NIGHT--AND THE MYSTERIOUS SPEEDERS
Big Jim Torrance sighed happily. He was thinking of the orders he had
issued for the commencement of the fill-in. In the definition thus
given to the task he found the most effective silencer of every fear.
Supply trains had multiplied of late, but not the heaviest had made so
much as a visible tremble in the trestle; and he should know, for he
watched with bated breath and expert eye. Even the crews were teasing
that they hoped once more to see home and mother. Torrance accepted
their banter with a pleased grin, and hurried to tell it word for word
to Tressa and Adrian.
Yet as darkness fell flashes of the old restraint held him silent and
wondering. The solitude of the northern evening was making him a bit
frightened of his success. Removing the old calabash pipe from his
lips, he expectorated thoughtfully toward the grade.
Just within the door Tressa sat as silent as her father. In all her
silent moments now she was building, building. Conrad--home--a father
far from the harsh influences of this rough life where man fought man
as well as nature, and quite as brutally. The rapping of her father's
pipe against the doorpost interrupted her dreams.
"On Thursday!" he said. "I've spoken to Murphy. There'll be four
ballast trains here on Saturday, two working each way. Another ten
days will see the thing through. The big cutting at Mile 135 will have
a steam scoop to fill a train in a few minutes; it's a solid gravel
bank there, they say. We'll lift the heart out of it and put it to
beat in that trestle of mine to the end of time."
He laughed proudly, with a touch of sheepishness at the unaccustomed
metaphor.
"Then we'll go--home," she murmured.
In his blundering way he understood, and stooped to pat her bent head.
"'Home!'" he whispered. "'Home!' If your mother could be here! . . .
I know what she'd say. 'Jim,' she'd say, 'you've done well.' . . .
I'd like to hear it, little girl. 'Jim.'"
"Is it so much nicer than 'daddy'?" she asked jealously; she had had
this big loving man so long to herself.
He dropped to the doorsteps and reached back to throw an arm over her
shoulders.
"Some day, little girl, you'll know what the one voice, the one word,
means. . . . If I were dying, 'Jim' would call me back--as it seems to
call me on---from somewhere now. . . . 'Jim.'"
Conrad found them thus, the man's great arm laid lightly across the
girl's shoulders, her head sunk in his neck; both staring through the
dusk to the mazy tangle of timbers that had been their season's care.
The foreman silently drew a chair to the other side of the girl and
took her hand in his.
Presently Torrance stirred, diving into his pocket in search of a
host's tobacco pouch.
"Thursday," he said, handing it to Conrad.
Conrad nodded.
"And in three weeks we'll be going home," murmured Tressa,--"going
home--only three weeks!"
A gentle birr, like the distant note of a toneless beetle, insinuated
itself into their dreams. They had heard it for seconds without
noticing, rising and falling on the night breeze.
Almost together the two men jerked their heads up to listen; Tressa
felt their arms tighten about her. Through the darkness they strained
down the track to the east, their hearts thudding almost audibly.
The sound swelled--swept toward them out of the night. Swiftly it grew
to dominate the darkness, echoing through the forest. It became a roar.
"Chug--chug--chug--chug!" but in such a swiftly throbbing stream as to
be almost a steady torrent of sound.
Torrance leaped to the grade and stood, a heroic figure outlined
against the dim sky, struggling to pierce the mystery with his eyes.
"Speeders!" he jerked, in a breathless whisper. "Two of them, and
going like hell! The rifle--quick!"
Then suddenly, not a mile away, it ceased, dying to silence in a few
panting chugs, leaving the void a crash of silence. Not a breath
now--it was like a nightmare. Even the camp was listening.
They heard each other's breathing catch, but that was all. Back in the
locked stable the two horses snorted with fear; the strain had reached
even them.
A short ten minutes of awful waiting. Then "chug--chug--chug!" again.
With fantastic rapidity the warm engines picked up to racing speed.
Torrance swung his head incredulously toward Conrad.
_The speeders were going the other way now._
The contractor stumbled to the shack like a blind man and sank in a
chair.
