
in front of his pistol and out of the town. After that, Clancy kept
away from Big Cloud. As I say, that part was before my time. I only
know there was bad blood between them; wicked bad blood on one side, as
you’ll see. Clancy disappeared from Big Cloud, and the two didn’t foul
each other again until Coyote Bend started.
Breed Clancy hit the Bend with the first inrush of the miners, and
before any of them had time to much more than get a pick into the ground
he was busy knocking together a bit of a shack he called a hotel, and
was ordering the furnishings--liquid furnishings, you understand--from
Big Cloud.
There were three barrels of it, the hardest kind of fire water that ever
went into the mountains waybilled to Clancy at Coyote Bend by the local,
on the first trip that Charlie Lee ever made with Matt Perley. I’m
getting back to Lee now, you see.
Well, it was about noon when they whistled for the Bend that day, and
Lee, riding the brake wheels on the front end, could see about a dozen
“blankets” squatting alongside the right of way about where the train
would stop. Grouped behind these were a number of stragglers from the
camp, among whom was a big fellow in a red shirt you could see farther
than a semaphore arm.
Now, I don’t say those Indians were attracted by the gold rush to Coyote
Bend. Coyote Bend, or any other place, old or new, stale or prosperous,
would get its share of the redskins. Where they came from or where they
went nobody knew. They’d drop in from nowhere, and, if they liked the
place, they’d grunt and settle down for a spell; if they didn’t like it,
they’d grunt, in benediction or otherwise, and leave.
I’m not saying they smelled the whisky in that train. I’m not saying
they knew Clancy was importing fire water, and they were just there to
feast their eyes on the barrels and meditate on what was inside. I’m not
saying anything at all about that, or what followed. There’s only one
man that perhaps might have explained it---I say “perhaps” because he
never did; and also, because he knew Indian nature as well as any white
man in the West. That was Perley.
Whether Perley even knew that Clancy was at the Bend or not, I don’t
know. I only know that he could have known it if he’d bothered to
read the waybills; and it was likewise on the cards that he might have
learned the day before, down at Big Cloud, that the whisky was going up
the following morning. I don’t know, and that’s straight. Sometimes I
think he did; sometimes I think he didn’t. I don’t know.
Anyway, Lee slid to the ground as the train stopped, and went back to
the car that held the consignment for the Bend. As he fumbled with the
door, he got a whiff of raw spirit that nearly knocked him over. And
then, right behind him, rose a chorus of appreciative “ughs!”
I told you an Indian could smell whisky, but I didn’t tell you why. It’s
his ruling passion. That’s straight. I’m not judging the Indian; the
taste was born in him. There are some white men just as bad. I’m not
judging them, either. Some drink for the same reason the Indian does,
some for others, and some--some men drink because they have to.
What was I saying? Oh, yes, Lee getting that whiff. Well, before he got
the door unfastened, the man in the red shirt had pushed through the
Indians and come up beside him.
“Me name’s Clancy,” said he. “Did yez bring up any stuff for me?”
“There’s three barrels for somebody,” replied Lee, and slid open the
door--and the next minute he had jumped back with a yell, colliding with
Clancy.
“Ugh!” ejaculated the apparition that confronted him.
“He’s drunk! Majestically drunk! An’ on _my_ stuff!” roared Clancy; and
then, turning fiercely on Lee: “Fwhat did ye let him in there for, eh?
Fwhat did ye let him in for, ye mealy-faced little----”
“Let him in nothing!” retorted Lee, getting back his grip on himself.
“Here, you, get out--and _quick!_”
The Indian blinked gravely, but never moved. He sat cross-legged on
the floor, exactly in the middle of the car between the doors, swaying
slightly backward and forward. Beside him, up-ended and broached, was
one of Clancy’s kegs. The car reeked with the smell of it, for of the
half kegful that had gushed out what hadn’t gone into the Indian had
gone on to the floor.
The half-breed was raving mad. I’ve a notion sometimes the man wasn’t
human at all. He had his hand on Lee’s throat when Perley came running
up from the rear end.
“What’s the row?” he began, and then he stopped. He was a cool devil was
Perley, and he never turned a hair as he stepped between the two men.