"My God!" he breathed.
Three miles down the track, in what remained of a deserted end-of-steel
village, Sergeant Mahon sat in his shirt sleeves, smiling across the
corner of a table into the eyes of his wife, the only white woman,
except Tressa Torrance, within a day's hard ride.
Of the village that ten months before covered a life as fevered as it
was unclean, only the Police barracks remained in repair, since life
had passed the rest by and forgotten it. The ill-defined streets,
incorporated as a part of the plan of the original village only because
the helter-skelter builders knew no other plan for a village, were more
ill-defined than ever because less used. Where nothing but pedestrians
passed, where the "Mayor" was merely proprietor of the leading
dance-hall, where there was no to-morrow, there had never been
side-walks. Now the space from ruined shack to tumble-down shop was
overgrown with weeds. Yet down the length of it, meandering drunkenly
to avoid butts of stumps as solid as the day they were axed, and
steering clear of creeping decay in the buildings themselves, a narrow
path felt its way.
The two Policemen were not the sole occupants of Mile 127, as the
village had been known in its day. Murphy's train crew, less
particular than the Mounted Police, had satisfied themselves with minor
repairs to the most reputable of the shacks. Murphy himself, and his
foreman friend 'Uggins, more exclusive even than the Police, had drawn
their skirts aside from anything savouring of the swift but gay life of
the days of grade construction, and erected for themselves a tent where
the only real comfort was the opportunity it gave to sneer at their
more lowly companions, and a fond but scarce justified hope that they
were immune from the torments of formerly inhabited buildings. Murphy
openly scored anything "any damned bohunk ever scratched himself in,"
and, after days of quarreling with 'Uggins about a site, during which
they struggled miserably along beneath separate ground-sheets, a common
tent was decided upon far from the former selection of each and close
to the new siding where "Mollie," the engine, slept at nights.
Helen Mahon was smiling back into her husband's eyes, shyly but
happily, for she was proud of him--proud, too, of the loving little
trick she had played on him by riding up to the barracks only a couple
of hours ago, when he thought her still in Medicine Hat. Having been
married to him only a few months, she was still a little shy with her
happiness.
"Helen," he exclaimed for the tenth time, "I don't believe it's true.
Williams is going to dig his heel into me and tell me I'm snoring. I
always do when I dream."
"And you don't like dreaming?" she asked slyly.
"As a dream," he corrected, "it's a ripper. At the same time I'd like
to have some help to realise it. How did you manage it? Of course
every one knows you have Inspector Barker in the hollow of your hand,
but there were others to win over."
She gurgled joyously and seized his hand to press it against her cheek
and nibble lovingly at the finger tips.
"Inspector Barker did it all. He's got a way with him, and I just made
him pull the wires right up to the Commissioner, I guess. Anyway, here
I am, and there's nobody defied by it. I suppose they reckoned that
any wife who thinks enough of her husband to travel two days by train,
then two more on horseback, is worth encouraging for the salvation of
his soul. To sum up: I'm here for a month, if you'll let me stay."
The laugh with which he greeted it was not so free and spontaneous as
she hoped to hear. "In less than that," he said fervently, "I hope
we'll be back in Medicine Hat. Torrance is giving orders to start the
fill-in, and there won't be more than two or three weeks after that.
Truth to tell, there are lots of other reasons than home that make me
want to get out of it in a hurry. It isn't that we have much to
do--too little, indeed; I'd grow rusty and evil-tempered with another
season of this--but I confess to a great mental blank in considering
the bohunk . . . and I've no ambition to understand him better. The
more I know him, the more I think Providence was experimenting without
encouragement when he created a few of those Continental countries that
send their scum over here to build railways. Really there hasn't been
a thing happen since I came worth writing about. Of course there are
strange little incidents--"
He broke off abruptly and his head went up. From the east drifted a
purring sound that swelled with startling speed. Faster than their
thoughts, it grew to a roar. Helen was alarmed.
"Only gasoline speeders," he explained. "You must ride on one.