“Ah, Clancy, it’s you, is it, you copper-faced renegade?”--no loud talk,
no bluster, he didn’t raise his voice; but his insult, the worst he
could have laid his tongue to, cut like the sting of a lash.
Clancy swung around like a flash--and stared into the muzzle of
the conductor’s.45. His hands were clenching and unclenching as he
recognized Perley, and the cords in his neck swelled into knotty lumps.
“Ut’s your worrk, this job, is ut?” he snarled. “Some day, Perley, I’ll
show you.”
Queer, you say, he’d act like that--nothing to warrant it. Well, maybe.
I don’t know. I don’t know what was between them before; but I do know
the awful deviltry of Breed Clancy, and I know that Lee, leaning back
against the car, shivered at the look that passed between the two of
them.
Perley cut the half-breed short off. “Once,” said he contemptuously,
still quiet, not a tone raised, and his voice the more deadly for it,
“once, perhaps you’ll remember, I warned you to keep out of my road.
Lee, how’d that Indian get in the car?”
“I don’t know,” said Lee.
“Well, then, throw him out,” said Perley shortly, snapping his watch
with his free hand. “We can’t stay here all day.”
This little ruction between Perley and the half-breed has taken me
longer to tell it, I guess, than it did to happen. Anyway, it didn’t
cause the excitement you might think it would. The “blankets” were
too busy drinking in the smell of that whisky to let their hungry eyes
wander very far from anywhere but the open door of that car. And as for
the stragglers, by the time they’d caught on to the fact that there was
something on the boards besides that drunken Indian, Perley, with the
same cool contempt, had slipped his gun back in his pocket and was
boosting Lee into the car.
The Indian offered no opposition as Lee tackled him. He couldn’t--he
was beyond all that--he was so full of dead-eye it was oozing out by the
pores. He just sat there, and Lee slid him to the door just as he was,
still sitting, and dropped him out. He struck the ground with a thud,
rebounded a foot, rolled over, grunted, and lay like a log. There was
a guffaw from the camp stragglers, and a deep and envious chorus of
“Ughs!” from the “blankets.”
No, I’m not joking--it’s a long way from a joke, as you’ll see. They
_were_ envious. It acted like a red rag on a bull--the possibility of
attaining the condition, the state of heavenly bliss, that had been
reached by their red brother, do you understand?
Clancy wasn’t laughing. He stood where Perley had left him, sullen and
with twitching face. I don’t know, I think it was Perley’s sheer nerve
that kept the halfbreed from drawing and shooting the conductor when
his back was turned. I don’t know--brute beast cowed by the human mind,
perhaps. No one ever knew Breed Clancy. He had his yellow streak at
times, and then again the blood that was in him made him worse than a
frenzied madman. Yes, I guess it was a case of “brute” all right, for
there was no cowing him when the frenzy was on him.
Perley wasn’t laughing, either. He was opening and shutting his watch
impatiently. “Come on! Come on!” he cried at Lee. “Get those barrels
out. We’ve got to cross Number Two at the Creek. It’ll be the carpet for
ours if we hold her up.”
Lee grabbed the broached cask and edged it toward the doorway. The
contents slopped and sloshed inside as he moved it, and occasionally a
little of the stuff would spill out through the bunghole. Then, somehow,
just as he got it to the door, his hold slipped, out it went, bounded on
the edge of the ties, and then went down the embankment right into the
hands of those squatting “blankets.” They didn’t squat long; I don’t
need to tell you that. They were on it in a mob, and they got the
taste--they’d had the smell--and the fill was to come presently.
Clancy was cursing in streams; and no fouler-mouthed man than Clancy
ever lived. He tried once to get the Indians off the barrel, and the
stragglers backed him up half-heartedly. You might as well have tried
to move that mogul on the pit there behind you. He didn’t try but once,
then he fell back on cursing again, and Perley was the target for most
of it.
Perley? He never answered him, but his face grew harder and harder--and
his gun was in his hand again. “Throw out those other two barrels!” he
snapped at Lee.
“The redskins will get every last drop if I do,” objected Lee,
hesitating.
“Owner’s risk. We’ve no station here. Throw ‘em out!” repeated Perley,
grimmer than before, only this time loud enough for Clancy to hear him.
“Ye do,” roared the half-breed, “ye do, an’ I’ll worse than murdher ye
one of these----”
“Throw ‘em out!” said Perley quietly, waving the go-ahead signal to the
engine crew.
And out they went--down the embankment after the first.
Lee jumped to the ground and banged the door shut, just as the drawbars
began to snap tight along the train and the local jolted into motion.
He waited beside Perley to swing the caboose as it came up. And while he
waited he watched and grinned.
Funny? I don’t know; it depends on the way you look at it, depends on
what you call fun. Lee thought it was funny--then. The air was full of
curses, Indian yells, shouts, oaths; and there was one jumbled mess of
arms, and legs, and barrels. The Indians were after their _fill_, and
this time Clancy and the stragglers were in the game for keeps.
Up ahead the engine crew hung grinning out of the gangway. Behind, the
other brakeman was occupying a reserved seat on the top of the caboose.
A quarter of a mile away over by the camp, men, attracted by the
shouting, were beginning to run toward the track. Inconsistent kind of
a mix-up, eh?--Indians, miners, whisky barrels, and railroaders. I
don’t know; call it funny if you like, though perhaps you can size it up
better when I’m through.
By this time the caboose was up to where Perley and Lee were standing.
Perley motioned Lee aboard, and then swung on himself.
Just as he did so, Clancy’s red shirt loomed up out of the mêlée, his
arm lifted, and over the clack of the car trucks pounding the steel came
the tinkle of breaking glass from the shattered pane in the door--the
bullet had passed between the heads of the two men on the platform,
missing them by a hair’s breadth. Another shot followed the first,
another and another, dangerously close; splintering the woodwork around
them; and then Perley fired. The half-breed spun round like a top,
clapped his hand to his face and pitched over.
Then the curve of the track shut out the scene, but for five minutes
after they were out of sight they still got the whoops of the redskins,
the shouts and curses of the miners, and the crackle of guns like the
quick fire of a Gatling. You see it came to that before it was through,
and there was some blood spilled--a lot of it--and, not counting
Clancy’s, it wasn’t all “blanket” blood, either.
Clancy? I’m coming to him. No, he wasn’t killed--if he had been I’d
never be telling you this story.
It was two or three days before Lee and Perley got the details of what
happened. The redskins fought like fiends after the miners began to
fire on them and had killed one or two, and, though they were finally
subdued, the casualties, as I’ve said, weren’t all on their side by a
hanged sight.
But I was talking about Clancy. Well, that bullet of Perley’s caught him
on the cheek bone, glanced in, plowed through his left eye, and landed
up somewhere against the cartilage of his nose--a bullet will make queer
tracks sometimes, worse than surveyors by a heap. They got him down to
Big Cloud to a doctor’s, and before he was half cured he disappeared.
They had a sort of makeshift hospital here in those days, and when I say
“disappeared” I mean they found his bed empty one morning, that was all.
I told you I didn’t know whether Perley had any hand in putting that
Indian in the car, or the other redskins at the Bend. I don’t. I told
you I didn’t know what was between him and the half-breed before all
this happened. I don’t. Perley never said. But day after day as he and
Lee pounded up and down on the local through the mountains, he began to
grow silent and moody.
Lee, young Lee then, was the only one that could get anywhere near the
inside of his vest. He took to Lee, and Lee liked him; but even Lee
had his limits when it came to confidences. There was lots Perley never
opened his lips about. No, I don’t know as it makes much difference now.
Lee was the first of the two to hear that Faro Clancy was “loose.”
“It looks to me like a bad business,” he said, after telling Perley the
news.
Perley’s eyes just narrowed a little. “It looks more like a bad shot, a
rotten bad shot,” he answered evenly.
“That, if you like,” returned Lee; “but there’ll be more to follow.”
“One would think you _knew_ Clancy,” said Perley, cool as ever.
Lee was anxious. Call it presentiment or what you like, from that moment
the thing was on his nerves. Perley had been pretty good to him; had
made things a heap easier for the young fellow, green and raw as he was,
in a hundred different ways. Things like that mean something.