Torrance has a rather grubby specimen. They're the wildest form of
slimpsy-skimpsy flight you ever saw. About forty miles an hour, with
just a board and a tremendous sputter between you and the flying rails.
It makes your hair curl, yet you look forward to the next time."
Lightly as he spoke, he had risen to his feet and gone to the doorway.
"Some of the big moguls of construction, I suppose," he shouted back
above the echoing din. "Perhaps to pass on Torrance's trestle before
the fill-in commences. Holy mackinaw! they're scorching. I ought to
arrest them for exceeding the speed limit. . . . They're without
lights, too!" he exclaimed suddenly.
Two dim objects flew past in the darkness like shadows, not forty yards
away, a space of less than fifty yards between them.
"They must be drunk!" he muttered. "They're taking awful chances to
run as close as that at such a speed. Look as if they're loaded. Rush
stuff, I suppose, for the line further west. . . . I hope they don't
try to take Torrance's trestle at that gait; it would be an awful
plunge." He returned thoughtfully to the table. "First time I've seen
a speeder along here, except Torrance's and the contractor's at Mile
190. . . . I don't understand it."
Helen closed the door firmly. The roar dimmed into the trees.
"This is my night," she declared. "What you don't understand about
railway construction doesn't need to be worried about. Anyway they're
gone. It isn't often a man's wife drops in on him from four days of
wandering, when he thinks her two hundred miles away as the crow flies."
He looked about the room with an apologetic smile. "It isn't the place
I'd choose to bring you to, Helen, though Williams has done a lot in
the couple of hours since you arrived. It doesn't seem the same old
room. If you'd believe me, he wants four days off to scare up some
luxuries worthy of the event down at Saskatoon . . . and I can't
convince myself it's part of our duties. He got quite huffy when I
refused. That's the worst of marrying a woman every man falls in love
with. The only redeeming feature is that we've lots of room; there's
bedroom space enough for half Medicine Hat--though I wouldn't recommend
it to my friends. . . . I believe bohunks do bathe--they must have a
human trait or two--but I've never happened to see it. The nearest
approach was two semi-civilised fellows down at the river one evening
sheepishly dipping their hands in the water and wiping them on a
discarded shirt. And shirts aren't discarded here until they're past
wearing. It wasn't promising for results, but it showed good will."
He pushed across a plate of abnormal raspberries. "Try another sample.
Our mutual friend, 'Uggins, hand-selected them from a thousand miles of
laden bushes. I believe he and Murphy almost came to blows over them
because, after finding fault with the china in which they were to be
presented, Murphy contended that he knew a spot where larger ones grew.
'Uggins was undecided whether to look for the spot and give Murphy a
chance to forestall him, or to insult you by offering you something not
reputed to be the best."
She nibbled at the berries that, ever since the seed had been borne
hither on the winds, had been reserved for birds and bears. But her
husband was not at ease. Twice in the next ten minutes he went to the
door and listened up the track.
"They must be stopping at Torrance's," he said, throwing wide the door
and leaning against the side as he talked. "It'll make some
excitement, at any rate, for a nice little girl who's going a bit to
seed. No . . . they're coming back!" He paused to listen, his brow
wrinkling. "That's quick work, whatever they did."
The roaring putter was rushing back toward them at a speed that sounded
foolishly desperate.
"There's no sense in going like that," he said irritably. "I wonder
what they were doing. I'll find out."
He ran into the darkness and stood on the track between the rails,
flashing an electric torch toward the approaching speeders. But they
came on without a sign that they saw. He shouted. Fifty yards away
the noise of the engines burst into a louder torrent of sound, and he
had but time to leap out of their way as they whizzed past, the second
speeder so close to the first that he could do nothing to stop it.
Before Mahon, thoroughly angry, could think of anything worth doing,
Helen stood beside him, thrusting into his hand his Police revolver.
Almost with the touch he fired above the retreating speeders.
Two spurts of flame jabbed at him through the darkness in reply, and
Mahon jerked his wife to the ground.
"I think, dear," he said, as he gravely lifted her to her feet, "that
you shouldn't have come."