“Look here, Perley,” said he, “I’ve heard some talk, and I know there’s
something behind all this between you and that devil. I’m not asking for
confidences----”
Perley cut him short, and caught him almost angrily by the shoulder.
“Don’t meddle!” he snapped. “Let it drop. _You_ don’t count in this,
whatever happens. Your being at the Bend that day was an accident.
What’s between me and Clancy concerns ourselves. You don’t count. Unless
you’re looking for another run besides the local, just remember that and
don’t meddle.”
That was all. Lee never mentioned it to Perley again. Perley was right,
wasn’t he? I told you there were three men in this story, but that one
of them didn’t count. No, Lee didn’t count. Why should he?
What did he have to do with it? Perley was right, I leave it to you.
You’ve been over the division, and you know the Devil’s Slide just west
of the Gap from here. You know the grade--the worst in the mountains.
The trains crawl up at the pace a man could walk, because they can’t go
any faster; and they crawl down just as slowly, because they don’t dare
do anything else.
I’ve seen the passengers get off the observation and walk--so have you.
Done it yourself probably? I thought so. Extra engine on the rear end to
push or hold back, and one in the middle if the train’s heavy, to keep
it from breaking apart--lessens the drawbar pull, you know. They’re
tunneling now to do away with that particular grade, but that’s nothing
to do with this story, nor, for that matter, with the night, some six
weeks after that business at the Bend, when the local, eastbound, was
climbing the Devil’s Slide.
It was a dirty night outside the caboose. A storm had been racketing
through the mountains all afternoon, and by the time it got dark it was
a howling gale, raining hard enough to float the ties.
Lee’s place was on the front end, going up that bit of track, but he
wasn’t well that night, and the other brakeman was doing his snatch.
Touch of mountain fever, or something, nothing serious; just enough
to make him shiver and boil alternately over the little stove in the
caboose, sitting with his back to the door. Up above him in the cupola,
holding down the swivel chair where he could watch the train--that is,
see his engine fling up the sparks, for that’s about all he could see, I
guess--was Perley.
The car was swinging like a hammock with the heave and strain of the
big pusher coupled right behind it--it acts queer, that does. Every time
I’ve felt it I’ve always thought of a cat and a mouse. It’s like the
engine had the caboose by the scruff and was trying to shake the life
out of it.
You’ve felt it a little if you’ve ever been in the rear Pullman going
up--the difference is that a caboose hasn’t any springs to speak of, you
understand? Racket enough to raise the dead. You couldn’t hear yourself
think. Not so much from the noise of the train or the storm, but from
the booming roar of the trailer’s exhaust--like she was trying to cough
her boiler tubes out every time the valves slid.
Now, there’s just one more thing I want you to get. The engine crew of
a pusher naturally can’t see any track, road-bed, or anything of that
kind, and it isn’t their business to, either. All they watch is the
leader and the intermediate, if there is one. Their headlight plays
along over a few cars if it’s high enough, or loses itself on the top of
the door or the roof of the caboose if it isn’t, understand?
Lee didn’t hear anything. He was sitting bent over with his head between
his hands, and it was the current of air from the opening door that made
him twist around and look up, thinking it had blown open. I don’t
know as you’d call him a coward; maybe yes, maybe no; anyway, he was a
white-faced, terrified man that next instant, as he started up from his
chair. He never got to his feet. Instead, he shut up like a jackknife,
and went down to the floor with a blow over the head from a revolver
butt that knocked him senseless.
It all happened in a second, but in that second Lee got it with more
vividness than a thousand hours would have given him--the great, hulking
figure, the water trickling to the floor in little pools from the
dripping clothes, the sickly pallor of the face, the thin new skin of
the livid scar across the cheek, the sightless eye--Clancy.
Lee couldn’t have lain unconscious more than twenty minutes, perhaps
it was only fifteen, for it takes about forty minutes to climb the
four miles of the Slide, you see. Call it twenty, that allows for what
happened before and what happened after. When he came to his senses the
light in the bracket lamp was out; blown out by the draft, for the door
was open. A stray beam or two from the pusher’s headlight filled the
caboose with an uncertain, wavering light--from the jolt and swing, you
know, though Lee thought at first it was his head.
He tried to get up, but he couldn’t move. He was bound hand and foot,
laid out on the flat of his back--helpless. For a minute he was too
dazed to understand, then he remembered--Clancy. He stared up into the
cupola above him. The swivel chair was empty--Perley had gone.
The car trucks were beating a steady _clack, clack-clack_, as they
pounded the fishplates; from behind came the full, deep-chested thunder
of the trailer’s exhaust; around, the hundred noises of the creaking,
groaning, swaying car; without, the patter of rain, the wail of the
wind. But over it all, low though it was, came a sound that sent a chill
to Lee’s heart.
It was like a breathless moan, do you understand? That was the inhuman
part of it; it was breathless--there was no break--a sort of sobbing
monotone. It came from behind him. Lee shivered as he listened, and
then his heart began to pound as though it would burst. He was
afraid--_afraid_. Premonition, perhaps; I don’t know. He rolled himself
over on his side, and he saw----
How can I tell it! A figure was crouched against the side of the car in
a half-sitting posture, the face was red--red with the blood that
was flowing from the forehead. Lee shrieked aloud in terror. “Perley!
Perley!” Then he grew sick with the horror that was on him. Worse than
murder the half-breed had threatened--and he had kept his word. Perley
had been scalped!
Lee’s cry must have reached the poor wretch’s consciousness, for he
staggered to his feet, sweeping his eyes clear with both hands. Lee,
sick to the depths of his soul, the sweat breaking out in great, cold
drops upon his forehead, fought like a maniac with his bonds.
Perley never spoke, never paid any attention to Lee--he was past all
that--but his brain, at least, was still capable of coherent impression.
It must have been--to account for what he did. Right in front of him, as
he hung there tottering and swaying, was a broken bit of mirror tacked
up on the side of the car. He was staring into it.
His moaning stopped. The shock of his own awful horror must have
revolted, shaken his very being. His hand groped weakly, subconsciously
perhaps, for his pocket--his revolver--the end.
Again Lee shrieked as he struggled to free himself, and then, as Perley
fired, he burst out into a peal of wild, discordant laughter. His mind
was giving way. He began to gibber like a madman--that’s the way they
found him--with Perley’s body pitched full across his chest.
Don’t ask me. I told you Perley was a little, undersized, sawed-off man.
I don’t know, do I? The halfbreed, physically, could have handled him
like a baby, once he caught him unawares. That’s all I know.
They buried Perley down at Big Cloud; and they buried Clancy where the
posse dropped him, drilled full of holes. That’s the story.
Lee? Charlie Lee? Why, he doesn’t count, does he? He had nothing to do
with it. Well, if you’re interested in him I’ll tell you. His college
diploma never did him any good. Once he got better and out of the
hospital, he took to drinking periodically--_hard_. Between times
straight as a string, you understand, for six weeks say, then off again.
That was fifteen years ago, and he’s done it ever since. The doctors
said that blow on the head unsettled him, skull splinter, or something
like that; but medicine’s not an exact science. The doctors were wrong.
The trouble was deeper than the skull--it was in his soul. Lee drank
to save himself from the madhouse--I told you, didn’t I, that some men
drink because they have to?
Carleton, the super, and the men before Carleton, understood what the
doctors didn’t, so Lee’s working for the railroad yet. Not braking--he’s
not fit for that, but he keeps the job they gave him--and it’s kept for
him--when he gets back after his spells. I------there’s the foreman
shouting for me. Sorry, but I’ll have to go. “If you’re going out on
Number One she’s just coming down the gorge now. Good night, sir.”
I lost him in the shadows of the big mogul on the pit behind me. Then I
turned and walked slowly out of the roundhouse, over the turntable, and
across the tracks to the station platform. Number One’s mellow chime
floated down from the gorge, then the flare of the electric headlight,
and the rumble of the train. And in quick, fierce tempo, the beating,
drumming trucks caught up the name I had heard the foreman shout, and
rang it over and over again in my ears:
“Oh-you-Lee! Charlie-Lee! Lee! Charlie-Lee--Lee!”